China’s Inner Mongolia Declares War on Crypto Mining

[MageTank]

14 hours ago, Brooksie359 said:

Not relevant at all. You leave your system to mine and therefore are not entertained by mining. It sounds to me like they just are into hardware in which case they don't need cryptocurrency. And exactly like you said if they want to be entertained  by trading then just go trade stocks as that actually has regulations and isn't such a shit show like cryptocurrency. 

I'd argue otherwise. People can be entertained by the challenge of having to come up with proper cooling solutions for their mining setups, the challenge of undervolting each card and gathering the data on binning each cards ability to undervolt, the aforementioned thrill of the hunt for new hardware or even the more trivial part of simply watching your crypto accumulation increase. Like I said, you cannot dictate what is considered entertainment for others simply because you yourself do not find it entertaining. Arguing subjective opinions is a fruitless endeavor.

 

You may disagree with the current landscape of cryptocurrency, but others may view it differently. If they prefer to trade cryptos over traditional stocks, that is entirely their decision to do so. 

 

I'll extend my offer for a proper debate on the subject, let's avoid the dismissive approach and actually discuss some real comparisons.

[Bitter]

23 hours ago, tikker said:

Or until difficulty adjusts; whichever comes first.

Yeah that's how it was designed. The network aims to process a block every 10 minutes, with difficulty being adjusted every 2016 blocks. Taking out a large amount of hashpower will temporarily slow things down as difficulty is still based on when they were there. After 2016 blocks it should adjust though and it will be "back to normal" so to say.

And for that brief period of time my P106-100 (Mining 1060) will be a god among blockchains and very profitable and then go back to a dollar a day lol.

[Moonzy]

14 hours ago, Brooksie359 said:

You leave your system to mine and therefore are not entertained by mining. It sounds to me like they just are into hardware in which case they don't need cryptocurrency.

crypto currency is a good way to subsidize my hobby of hardware owning + tweaking

 

 

i do enjoy sitting beside my mining rig, tweaking numbers, watching numbers change, and recording everything down

nothing else would come close to allowing me to do this while getting paid to do so, other than some jobs that require me to review it or something, which i do not intend to do

 

never in my life will I pay $2200 for a 3080, but mining allows me to do so as i can re-coup the cost of it using my other GPU in 3 weeks, or by itself in few months.

 

so yes, it may be useless and pointless to you, but it allows me to do things i like and so i find it useful.

[WkdPaul]

The amount if ignorance displayed about crypto here is rather impressive, really.

 

Yes, mining use electricity, a lot, but in the end you get something that has monetary value, you all can yell on your soap boxes that it's worthless, but that OBVIOUSLY false.

 

You can't buy anything with crypto ? Really ? Then I would love to hear how I got my current rig then (it was all bought with BTC, minus a few peripherals). I personally don't like BTC for it's slow transactions time, but that doesn't mean it can't be used for purchasing stuff.

 

Again, nobody here is saying crypto isn't using a lot of electricity, but it's obviously not useless, there are whole companies that exist because of that (I'm not talking about companies that mine the coins, but companies that make hardware, supply services, etc..). As long as mining those coins will be profitable, there will be mining.

 

Saying mining isn't entertaining to some is rather dismissive ; who are you to say what one person find entertaining, what other enjoy doing with their free time ?

 

 

2 hours ago, Kisai said:

The point is. there is nothing recoverable from cryptomining.

Wrong

 

Quote

- Used ASIC miners? Garbage.

I do agree with that, after an ASIC miner isn't profitable anymore, it's completely useless.

 

Quote

- Energy used to mine bitcoin and others? Gone. Nothing recoverable.

Wrong, you have a coin that's worth money. There are a lot of things we use energy for that is unrecoverable, but is 100% useful, but with mining, you get crypto coins, and those are worth something, so I'm not sure what you mean by "nothing recoverable"

 

Quote

- Used GPU's? Likely going to the landfill when better stuff comes out. A small amount might get resold if they're less than 2 years old. But who's going to dismantle a cryptofarm and stop making money for a day just to do that.

