[Animats]

I've never seen such prolonged parroting as this last cycle.

The scale of the thing is getting out of hand. Cryptocurrency mining is eating up power on the scale of a small country, a sizable fraction of GPU manufacturing capacity, and a noticeable fraction of wafer fab capacity.

This has some parallels in how Spain went broke mining gold in the Americas in the 1500s. Expeditions went to the New World and gold came back. They were rich! Well, no. They had only created inflation by creating a gold glut. At a much higher operating cost than printing money, too, because it took ships and armies to make this happen.

[tal8d]

I've never seen an estimate that withstood any kind of scrutiny. I've seen estimates based on both fundamental misunderstanding of the function of mining, and wild assumptions regarding miner behavior and out of date asic specs. Have you bothered fact checking any of those claims you just made? I mean actually reading the papers they cite, and learning the methodology they used. Because while you're thinking about conquistas, I'm thinking about the field of cybernetics in the 70's, and how it killed itself dead with ridiculously flawed methodology for modeling population growth - as the Davos types all nodded in agreement.

"Give me a one-handed Economist. All my economists say 'on the one hand...', then 'but on the other..."

-- Harry Truman