Re:Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purp...
by bavell on Tuesday January 11, 2022 @09:27PM
(#29901530)
Agreed with the "waste" argument. I won't defend the huge power consumption but the energy spent is strictly useful in a utilitarian sense - every joule spent makes it that much harder to perform a 51% attack. Ideally, the energy used to secure the network is widely/evenly distributed among nodes for maximum security benefit (though not usually how it plays out).
However, to say it's all a waste is just an emotional argument because you don't like it. That's fine but it's opinion, not objective fact.
This is what i dislike about the argument that PoW should be banned - that it wastes energy that could otherwise have been used for something else. I argue that it is not a waste, because the person who is paying for the energy does not consider it a waste. No one else can make this judgement.
The only weakness of this argument is that some energy sources have externalized the cost of emissions. I would very much like to see an emissions tax to account for it (which makes sense to do, regardless of one's position on PoW).