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The electricity argument loses weight when you look at the world allocation of GPUs. Although mining has cut into supply, they're also being used for gaming, workstation, and cloud compute tasks. One way or another all of that chip supply would be sold, and then it is a case of benchmarking the social value, load and efficiency of the different uses to some utilitarian optimum.

Much easier to cut off the framing early and declare "all crypto is bad and has no value", which is what the contra side is leaning towards. It's easily embraced by authoritarian-left ideologues, since their inclination is to reject market solutions anyway.

My suspicion is that we'll all be surprised in eighteen months. The "boom" will be gone, but an unalterable trend will have taken hold regardless, and the platforms will have largely moved on to proof of stake, closing the environmental argument.

The thing of cryptocurrency is that at the end of the day, all you have is a file of a few hundred gigabytes that somehow represents hundreds of billions of dollars of market value. That value means that an absolutely huge number of eyeballs are scrutinizing it, looking for a way to protect their investment. They can't "turn off" the system and make sweeping changes. The hypotheses of anything-goes "assassination markets" have not panned out - crypto has become a sector with a civic outlook.

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> One way or another all of that chip supply would be sold, and then it is a case of benchmarking the social value, load and efficiency of the different uses to some utilitarian optimum.

I disagree. Cryptomining created a new market that increased the demand. There's no reason to assume the same numbers of GPUs with the same utilisation rate would be in use if we didn't have crypto. Thus, it does have direct environmental consequences.

Not all of that electricity use is a total waste: a friend of mine uses part of his mining heat to warm up the apartment in the winter. It's an expensive heater though.