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by RcouF1uZ4gsC 829 days ago
Bitcoin is especially obscene because it counteracts efficiency gains. If a new Bitcoin miner that is 10x more efficient for hash rate comes out, Bitcoin won’t use 10x less energy, instead the difficulty will get 10x harder so it continues using similar amounts of energy.

With AI, on the other hand, efficiencies help. Of someone comes up with AI hardware that does inference or training 10x more efficiently, people will incorporate that and the energy usage for the same amount of work will decrease.

1 comments

You are fundamentally misunderstanding the purpose of the difficult mining in Bitcoin. It is to keep the currency scarce and difficult to obtain. If it didn’t scale with increases in technology all the Bitcoin would quickly be mined and you’d have money printing like the fiat money we are trying to escape.