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by 0thgen 1578 days ago
I was under the impression that standard bitcoin mining leveraged GPUs for the heavy lifting. If that's not the case I'm happy to know what does
3 comments

There are ASIC chips as far as I know.
It's all the other shitcoins that are mined on GPUs.
That hasn't been the case for most of the decade. I already told you what does: Completely custom-built hardware that can do nothing but bitcoin mining, such as Antminers.

For instance, here is a shipping container that burns 1 megawatt of power in a pure and complete waste of energy and carbon emissions: https://shop.bitmain.com/product/detail?pid=0002021123118285...

alright, in that case you're right, the processors seem wasteful

though interestingly, the specialized processors alkso seem like an example of a second order effect of bitcoin: driving innovation towards more energy efficiency. (though the tradeoff here seems to be wasting materials versus wasting energy)