I took your words by their actual meaning, sure. That's how language works. Certainly mining consumes a great deal of power. However, when I pointed out that gaming uses as much or more, you attempted to deny that with a figure smaller than the actual value by a factor of a million or so.
Tinfoil on a bit tight today?
None of the numbers I used were "random", nor anything approaching that. Unsurprisingly, you're missing the entire point of my off-the-cuff analysis. Of course none of the figures were extremely precise: some were too low, some were high, and some may be as far off as a factor of 2 or 3. But the resultant estimate is certainly correct to within an order of magnitude, and it clearly demonstrates that the statement that worldwide gaming uses "a few dozen tons" of coal is absolute nonsense.
According to Statista, the figure for 2019 was almost exactly half. However, as of today, and counting mobile, there are something like 2.6 billion users (a higher figure than I used) and there additionally is a significant amount of overlap in the categories. A gamer who spends 50% of his time on mobile may still be gaming on other platforms as well.
Per console. Add up all the iterations of the various consoles on the market and, even only counting older generations partially, due to their lower power consumption and greater dropout rate, you still reach a figure of over half a billion.
Why do you believe it's "safe to say" your estimate is more reliable than the experts?
Of course, which is why my estimate used the number of hours spent gaming each week.
So you can basically justify any amount of power usage for any purpose as long as there is something that uses more?
The talk has been happening for years, but there aren't many good options. Proof of Trust systems essentially devolve into ordinary currency, consensus systems have too many holes, and Proof of Capacity just pushes the problem back one step. Proof of Stake probably has the best chance of succeeding, but its essential plutocratic nature doesn't appeal to many crypto-adopters.
Now you're just being silly. You implied mining was unethical because it was a pointless activity that wasted a great deal of energy. I pointed out that gaming is just as pointless and energy-wasting as mining. Either both activities are ethical, or both are not. Why not simply admit the truth, and move on?
Hashing algorithms are very different. They’re basically cryptographic functions, and 1MH/s of DaggerHashimoto (what Ethereum uses) is roughly equal to 100MH/s of SHA256. Plus it requires more RAM and some other factors. Because Bitcoin is almost purely run on ASICs now, that also factors into the hash rate. It would be moderately interesting to try and compare the power use of the Ethereum network to the Bitcoin network to see how much each uses, but also very difficult because there are lots of different types of hardware used on each network.
Gaming has the intrinsic value of whatever entertainment you get out of it. Mining is just high-stakes gambling that may implode at any time for any number of reasons such as governments banning crypto exchanges.
That isn't possible since hashers are just another shader as far as the GPU is concerned. Crippling the GPU in a way that makes it unsuitable for GPU-mining would likely destroy shader performance for games too. If game shaders can be recompiled to work around mining-specific crippling, then it is almost certain that mining shaders could be re-written to bypass it too.
"creating a perceived supply issue, causing prices for their products to rise"
Circumventing all of those you listed is trivial:
I seriously doubt there are a billion (or more) gaming devices in use worldwide that include a GPU that consumes more than 100W.
No amount of forced exposure or your insistence can mitigate whatever... or make me like this ****!
I'd be interested in hard figures. The numbers I recall (admittedly a bit old) were FPGA energy efficiency maxed out at about 10X, and ASIC about 1000X.
This is simply rationalization to justify your likes and dislikes. I vastly prefer gaming to mining myself, but honesty and simple logic compels me to admit that one is no more valuable than the other, and that there is no "gambling" to a business that with a guaranteed net profit.
I'm not asking you to like them. I'm trying to get you to accept a few realities, such as the fact that, long-term, mining (and other GPU uses) are giving you more powerful cards at a much lower price.
Possibly. So? Cut that factor in half, and it still demonstrates your original estimate was off by nearly 100,000,000%.
A few facts interfere with this tinfoil-hat analysis. Firstly, NVidia doesn't need to manufacture excuses to set higher prices. They own the product; they can freely charge whatever they wish, be it $500 or $500,000. Basic economics, though, dictates that at some point a higher price yields lower revenue, by depressing total sales volume. NVidia (and all manufacturers) attempt to find this point, and price accordingly. Now and always.
The more important thing to consider is how much faster miners can adapt to GPU manufacturers' attempts to stop them than GPU manufacturers can keep up with them. Miners can put out new code in a matter of hours at very little cost, new driver and firmware releases for GPUs on the other hand have to go through an extensive QA process costing millions of dollars over multiple weeks. The cost to GPU manufacturers is not worth the likely NEGATIVE benefit they get from it - greatly increased effort that is practically guaranteed to cause more issues later.
The whole point of block chain is that there is no central authority doing any sort of vetting. You are free to implement the mining algorithm any way you want, the only vetting you get is peers checking your proof-of-work when you attempt to publish it to confirm its validity.
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