Better late than never, I suppose.
This singles out a single industry. Why not data centers in general or also add in AI?
I wouldn’t consider cryptocurrency an industry. At best, it’s unregulated stocks whose value is backed by speculation. At worst, it’s a waste of resources and a low-risk way for malware authors to profit off of victims.
Don’t get me wrong, though. AI is also deserving of the same treatment.
Note that the second-largest cryptocurrency, Ethereum, no longer uses proof-of-work to validate its chain. So any regulations or data on electricity usage will be basically irrelevant to it.
Would you consider finance to be an industry? Because crypto is the same thing without the legalized grift.
The military is one of the larger stakeholders in AI advancement, and generally doesn’t care about the environment. There will not be a probe that could stifle future advancement in military applications.
I’m pretty sure the military cares, at least to the extent that it will cause instability. I’m 99% sure there’s something from the Pentagon to support that. I wanna say Pentagon wants us to address it before it starts making them do their job a whole lot more.
Why? If people paid for the electricity then what’s the problem?
Drives up costs, causes brownouts, keeps fossil fuel plants open longer, etc.
It should be the opposite. Crypto mining only makes sense if you’re getting a good deal on electricity, which means they’re probably running on off-peak hours. What that does is encourage electricity generation to increase the base level supply, which should decrease brownouts.
Brownouts are caused by unexpected peak electricity demand or some kind of equipment malfunction (e.g. inclement weather). It’s not caused by a consistent increase in base level demand, which is what crypto mining would do.
Keeping fossil fuel plant open longer is a valid concern though, but since solar and other green energies tend to be cheaper over time, I don’t think that’s a significant concern. I could absolutely be wrong though, I don’t work in energy generation.
Crypto miners aren’t generally turning themselves off to just get the off peak rates. The hardware is expensive and only has a short lifespan before the next hardware that’s 5x better comes out rendering theirs obsolete as the hash rate spikes and they can’t make ends meet anymore.
Generally speaking, it does drive them towards cheaper electricity, which is often renewable or finding places that have excess and getting good rates on it.
Sometimes, that turns out to be dirty electricity like coal, and in some places its kept some coal plants alive and stopped others from being shut down.
But it doesn’t matter if they are 100% renewable because the people that hate crypto, don’t understand it at all, think it’s a scam with absolutely 0 use cases. So all those solar panels or windmills that they buy are resources being taken from other people and slowing down the adoption of renewables, because crypto is a waste.
“what do you mean environmental impact, if people paid for the gasoline then what’s the problem?”
I know people that leave FO76 open just to farm click in game tokens that are worthless.
Is that the same thing? Because a lot of people do that type of energy waste.
He’s on 1300 hours rn. He paid for it. Totally weird tho. Dude is over 40.
It’s not. A single miner often has like 4 GPUs running at 100% load, 24/7 and I doubt someone will build a 100 Megawatt facility with thousands of computers to get fallout tokens.
Though it is the same thing in the sense of running computer to generate worthless digital tokens. The main difference in that sense is that fallout tokens do actually have a use(in game)!
Tangent to leaving FO76 open…
Makes me wonder how much energy is wasted by people just leaving their desktop computers on.
I know I used to be bad about that and eventually made a concerted effort to always sleep or turn it off.
I’m also glad LED lights are a thing now. I’m a lot better at turning lights off now as well, but at least if one gets forgotten on now it’s like 10x less waste.
We all know the answer - too damn much.
Should gather data on how many useless and overbugeted government agencies exist, and how to return that money to the taxpayer.