Small amount ? Not even a few months ago I could still buy RX470 4GB that were used for mining for $125 CAD ... Even when a GPU is dead, miners are going to resell them, 100%, because that's taken into account when they calculate ROI, if it has value, they're going to sell it, why would they throw it away? That's a 100% disingenuous argument right there.

 

Quote

Quite frankly anyone championing the current generation of cryptocurrencies is either an idiot, or desperately trying to justify their foolish investment. 

Ah right! Because anyone that doesn't agree with you is an idiot ... that's always a great argument, right? Let's not discuss it, let's insult people because they don't agree with me !

 

Jesus, I'm honestly disappointed, I expected so much more than this.

 

 

 

On-topic ; any, and every, government has the right to regulate anything they want, and IMO it's a good thing they regulate this since most, if not all, of the energy in the region is coal based, China has big hydro electric dams that mining farms should take advantage of, especially when the coal generated electricity in the area they are is artificially low.

Edited March 5, 2021 by wkdpaul

[PCGuy_5960]

On 3/4/2021 at 1:14 PM, Brooksie359 said:

Cryptocurrency is legitimately a problem when it comes to world power consumption and doesn't offer anything of value over normal fiat currency. No need to waste such large amounts of energy and resources on something so pointless. Definitely has a huge negative impact on the environment. 

On 3/4/2021 at 1:27 PM, akio123008 said:

I just hate the idea that people around the world are trying to reduce carbon emissions in all sorts of ways, sometimes even investing large sums of money, and then there's a bunch of people burning up a huge amount of power in these computers doing nothing useful at all, just to make what seems to me like a marginal amount of profit. Power that may as well be spent to do actual useful work. Imagine all that energy being used for scientific research for instance.

You could argue the same thing about gaming, lol. Gaming is even worse since you are wasting that energy for literally nothing and are getting nothing in return . At least cryptocurrency lets you make money. 

[Tan3l6]

4 minutes ago, PCGuy_5960 said:

At least cryptocurrency lets you make money. 

I think there is a market for "playing games so others can pay"...

Not too easy to get into the market though.

[tikker]

2 hours ago, Kisai said:

A better context is "well if everyone stopped recycling, we would run out of newsprint, aluminium, and steel within a decade" 

 

Steel mostly goes doesn't get recycled. Those shipping containers coated in toxic chemicals from china? They rarely get used to ship anything back, and turning them into tiny houses is a bad thing since the amount of energy to clean them is as much as making new ones.

 

The point is. there is nothing recoverable from cryptomining.

- Used ASIC miners? Garbage.

- Energy used to mine bitcoin and others? Gone. Nothing recoverable.

- Used GPU's? Likely going to the landfill when better stuff comes out. A small amount might get resold if they're less than 2 years old. But who's going to dismantle a cryptofarm and stop making money for a day just to do that.

  Agree with most of your points here. ASICs you can almost say are already "garbage" when they hit the market, as the producer probably already mined their worth. The energy argument is a bit more tricky, because so many things we do or produce just use energy with nothing recoverable.

Landfill argument is also sound, though they probably end up there anyway. Technology just doesn't age that well, you are right that people tend to be apprehensive about stuff used for mining, as you of course can't be 100% sure it was used properly and treated with care whereas otherwise it'd may have gotten a 2nd or 3rd life. The same applies to normal use as well though. There are miners that take good care of their cards and gamers that push them way to far frying them up.

2 hours ago, Kisai said:

Quite frankly anyone championing the current generation of cryptocurrencies is either an idiot, or desperately trying to justify their foolish investment. This is not going to last. All that needs to happen to terminate all cryptocoin mining in any particular state or country is for the energy cost to start charging anyone using more than 15KW/day 10x the price from 6am to 6pm unless they have Solar cells that they can switch to. In which case if it drives people to install Solar... good. Otherwise all it's doing is driving up the cost of energy for everyone.

I can find myself in this actually. One could easily figure out what a sort of average home electricity usage is or have different tarifs for various usage levels. We have part of that in place already here. Daytime power costs more than nighttime (albeit a tiny amount).

