As you may know, the hashing operation behind bitcoin is essentially the same that’s used to crack passwords. If you have a mining farm that can make a lot of bitcoins, you also have the hardware to open up, for example, encrypted databases.
So, bitcoin has no use, but states are absolutely interested in a computational arms race. That’s why I’m so intrigued by China’s turn on bitcoin. I saw some destruction of shitty GPU rigs, but I wouldn’t be surprised if China is just steering themselves out of bitcoin and organizing their mining capabilities. I’m thinking of that hydro electric dam, probably some secret ASICs too.
A player as big as that could take advantage of a time like when the difficulty doubles again and miners drop out, or some other opportunity in order to perform a double spend attack or just splinter the blockchain into a confusing mess.
Name a better targeted, more humane weapon. “Thousands of 36 year old white men are forced to stand in line to receive their temporary ape assistance. This aggression will not stand.”
i was under the impression that miners were buying up all the GPUs which was what was driving up GPU prices, but is that unrelated? if you have cheap or free electricity, does efficiency even matter? and it's not like crypto people are particularly rational
GPU mining is still a thing, just not for Bitcoin specifically (they're primarily used to mine Ethereum, unless some GPU-mineable altcoin spikes in price enough to make it worth shifting to that one).
And as for cheap or free electricity, power costs are actually a fairly small portion of total costs; much more painful are taxes and the truly big one, hardware costs. Hardware, after all, has a limited useful lifespan (and much more so when you're cranking it at full load all the time), and since difficulty tends to trend up except when the price crashes to truly extreme lows, it also produces diminishing returns over time (unless crypto prices rise, of course, but miners can't afford to bank on that, particularly given the need to cash out some of the proceeds immediately to pay for power and taxes, which are assessed using the value of the crypto as of the time of receipt).