[Moneyyyyy]

It's good enough from a demand perspective.

Chips are not made after lunch until evening. They are made weeks and month ahead

[Dylan16807]

Long term demand for chips will result in more fabs and make things slightly cheaper for everyone.

Bitcoin demand is a bit erratic so maybe it's more negative than positive, but it's definitely not all bad.

[cma]

So are you saying if the government wanted to subsidize chip development and had these choices:

A) Make resistive element chips out of wafers and all the normal complex chip patterning, using up the fab side of things and wafer space

B) Subsidize custom chip molecular simulation accelerators for cancer research, by providing the fab side of things and wafer space to design researchers or companies

A is as good as B?

[Dylan16807]

No. Why do you think I'm saying that?

I'm saying that over the course of several years, A is better for chip advancement and availability than nothing at all. And in the real world it's A+B vs. just B, the same amount of B in both scenarios.

I'm not aware of Bitcoin reducing any cancer research budgets anywhere. Are you?

[cma]

This would be like the government proposing buying up a big portion of argricultural tractors and running hours on them until their engines wear out, in order to help the economy make more tractors. Cash for clunkers without the environmental rationale.

[Dylan16807]

That would be bad because of the CO2 emissions and because it's a huge waste of government money.

It would not be bad for long-term tractor availability, if they kept up big purchases for many years. Especially if tractors were a hotbed of research and improving by orders of magnitude.

Or to put it another way: It's a hugely inefficient way of boosting tractors, but it will in fact boost tractors. It's not a good idea overall, but it will have some positives.

[Moneyyyyy]

It's all bad.

The chip shortage last year which affected cars, roof window, refrigerator etc were also affected by ASIC production for Bitcoin miners

[Dylan16807]

That's the short term. In the longer term it leads to more asic capacity.

It's possible that without Bitcoin production in the many years leading up to 2020 the supply crunch would have been worse.

Also remember that a huge chunk was based on GPUs and those don't mine Bitcoin, they mine other things.

[Moneyyyyy]

Those Asics basically have been made and will be thrown in the trash.

And the only thing they ever did was guessing a hash.

Our economy needs enough chips without demand from Bitcoin. The only thing this did was making it more expensive for everyone.

[Dylan16807]

Do you not think supply and demand applies to building chip fabs, or something? And economies of scale?

I'm serious when I say that if there was less asic demand in 2015 and 2018, no matter what the asics were for, that might have reduced the asic capacity in 2021 enough to make the problems we had even worse.

[Moneyyyyy]

"might".

Fabs (especially the ones who can build the chips we talk about) are not build on a crypto hype and also not build short-term.