I frequent several datacenters in the Pacific Northwest; a couple of them are near the cheap power available in the central part of Washington State. We're on friendly terms with the staff and we talk about their other customers in general terms because it's nice to have a feel for who your neighbors are.
Two years ago the datacenter owners were contemplating whole new buildings. "We're going to run out of room next year, so we're planning another quarter million square feet down the road a bit." That expansion didn't happen. The space they opened up internally remains largely unused. One of the cages next to ours had a bunch of bitcoin mining racks, clearly at the DC's capacity for cooling . . . and they were unplugged because the customer hadn't paid their power bills. The DC wound up tossing the machines away after a few months. That parcel of land "down the road a bit" remains vacant.
I think the bitcoin "resource losses" go much, much deeper than an algorithmic tweak that would have been taken for granted a few months after introduction. [Okay, 25% is a good optimization, but it wouldn't have changed the basic game, nor the character of the companies involved]
Two years ago the datacenter owners were contemplating whole new buildings. "We're going to run out of room next year, so we're planning another quarter million square feet down the road a bit." That expansion didn't happen. The space they opened up internally remains largely unused. One of the cages next to ours had a bunch of bitcoin mining racks, clearly at the DC's capacity for cooling . . . and they were unplugged because the customer hadn't paid their power bills. The DC wound up tossing the machines away after a few months. That parcel of land "down the road a bit" remains vacant.
I think the bitcoin "resource losses" go much, much deeper than an algorithmic tweak that would have been taken for granted a few months after introduction. [Okay, 25% is a good optimization, but it wouldn't have changed the basic game, nor the character of the companies involved]