Aren’t they immediately going to start mining other PoW coins with those GPUs?
Mining BTC on a GPU isn't profitable.
You need a dedicated ASIC chip that is far more efficient at the task than a GPU if you want to hope turning a profit mining Bitcoin.
Something like this:
Eth thought that was a bad thing, so chose an algorithm that was intentionally difficult to implement in asic. They thought having gpus be the most efficient platform would be more decentralized and be more one person one vote compared to asics. As a result people use gpus for eth.
Password hashing algorithms (scrypt, argon2, etc) are generally designed to minimize the advantage custom hatdware gives.
> "The only coins showing profit have no market cap or liquidity. The profit is not real."
That is, the remaining PoW derived coins are not as profitable for miners, presumably not enough to cover their margins.
Of course if you are running from home generated power (e.g solar) then the equation changes, but so does the capital cost.
If 500 watts of electricity go into a heater or a computer, 500 watts of heat will come out, minus some light from leds and screen, some electricity on the ethernet cable, and other of these ignorable things.
If it does some usefull computation on the side, that's nice, but energy wise a 500 watt game computer is just as efficient as a 500 watt heater, if used for heating purposes.
So couple of years ago I permitted for my son to mine coins on GPU when it was cold allowing to him to earn like 2-4 Euros per day.
But then I stopped as I realized that this just promoted insanity of using proof of work in other places.
They will just find other buyers.
But even so, at least that power would go to something useful (keeping buildings comfortable, purifying water, who knows what) rather than being burned in the crypto-pit.
> Perhaps you are right about power companies wanting to sell more power (although it seems like that is not the case for the marginal kWh given all that power companies do to incentive energy efficiency for their customers).
It is literally called a power company. They offer special rates for large customers. That alone creates a marketplace.
> But even so, at least that power would go to something useful (keeping buildings comfortable, purifying water, who knows what) rather than being burned in the crypto-pit.
Did you have a choice in where that power went to begin with? No.
"No one has the moral authority to tell you what is a good or bad use of energy (ex: watching the Kardashians)" -- https://twitter.com/danheld/status/1479135584685854729?lang=...
I consider that a moral opinion.
It’s not a “moral opinion” to accept someone else’s assessment of the utility of their own actions.
Is it a “moral opinion” to state a preference that crude oil is more useful when refined and injected into an ICE vehicle than if it’s burned on site in an oil well fire?
So if there's an unambiguous case of morally abhorrent energy use, everything else is up for debate. That tweet thread goes off the rails early, as it's clear the author is financially incentivized to not understand the position he is arguing against. So it's no surprise the argument is nonsense.
https://www.lynalden.com/wp-content/uploads/bitcoin-energy-c...
Yes, and?
In other words, those things work because you directly or even indirectly support the system which causes those sorts of catastrophes to happen.
Does this include mean computer gaming? How about watching movies? Is it morally wrong if done using computer "burning joules..."?
Alternatively consider planned obsolescence. Devices are designed to break and be replaced rather than last today, as a rule. Consider just phones alone on this front. The amount of resources that consumes is unimaginable, and that goes well beyond just electricity or manpower.
Ultimately our entire society is built around the largely arbitrary expenditure of absolutely massive amounts of energy and resources to accomplish tasks that, in most cases, are not especially useful or necessary. Optimizing GDP, a goal of most all developed nations now a day, is often just a proxy for increasing waste. Buying the same phone 20 times gives a 20x boost to GDP relative to buying it once. And yet this is the metric we've chosen as a measure for progress.
We should all be judicious with how we use our limited resources. The market often serves to incentivize that good judgement. When the market starts incentivizing waste (e.g. “cryptocurrencies”) that’s when you need to start banning things.
The same thing happens with power companies and we get a net reduction in generation.