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Comment by lvl155 | Hacker News Reader

Even if energy needs inevitably come down these guys will continue to force energy use purely driven by financial obligations. It’s the dumbest thing since subprime. We’re already seeing shades of this with Nvidia. They’re giving away their GPUs in exchange for paper to keep people on this path. But energy is not free. It’s finite.

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As a side note, one argument I heard again and again against crypto was the energy use. It’s an argument that has gone so far to the way side it’s incredible to me. Overcoming criticism about energy use and tech was simply marketing. Global warming is barely an issue in the mainstream anymore, it’s truly amazing

If the LLM boom ends then bitcoin miners can eat up all the slack grid power! You can put those ASICs anywhere

Crypto mining energy is wasted relative to proof of stake that provides the same security for no energy. But AI inference has no real alternative so the energy isn't wasted. It is unfortunate that politicians refused to allow abundant clean energy even after we told them exactly what to do, but now it is what it is. The market wants AI, they are willing to pay for it, and they are getting it.

If the market demands bitcoin, then miners provide? No?

Mining doesn’t create bitcoins though. They are created on a schedule. Miners just burn power on useless calculations to compete for a share of the scheduled distribution.

Didn't more modern currencies (e.g. ETH post switch to Proof-of-Stake) solve a lot of that[0]?

[0] I own no crypto and have no horse in that race, just from what i understood from online discourse.

Ethereum did the change, Bitcoin is stuck with the current mining of small blocks due to politics, it could've moved to bigger block sizes many years ago but the miners blocked the move since it would be less profitable.

So Bitcoin is locked into its current wasteful state with no end in sight.

> If the LLM boom ends then bitcoin miners can eat up all the slack grid power! You can put those ASICs anywhere

Or maybe we shouldnt use that energy at all. We're still heading towards climate collapse so just frivolously wasting energy on something that has 0 value like cryptocurrencies doesnt seem like the smartest idea.

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