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Comment by ai_ja_nai | Hacker News Reader

These miners are really getting on my nerves: not only they are polluting the planet (1% of electricity in 2018 was for cryptomining), but are driving off the budgets of whole deep learning practitioners

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Carbon tax, carbon tax, carbon tax.

Rather than coming up with a billion restrictions for every new way people invent to waste resources, just charge people for resource usage.

Crypto mining can't run on renewables?

Careful here. The 'renewables are cheaper' narrative is sacred.

If crypto miners want to run on renewables, they can pay the cost of the resources to build those renewables and then enjoy the power they create for free.

Crypto mining on its own is not bad or evil. Only ruining our environment is bad.

How this would work in practice is you charge it at power generation. If the power company uses coal as a power source, they are hit with a carbon tax which gets passed on to the customers. Then every power company that doesn't use dirty sources has cheaper prices and all customers move over.

In the mean time you can use all profits from a carbon tax to discount other taxes so the end user pays no extra but they are constantly pushed to cleaner sources. This has been tested in the real world and it works very well.

Crypto mining only runs on renewables when both available and profitable, and will happily run on coal if that's the cheapest method.

I'd argue deep learning is just as much a waste for most businesses anyway

Strong argument.

Most business logic neural nets simply train into what could've been an or-gate

Shh!

You can’t get a $700k/y salary for being an “OR-gate logic engineer”, but you can for being an “AI engineer”.

I purposefully waited a bit to build a new computer (first one I've been able to build for myself and not others!) seeking the new AMD and Ampere cards, with the purpose of being able to do some research on my home machine and not a lab one. I figured I'd have to wait a month or two after launch, no biggie, but I got my 5900x last week and still can't find a 3080. This shortage is insane and no one seems to be doing anything about it. I'm extra peeved at NewEgg's shuffle system which I'm pretty sure someone that just took a week of a stat's class could tell you that they are giving the edge to bots and scalpers. While I'm peeved at the miners, I'm also upset that retailers aren't combating them and helping consumers.

With all this talk of crypto, it's ironic that the problem is essentially the same as bitcoin, it's a Sybil Attack problem. Scalpers can pretend to be dozens of people (registering multiple accounts, trivial variations on address, privacy cards to generate unique credit card numbers, automating all this by botting, etc) and the real underlying problem is that you need is a unique personal identifier.

I personally think hardware identifiers are a good approach. NVIDIA has GeForce Experience, they have access to hardware identifiers and telemetry that will let them see who's actually gaming. This approach works very well for games like Overwatch, where hardware bans are essentially "game over" and you now have to get a new motherboard, CPU, GPU, clean OS install, and new IP address in order to hack again, it is fairly painful and slows down hackers significantly after a ban wave.

(Or something like requiring a unique driver's license, one per person.)

All of the other approaches are trivially gameable. A queue? Scalpers will register 1000 accounts and take all the queue spots. A lottery? Scalpers will register 1000 accounts and win all the lottery cards. etc etc. There will always be retailers if you do not currently have a card or are morally opposed to GFE.

BTC uses most of the energy relating to cryptomining, and people almost certainly aren't buying GPUs in bulk to mine bitcoin since ASICs are far more efficient.

0.1%, not 1%

A counter argument I heard recently: all of the work and resources we need to have physical money is comparable in energy needs and environmental consequences.

I have no source at hand.

I’m also not sure what to think of it.

That would still be a damning statistic given how tiny a portion of overall transactions are done through crypto.

And the economics of reversibility depend on that number increasing as the amount of economic value transacted increases. If 0.01% of the world's money moves through bitcoin today, if you want that to be 10% then you're going to have to spend 1000x more energy to keep the network secure.

PC gaming alone wastes the same amount of energy. There are also consoles and the whole industry of game creators surrounding it. In my eyes they are both useless and pollute. Some get kick out of games, some out shitcoins.

Huge difference between running a graphics card at 100% capacity (ok, most eth miners underclock but still use a good amount of wattage close to 100% of the time) and someone playing a video game for a few hours after work one day.

Nowhere near the same amount of energy. Gaming certainly doesn't use 1% of the planets energy, for example...

It does - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285396475_Taming_th...

The number of people with high-powered gaming machines-as described in that paper- is comparatively small, and their sustained energy use would be a fraction of what crypto-currencies waste.

Moreover, socially games are probably less damaging and they’re not attempting to strip money off people in large volumes.

It says 120tw/h a year right there, which is the same as bitcoin now. Do you think it's a bogus paper or what are arguing against?

I agree with the criticism about bitcoin, I just find gaming industry as useless burning carbon and trying to milk money from the naive.

> Some get kick out of games, some out shitcoins.

> I just find gaming industry as useless burning carbon and trying to milk money from the naive.

Can Video Games be divorced from the Gaming industry? Are you saying that gaming is as invalid a form of entertainment as crypto mining and speculation is? So other forms of entertainment are more valid, or is entertainment not a valid use of time?

If we assume that video gaming is not an invalid form of entertainment, how many gamers are measured compared to miners and speculators? I suspect that entertainment person-hours per joule is substantially better for video games than it is for bitcoin. In which case, if video games were a valid form of entertainment, then what we want are video games that use less energy.

If video gaming is a lesser form of entertainment, why? People said 100 years ago or thereabouts that books were a bad influence on society.

I don't quite understand what the naive part of video gaming is though. Is that in reference to gatcha?

Are you in favor of banning movies too then? We burn a lot of resources (both physical resources and electricity) to film and distribute and show movies, and we could repurpose all of that for other pursuits

No, all I said is that in my eyes they are on par, not that we should ban any of them.

I would not call video games a waste of energy. Leisure is important.

The same amount?

What gamers are running multiple GPUs in a game 24/7 with 100% utilization?

I don't think it even comes close.

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