Re:Square: Bitcoin Is Key to an Abundant, Clean Energy Future
by sauwan on Thursday April 22, 2021 @09:26AM
(#26902462)
Small drives will probably not see much of a shortage. If you're looking for a 10+tb drive you might run into some issues in the short term.
Things are not either "green" or "not green". Something can be "more green", and just because it's not perfect doesn't mean we shouldn't go down that route instead.
The fact of the matter is that cryptocurrencies are not going away.
You can choose to be angry and resentful of that, or we can try to find ways to minimize the impact they have overall.
Hard drives use a fraction of the power that a CPU/GPU/ASIC uses, and there is just as much production energy and waste involved in those as in hard drives.
The world is not black and white.
Re:Square: Bitcoin Is Key to an Abundant, Clean Energy Future
by phpnode on Thursday April 22, 2021 @10:12AM
(#26902970)
cryptocurrencies could easily go away. They have almost no adoption and the US or EU could look at just how much power and wealth is being controlled by Russia and China, how they're used for money laundering, or how Iran and so on use them to work around sanctions and just decide to ban them. It would be trivial.
How is it possible to frame those systems as green?
It's power that goes away to computation
It's hard disks that nobody uses and that sit there, eating power
All those things have not only the energy cost, but also the environmental, production costs associated, and the damage done to countless companies that can't get the hardware anymore