2 hours ago, Brooksie359 said:

Why comment when you clearly have no idea what my knowledge of cryptocurrency is. Oh it does secure transactions that are untraceable? Great now we have an easy avenue for illegal dealings what great utility. Oh its decentralized so it should help getting away from one countries currency. Well that is pointless as cryptocurrency is so volatile and has no ability to do anything other than exchange for fiat currency for most places meaning that it doesn't even do what it set out to and likely never will. The fact that it even has the word currency in it name is such a joke that I can't take cryptocurrency seriously. At least with fiat currency has the backing of the economy in which the currency is used because its a legal tender and therefor is required to be accepted as payment for debts. Cryptocurrency on the other hand doesn't have anything backing it which is why its value is so volatile in the first place. Cryptocurrency needs to go. 

Again... crypto is not untraceable and illegal dealings take place in every financial corner from fiat to real estate. It's indeed volatile because it has a small market cap, no intrinsic value and, very importantly, is still in its infancy. It's very new and evolving. Anything you invent will be extremely volatile, expensive or unstable in those stages before it calms down and people figure out better versions. You are also completely ignoring that there are many coins trying to solve this problem to be an actual currency, that have tiny to no fees, are fast and cheap. Not liking the classification is just opinion. As you say fiat required to be accepted as payment. That's the reason it has value however. Your bank notes have zero intrinsic value.

 

I think there are three camps here:

1. Those that say mining is a waste of energy and should go
2. Those that just don't like crypto because it's not their interest
3. Those that don't yet see crypto extends far beyond Bitcoin and mining.

For number 1: WE AGREE. Mining IS a big problem, consumes a lot of energy that could be better spent and needs to be improved upon. Nobody is saying that Bitcoin in its current state is the future. That also directly ties into number 3. When people see "cryptocurrency" they immediately think Bitcoin and don't know better. As for number 2, let people just have their fun just as you have yours?

 

27 minutes ago, Bitter said:

And for that brief period of time my P106-100 (Mining 1060) will be a god among blockchains and very profitable and then go back to a dollar a day lol.

Oh man can you imagine if for a brief moment Bitcoin was GPU mineable again. Even the crypto haters would jump on that like their life depended on it.

[PCGuy_5960]

2 minutes ago, Tan3l6 said:

I think there is a market for "playing games so others can pay"...

You mean streaming/professional play? That's like 0.01% of all gamers

[Tan3l6]

2 minutes ago, PCGuy_5960 said:

You mean streaming/professional play? That's like 0.01% of all gamers

Yup, like a streamer, not the 0.1% of the streamers. 

I did edit my post to say that it does take some luck and time and even then, the income is not guaranteed, but yeah...

[PCGuy_5960]

3 minutes ago, Tan3l6 said:

Yup, like a streamer, not the 0.1% of the streamers. 

I did edit my post to say that it does take some luck and time and even then, the income is not guaranteed, but yeah...

Yeah, but most streamers have like 10 viewers and are lucky to make $10 in a month. It's very hard to make any meaningful amount of money by streaming and typically it involves a lot of skill and luck. If you mine the right cryptocurrency you can make more money in a few hours than you could by streaming for an entire month.

[Moonzy]

8 minutes ago, Tan3l6 said:

Yup, like a streamer, not the 0.1% of the streamers. 

I did edit my post to say that it does take some luck and time and even then, the income is not guaranteed, but yeah...

Given that those professions depends on popularity, they'll always remain the minority of the population

 

I've got a whooping $0.01 from my 4 years of casually streaming on YouTube

That I can't even cash out

[Tan3l6]

2 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

I've got a whooping $0.01 from my 4 years of casually streaming on YouTube

Yeah, well I had a 0.2 bitcoins on my slushpool account from a night of mining BTC in 2011. Just happened to check the balance 2019 and was able to transfer it to a wrong wallet.

Thats 8000€ today.

Maybe that's why I'm bitter about coins.

