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Re:Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purp... by acdha on Tuesday January 11, 2022 @05:47PM (#29899450)
No, I'm recognizing that the economy is connected. Many of the best renewables — especially those which are available 24x7 — are things like geothermal or hydropower which have finite capacity, and non-trivial ramp-up time.

Proof-of-waste systems like Bitcoin are uniquely inefficient due to the way the network adjusts to increase the difficulty — an aluminum smelter uses a ton of power but they don't build new ones in excess of market demand for aluminum — and they're easy to ship around the world. That means that demand always goes up and any time some place has cheaper power for a non-trivial period of time someone will probably ship a bunch of mining hardware there.

This is a problem because right now we need the entire global economy to electrify as soon as possible. That means things like industrial processes need to be relocated to cheap sources of clean electricity because you can't just plunk a coal power plant next door, etc. and there are also challenges with peak power demand requiring upgrades to electrical grids or other equipment. Having so much power dedicated to something which has never found a useful purpose is a source of friction we don't have time for.

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