> The environmental claims are all FUD.
This is hilariously unpersuasive. Not even a hint of an argument, just “please ignore the TWh behind the curtain”.
Meanwhile Etherium seems extremely bubbly to me too. At first smart contracts was the only thing that made any sense to me (bitcoin struck me as goldbug nonsense early on), but over the years it seems like it’s mostly used for gambling and making tokens. Nothing that couldn’t be done more efficiently and conveniently off the chain, especially since the oracle problem always looms large over any given hypothetical use case.
At least if they go to POS it’ll be less wasteful.
Decades? With an S? It's barely been 10 years since Bitcoin's public release and that's ignoring the fact that it wasn't particularly popular (and nowhere near as valuable) for another couple of years. Other cryptocurrencies wouldn't come into their own for another couple of years after Bitcoin, either.
For reference, the dot-com bubble began roughly in 1995 and had popped by 2003. Crypto, especially with the fact that it picked up in value an incredible amount in 2020, is a prime candidate for being a bubble.
> I'm sorry there's demand for popular hardware. That's how markets work.
And the actual demand is being exacerbated by the somewhat artificial demand crypto creates. It also likely means that if crypto is a bubble and it pops, there's going to be a glut of pre-owned crypto-abused graphics cards flooding the market. All of this is definitely a knock-on effect of cryptocurrencies booming.
> The environmental claims are all FUD. None of them hold up to the slightest scrutiny.
Would you like to back this claim up with anything? The way proof-of-work crypto works demands computation, which demands power. Imagine if somebody did take this entire pallet of GPUs and start mining cryptocurrency with it; that'd be a pretty good amount of power consumption. Tack on the fact that there are multiple cryptocurrencies and a lot more than just a trailer full of GPUs working on mining them around the world, plus the fact that those GPUs are unlikely to be as efficient as the latest, and you've got a lot of power consumption.
Obviously, I'm not doing the math here, but just thinking about the (apparently hypothetical) power consumption of something like Etherium or Bitcoin is enough to raise red flags in my mind.
This is the only part I disagree with.
Most miners undervolt their cards to minimize heat and lower cooling costs... I'm cool with the rest of your post.
Mining cards are probably fine to use for years and will probably destroy the markets if crypto explodes.
Nvidia is selling GPUs without output capability to miners to avoid exactly that scenario already.