When I am playing a game, my computer's power consumption increases by a lot. I am using more energy and ultimately generating more entropy in the universe. Is it worth it?

Your computer's power consumption increases by a lot - so much in fact it might hit it's cpu and gpu rated max wattage - perhaps 300 watts in all for a high-power PC. A kettle uses around on average 1800 watts while on. Washing machine is 700 watts. On the scale of home gadgets, a fairly beefy home PC is only really in the middle of the pack for power consumption.

Depends on the game.

While this was almost certainly a joke, to the downvoters: Did you know about Foldit [0], the protein-folding game that actually contributes to scientific research?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foldit

Precisely what I was getting at :)

http://www.eternagame.org/web/

https://eyewire.org/explore

https://phylo.cs.mcgill.ca/

> Depends on the game. lol

> When I am playing a game, my computer's power consumption increases by a lot. I am using more energy and ultimately generating more entropy in the universe. Is it worth it?

Yup, that's the right answer to a collectivist sentiment. Value is subjective

Mostly what we think others should spent their money on is irrelevant.

For example the global pet care market has sales of approx $100 billion. Many people think that is a waste.

H Other examples more than 0.05% simple to find!

> Mostly what we think others should spent their money on is irrelevant. Yup yup. One would think this is almost a tautology but sadly isn't

Actually it may be more worth it than most energy sucking things.

If it becomes an actual currency, the proof-of-work system will put everyone in an arms race of power/compute efficiency unlike any other.

That's actually a great point.

FPGA and GPU development has been granted quite the stimulus package from the crypto craze.

There are secondary benefits to this technology.

I bet the economic incentive got a lot more people into coding than before too.

It could be providing value even if only used by a small percentage of the world by serving as a price floor on electricity.

It de-risks and incentives clean and cheap energy generation like solar.