Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says

Re:Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purp... by cedilla on Tuesday January 11, 2022 @05:22PM (#29899023)

You severely underestimate the power use of proof-of-work blockchains. It's on the scale of nations.

But the main difference is that whatever you compare with those blockchains, it will never have the critical flaw: the automatically increasing difficulty. Your dryer doesn't periodically flood the drum to make it harder because more people are interested in tumble drying.

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Re:Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purp... by jhasse on Tuesday January 11, 2022 @05:43PM (#29899394)

Difficulty isn't necessarely increasing. It could also decrease if less people are interested in mining (e.g. when energy prices go up).

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Re:Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purp... by cedilla on Tuesday January 11, 2022 @06:15PM (#29899816)

That is true.

However, market forces guarantee that the difficulty will go up to the point where it's infeasible to add more hashrate, e.g. because it becomes uneconomical or there's simply no more hardware available. PoW workchains must work at maximum inefficiency. (This bears out in the data, too, I think. BTC had its highest hashrate at the beginning of this month, when energy price were at an all-time high and BTC was at the lowest over 12 months)

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