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| System Name | Hotbox |
|---|---|
| Processor | AMD Ryzen 7 5800X, 110/95/110, PBO +150Mhz, CO -7,-7,-20(x6), |
| Motherboard | ASRock Phantom Gaming B550 ITX/ax |
| Cooling | LOBO + Laing DDC 1T Plus PWM + Corsair XR5 280mm + 2x Arctic P14 |
| Memory | 32GB G.Skill FlareX 3200c14 @3800c15 |
| Video Card(s) | PowerColor Radeon 6900XT Liquid Devil Ultimate, UC@2250MHz max @~200W |
| Storage | 2TB Adata SX8200 Pro |
| Display(s) | Dell U2711 main, AOC 24P2C secondary |
| Case | SSUPD Meshlicious |
| Audio Device(s) | Optoma Nuforce μDAC 3 |
| Power Supply | Corsair SF750 Platinum |
| Mouse | Logitech G603 |
| Keyboard | Keychron K3/Cooler Master MasterKeys Pro M w/DSA profile caps |
| Software | Windows 10 Pro |
Wow, that's an oddly willfully and explicitly naïve stance.
- First off: yes, technology advanced during both WWI and WWII. That is mainly due to governments using wars as reasoning to spend money on product development. What says they couldn't have achieved the same - or likely even more, given the reduced need for said technologies to be useful for killing - with just spending the same without the war? That warfare has historically been widely accepted as carte blanche on government spending is hardly an argument for it being beneficial, and twisting it to be so is some seriously flawed logic.
- Second: If those hard drives are being produced, it's because they have a use. Companies and people are buying them already. It's not like makers and distributors are stockpiling HDDs for the future, after all. If mining suddenly arrives with a massive demand for HDDs, what happens to those other use cases? They start experiencing shortages. Most HDD makers don't have ~50% free capacity, so it's quite doubtful that they'll be able to avoid shortages.
- As for mining worldwide consuming less power than our current banking and debit machine(?) infrastructure: how about no? Judging by your wording I'm assuming you're basing your numbers on this 2018 blog post or something similar, which among other glaring issues assumes that every ATM in the world has two air conditioners and lighting. Which is downright absurd - most ATMs are embedded into a wall somewhere, and have neither. It also assumes a/c in all bank branches, which again, is just nowhere near accurate. It also doesn't account for electric heating in colder climates, etc. So it's methodology is fundamentally flawed. (There are other articles, like this one, that have slightly different numbers but are still fundamentally flawed.) According to the University of Cambridge, the current Bitcoin network consumes ~122TWH/year (~0.5-0.6% of global electricity consumption). Ethereum is currently estimated at ~39TWH/year. And then there's all the various altcoins out there. This whole comparison of course entirely neglects the fact that global banking serves literal billions of people every day. Crypto comes nowhere close. But more crucially, crypto wastes most of its energy. Should banking become more efficient? Absolutely, yes. Does that make it look bad compared to crypto? Of course not. The vast majority of power consumed by crypto is for mining, i.e. spending computational power to generate a unique signifier of some sort. Is that valuable? Proponents would say yes, seemingly through some sort of philosophical idea of the inherent value of creating something unique and unreproducible. I would say hell no, because the thing that is created is inherently useless. It has zero use beyond being something to gamble on. It provides no tangible use to any human being that couldn't just be served just as well by something that already exists. Does it represent a better chance of ROI for your gamble than, say, a lottery ticket or stocks? Sure. But it also wastes heaps of energy while doing so. Energy that a) wouldn't need to be generated at all if not for mining, or b) that could be spent doing something with actual tangible benefits, like producing useful goods or providing useful services. The inherent - and intended! - difficulty of generating unique tokens is what makes crypto inherently and unchangeably wasteful. No comparison to any other industry or service will change that.
