Just, like, unplug it. This debate is maddening. The consensus among those who don’t have an ownership stake in AI is that AI is garbage and dangerous, yet we’re told it’s an inevitability. Why? If so, humanity has already ceded control.
AI doomers are right then, but for the wrong reasons. Luckily, we don't have to debate them but just agree to limit power as consumed by AI companies. Debating them wastes too much mental energy on their natural stupidity.
Crypto mining is a bigger threat to the power grid & our environment. It's also easier to fix – just wave a magic fiat wand and declare it all null. Bitcoin et al. is a giant Ponzi scheme and every "halving" basically doubles the energy required to sustain the scam. One more thing XÆlon can't grasp!
Halvings are actually good for the energy use. If you win 10 bitcoins from a block, the chain as the whole will spend around ~10 bitcoins worth of energy competing to win that block.
This won't always track exactly, but too far off the mark will tank/juice ROI and drive out/draw in more mining.
I'm as anti-crypto as it gets. But if you don't understand *why* miners are incentivized to burn energy, you might not understand why BTC as close as to $0 as practicable is the only way to stop mining.
This means if a block suddenly only rewards 5 bitcoins, miner profits will be deep in the red and a bunch will shut down until competition again reaches equilibrium around 5 BTC of total energy spend.
Note this is all priced in BTC. High $ price is bad for energy use. Cheer when it crashes.
This also means bitcoin mining hardware can never truly become more "efficient". Modern miners do a lot more hashes/watt than when bitcoin first started. But throwing more hashes at the network just causes it to get arbitrarily harder.
It's one of the most insanely wasteful systems ever designed.
Comments
Dumb.
This won't always track exactly, but too far off the mark will tank/juice ROI and drive out/draw in more mining.
https://bsky.app/profile/mosheroperandi.bsky.social/post/3kbjginsidv2p
I'm as anti-crypto as it gets. But if you don't understand *why* miners are incentivized to burn energy, you might not understand why BTC as close as to $0 as practicable is the only way to stop mining.
Note this is all priced in BTC. High $ price is bad for energy use. Cheer when it crashes.
Every 2 weeks (technically every 2,016 blocks), the "difficulty" will be recalculated to try to stay on that target pace.
So as the rate of guesses increases (hash rate), the odds of winning decreases.
It's one of the most insanely wasteful systems ever designed.