You can make the same argument about any type of entertainment. It won't make it less invalid, though.
Games are entertainment, and average gamer certainly doesn't consume electricity on a scale of Bitcoin farm 24/7.
Games are entertainment, and average gamer certainly doesn't consume electricity on a scale of Bitcoin farm 24/7.
First games waste a lot of electrical power. A modern GPU is what at its peak? 500 watts? A modern CPU isn't too far off. That's 1kwh that per gamer that gets turned into heat and lootboxes.
2nd technological game progress means that computers/gpus are considered obsolete too fast. Back in the day your home computer would last over a decade until you had to throw it away and buy new hardware.
3rd (young) people wasting a lot of time in computer games. Teenagers waste their youth infront of a screen over going out and enjoying the world in their prime. Leading to adults that lack life experience and get depressed/anxious easily. (Mental health crisis)
4th modern game design makes games pretty much a gateway drug to gambling addiction.
5th spending all that time sitting means it's an enormous health care crisis. Pair that with the deregulated dopamine cycle in game addicted people and you can easily see how this leads to over eating and obesity. Which is even more of a cost to society.
The miners got a few architecture jumps where everything older became obsolete as well. It's not much different from the availability point of view. On the other hand, unless you're chasing AAA titles, you don't really need to upgrade much - I can play all my game library with 4yo hardware and I'm sure I could go further back. And that's ignoring console gamers who use the same generation for ages.
> Teenagers waste their youth infront of a screen over going out and enjoying the world in their prime.
"that's like, your opinion man". You seem to assume online interactions don't improve life experience, or don't provide enjoyment of the world - that's just a set of your values. That's ok, but it's not universal.
> modern game design makes games pretty much a gateway drug to gambling addiction
You're missing a lot of qualifiers. There's a tonne of games with no lootboxes. There's likely more of them than those with. This is not "modern design", but rather "late stage capitalism in game design" - it's very related to some genres and producers - not to modern games in general. For every lootbox-heavy AAA released in a year there's a gamejam that results in some new creative indie title.
> spending all that time sitting
Are you assuming that removing games would not cause people to find entertainment that still involves only sitting? Do you remember how the same line was used about the TV?
Basically it sounds like you know about games and have opinions about them, but don't really have much experience with various genres or how people interact and don't enjoy them yourself. It's ok... but that's a lot of personal opinions.
> First games waste a lot of electrical power. A modern GPU is what at its peak? 500 watts? A modern CPU isn't too far off. That's 1kwh that per gamer that gets turned into heat and lootboxes.
Majority of gamers are smartphone users and mid to low machines.
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
> 2nd technological game progress means that computers/gpus are considered obsolete too fast. Back in the day your home computer would last over a decade until you had to throw it away and buy new hardware.
??????
> 3rd (young) people wasting a lot of time in computer games. Teenagers waste their youth infront of a screen over going out and enjoying the world in their prime. Leading to adults that lack life experience and get depressed/anxious easily. (Mental health crisis)
Bitcoin users waste their life chasing gambling schemes and then killing themselves.
https://www.jumpstartmag.com/are-crypto-related-suicides-a-r...
> 4th modern game design makes games pretty much a gateway drug to gambling addiction.
What's "modern game design"? Gachas existed for a long time, single player games exist and are wildly popular.
> 5th spending all that time sitting means it's an enormous health care crisis. Pair that with the deregulated dopamine cycle in game addicted people and you can easily see how this leads to over eating and obesity. Which is even more of a cost to society.
Got something to back that up?
Miners should be compared to data centers, like those massive ones powering cloud games?
Data centers host more than cloud games.
Its fairly useless as solely an observation, mining farms often also do other things with byproducts, so even if the crux of this conversation relies on a futile effort of comparing relative utility of "entertainment" or "bitcoin", it would be inaccurate either way
The network uses the same amount of energy whether a block has transactions or not. Surely you see how that would actually help your “I hate energy use” argument if you actually made that one. Your argument is a common argument though, its incompatible with the more accurate argument.
Secondly, trading for speculation occurs offchain, meaning most speculators are not transacting on the network.