>Supposedly (haven't dug into it yet) videogames consume more energy than bitcoin. [1] Yet we don't see a similar organized effort to ban gaming. Why?*
Because intellectual and entertainment pursuits generally benefit society.
Selfish fucks continuously buying up an already scarce supply of specialized microchips for the sole purpose of greed isn't really comparable.
Proof-of-Work crypto has completely screwed some scientists, artists, and just everyday people who might like to just unwind after a long day. During a global pandemic.
Crypto in its current form tends to brings out the worst in us. It's kind of like social media in that regard.
But you could make identical arguments for gaming, so I don't see how that applies:
>Because intellectual and entertainment pursuits generally benefit society.
The ability to conduct business under oppressive regimes in foreign countries also has value.
> Selfish fucks continuously buying up an already scarce supply of specialized microchips for the sole purpose of greed isn't really comparable.
The same happens with gamers buying up cards, and there have been shortages pre-crypto as well.
> Proof-of-Work crypto has completely screwed some scientists, artists, and just everyday people who might like to just unwind after a long day. During a global pandemic.
Why can't you entertain yourself with something that's less damaging to the environment, like watching a movie?
> Crypto in its current form tends to brings out the worst in us. It's kind of like social media in that regard.
The same could be said for the gaming community, which is saturated with misogyny and racism.
You're equating shortage driven by organic demand to that of shortage from cryptomining.
The fundamental difference is that with organic demand, people typically just want one card. With crypto, the incentive is to get your hands on as many cards as you can, fuck everyone else. Then we find ourselves in this race to the bottom.
Moreover, trying to equate the energy use of both activities is laughable when mining creates an environment where idle compute resources translate to lost profits.
I'm sure many people have taken up watching movies instead. Thing is, the net energy use is still vastly higher because mining creates a perverse incentive for virtually all GPUs to be hoarded, while drawing power 24/7.
I don't disagree that a large swath of gaming culture is a cesspool, nor do I disagree that crypto has beneficial uses. I do however think both are beyond the scope of this discussion.
What I'm saying is that
the Proof-of-Work model has run amok and is a net detriment to society right now in its current incarnation.
Your argument is much like answering yes to the question "Does a pound of bricks weigh more than two pounds of feathers?" Gaming still uses more energy, even if you try to rationalize it by invoking the motivations of the people consuming the energy.
It's peculiar you chose to focus on gaming. What of professional uses cases? Science, art, engineering.
Even so, GPU demand from gaming is satisfiable.
Mining demand only ceases once the price of the underlying instruments fall sufficiently. More mining won't necessarily make that happen.
My argument is that the mining dynamic itself is potentially insatiable and fundamentally detrimental on a societal level, whilst highly distasteful at that.
It's like advocating for a never-ending greed olympics.
The focus on gaming is just as arbitrary as the focus on bitcoin, and that's my point. Gaming consumes more energy than bitcoin and yet its economic justification is even less clear. And yes, gamers do cause GPU hardware shortages, and they have done so many times in the past.
It boggles my mind that your hill to die on in fighting the "never-ending greed olympics" is a tool that's predominantly used by small-time retail investors, i.e. regular people. According to your system of ethics, it's preferable to be an old-money banker that profits off of the destruction of economy, than it is to be a person using tools (cryptocurrency) designed to divest control over the economy from said profiteers. I strongly suggest you take your war on greed to Wall Street, rather than directing it at the people trying to dismantle the greedy system in the first place.
My point is that, if your goals are really to fight climate change and stop greed in finance, then your priorities are ass-backwards at best, and self-defeating at worst. However, this appears to be more about control than actually accomplishing either of those goals.
>With crypto mining right now, the more GPUs you buy, the more money you make. The demand is effectively infinite.
Here, you admit that your core objection is other people have the wrong economic preferences according to you. The problem isn't the externalities, but rather the mere existence of the demand preference for GPUs. It's a page straight out of the former eastern bloc command economies.
I never said anything about goals. Nor anything about climate change. In fact, my prior comment plainly communicated that I've no interest. Yet, you still attack these points. Except, they're not my points. Stop erecting strawmen.
As for your analysis that basically insinuates I'm a communist, consider how the United States government would respond to a cryptocurrency-fueled chip shortage that was negatively impacting national security.
Climate change and greed were the motivations you originally provided for attacking bitcoin, but now you claim those things don't matter at all. You're being evasive.
The US is a market economy, and like in any other market economy, the solution is to increase supply rather to attack demand. This is what has been done in the past for all the other chip shortages fueled by gamers.
>Climate change and greed were the motivations you originally provided for attacking bitcoin, but now you claim those things don't matter at all. You're being evasive.
False. The very first comment I wrote in reply to you was unsuccessful in its attempt to steer the conversation away from energy. Still, I never mentioned the environment nor climate change.
As for greed, I never said it didn't matter. However, you did try to misrepresent my argument and frame it as some type of war with preference for old money. That you knew my goals or some such.
Since you seem focused on my motivations, here they are:
a) I find people hoarding scarce resources to be extremely selfish and in poor taste. Especially when the intended use for said resources is intellectual in nature.
b) I believe the demand placed upon the GPU market by cryptomining fundamentally differs from the demand created by gaming. The former may never be satiable, due to perverse incentives that promote greed. With the latter, a single person is typically satisfied by one GPU every two years. They're two very different dynamics.
>The US is a market economy, and like in any other market economy, the solution is to increase supply rather to attack demand.
The problem arises when manufacturers are unable to increase supply to meet demand. Sometimes it makes sense to attack frivolous demand if that demand involves the hoarding of scarce resources. Government-sanctioned rationing is not unprecedented in the United States, nor outlawing ownership.
That said, I doubt that'll ever become a reality. However, I do hope manufacturers lock down their hardware such that cryptomining is rendered inefficient. Free market solutions and such.
You're just re-emphasizing that you disagree with the demand preference of people buying GPUs, that they should have used those GPUs for gaming instead of mining cryptocurrency.
> The problem arises when manufacturers are unable to increase supply to meet demand. Sometimes it makes sense to attack frivolous demand if that demand involves the hoarding of scarce resources.
That's not how it works, at least not in a functioning western economy. The more GPUs they sell, the more capital they will have to ramp up production. This is precisely the reason why market economies don't suffer from long-term structural supply shortages that plague command economies.
>You're just re-emphasizing that you disagree with the demand preference of people buying GPUs, that they should have used those GPUs for gaming instead of mining cryptocurrency.
Not just gaming: science, art, engineering. If the supply was scarce enough, gaming itself would take a lower priority to those.
>That's not how it works, at least not in a functioning western economy. The more GPUs they sell, the more capital they will have to ramp up production.
Supply is low and demand is skyrocketing. Cryptomining just makes availability of what little supply there is even more miserable. It wouldn't be unreasonable for cryptomining to be treated as a sink for GPU surplus, rather than the current sordid state of affairs.
Because intellectual and entertainment pursuits generally benefit society.
Selfish fucks continuously buying up an already scarce supply of specialized microchips for the sole purpose of greed isn't really comparable.
Proof-of-Work crypto has completely screwed some scientists, artists, and just everyday people who might like to just unwind after a long day. During a global pandemic.
Crypto in its current form tends to brings out the worst in us. It's kind of like social media in that regard.