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A comment on Do we really need to run a power station just for Bitcoin?. Parent comment

Re:Do we really need to run a power station just for Bitcoin? by dllthomas on Tuesday November 19, 2013 @11:47AM (#6762387)
Watts/(GH/s) will go down because of ASICs, but that will make mining more lucrative and they will have to up the difficulty which raises Watts/(GH/s).
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Re:Do we really need to run a power station just for Bitcoin? by danielharan on Tuesday November 19, 2013 @12:06PM (#6762538)
While making GFlops/watt cheaper for all number crunching applications, no?
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Re:Do we really need to run a power station just for Bitcoin? by dllthomas on Tuesday November 19, 2013 @12:09PM (#6762558)
Not if it's just because we're building bitcoin-specific ASICs. It might help push technology, but it'll also pull brain-power that would otherwise have been focused elsewhere. It's hard to know what the counterfactual would actually look like.
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