I hate what you do (the very idea of all those KWs going to solve sudokus to get monopoly money) but at the same respect you. In the end if someone buys, why not sell.
You could say I’m “wasting energy” for “monopoly money”, but that monopoly money gets converted to fiat dollars, which I use to pay taxes and feed my family passively while I’m at my actual job, or sleeping. If instead of mining I were to work a labour intensive job as a side-gig, moonlighting, driving there, how much more or less energy would that “waste” on gas? At least I’m recycling my exhaust heat into heat for my home and not using the natural gas line of my house in the winter.
You’re not wrong, and I’m not saying other actual side jobs waste more energy necessarily, but the gap may not be as large as you think.
Oh I’m sure I’ve spent a non-trivial amount of time total on maintenance, trial and error, watching videos, reading, etc. The thing is it’s my hobby, I have fun doing that stuff. I work with my hands and use my brain, and the output is money. It’s pretty great!
The people in my house use space heaters in their rooms. 1500 watts of electricity produces 1500 watts of heat whether you do it via a space heater or a computer.
The only way OP's method is worse is the capital costs of the processors. The energy spent on the actual heating is converted with 100% efficient either way.
This is a common opinion but I think many miss the purpose of proof of work. You get compensated for making the network more resilient. Other systems do this to a lesser extent with a combination of proof of stake and validated, but at a tradeoff of being less decentralized. Ultimately this is a necessary cost for developing the technology, and cryptocurrency & tokenization are necessary to facilitate a more decentralized internet. It’s unfortunate this has begun to take off while we are still in the process of transitioning to green energy, but that will happen soon and generally speaking miners are doing it faster than the rest of the economy. Negative environmental impacts of crypto are because of bad government energy policy, not the technology itself.
As far as it being “Monopoly money”, >40% of US dollars were created since the start of the pandemic. Yes, there’s a lot of technical details there and most of that money isn’t “in circulation” and many would argue that the way this is being done shouldn’t be inflationary, but it’s never been done at this scale and we do have the worst inflation in 40 years so it may be a contributing factor. Contrast this with Bitcoin which has a fixed known supply, or other crypto currencies or tokens which may exist primarily for their utility, and IMO “Monopoly money” isn’t a fair characterization. Even BTC which has little in terms of “utility” can be used to move money equivalent to billions of dollars a far lower cost than the traditional financial system so it has its advantages.
At least blockchain related technologies enable new use cases, IMO it would be more fair to blame something like Electron and inefficient web technology replacements for native apps for being inefficient and wasting energy. But I wouldn’t do that either, it’s silly. The people making software don’t control energy policy and that’s the real issue.