[Moonzy]

1 minute ago, Tan3l6 said:

Yeah, well I had a 0.2 bitcoins on my slushpool account from a night of mining BTC in 2011. Just happened to check the balance 2019 and was able to transfer it to a wrong wallet.

Thats 8000€ today.

Maybe that's why I'm bitter about coins.

We all make mistakes

But it's unfair to hate on it because it didn't do anything wrong (not implying that you hate it)

[Lord Bloobus]

Arguments for mining: whataboutisms, "decentralized currency", pushing blockchain, cheaper used hardware sometimes, I make money from it so it's fine

Arguments against mining: Energy waste, electronics waste, output allows for easier anonymous blackmarket dealings, at any time the output value can go to 0 with little to no recoup, hoards potentially scarce hardware, crypto can't be readily spent compared to most things

The people who keep these threads going are making money off crypto, the point of crypto was never the coin, it was always the blockchain. Greed invaded and now people think it's worth more than gold.

Cryptomining is not good; Cryptomining generates a pseudo investment currency in its current state, that Crypto has no protections, Cryptomining takes power and silicon and turns it into something less real than game currency since at the end of the day it represents nothing except what people think it is and what countries allow it to be.

Arguing about anything but the negatives is a useless argument (especially here) since despite them, people are making money till it makes a large enough power bubble that needs to get squashed (look at the title of this article). If you have hardware already and mine with it, that's fine; if you're purchasing new equipment to mine more, I wish you the best but I also hope crypto still dies quickly as I'm sure many others would like it to. I'm also really tired of seeing people posting cards mining when there are dozens of threads daily about people still unable to get one for their intended purpose, just so people can squeeze a few more dollars out of nothing.

[mwagen]

Heard a news story on NPR the other day about the amount of electricity mining consumes, I think one statistic was that mining world-wide consumes as much electricity in a day as Argentina does in a year, but don't quote me on that. So yeah, as more main stream news outlets start running stories on this phenomenon I just get amused at the way miners are always trying to minimize their impact by pointing the finger back at gamers as if we're part of the problem, too.

 

Say there are 1000 gamers who each utilize their gpu 20 hours per week. Now let's say there's 10 miners each utilizing 12 gpus 168 hours per week. That's 1% of gpu customers who consume as much if not more electricity. I mean, just play around with the numbers; even if it's less it's not insignificant, and for all we know there are as many miners as gamers at this point. Or for every 10,000 gamers there's one guy who built a farm with 1,000 gpus in one location. 

 

It's like in the classic car world...  Generally the pleasure of owning a classic car is actually driving it, taking it to shows, driving events, etc. So one guy will save up to buy the classic car he's always wanted except now he can't afford it because in the time he was saving up the values quadrupled. Turns out a rich speculator has been buying as many as they can, hoarding a collection that sits in a garage unused for years, waiting for them to appreciate so he can sell them off one at a time at inflated prices. This is generally frowned on in the car community, but I gather that miners would be congratulating these speculators on their profit.

 

That's the difference between miners and gamers. Hashrates and spreadsheets versus high res textures and lighting effects. Miners want money but gamers just want to chill. Not gonna claim that either is more entitled to gpus or whatever but only one passes the vibe check. 

[WkdPaul]

24 minutes ago, Lord Bloobus said:

*snip*

 

Pretty ironic to say people that are for crypto are sometimes using logical fallacy, when some arguments against it are also logical fallacies (only criminals are using it, has no real value, you can't use crypto coins, it's stealing hardware from people that need it, etc...).

 

Again, nobody argued against the fact that it uses a lot of electricity, or that ASICs miners aren't a waste of hardware, but realistically, as long as it's profitable, there's nothing anyone can do. Sure, governments can regulate against it, but take a look at Iran ; they have regulations, still, they've busted THOUSANDS of illegal mining operations, so again, as long as it's profitable people are going to do it, regulation or not.

 

Unless crypto currencies change how they're mined, nothing will change really.

[Moonzy]

30 minutes ago, mwagen said:

Say there are 1000 gamers who each utilize their gpu 20 hours per week. Now let's say there's 10 miners each utilizing 12 gpus 168 hours per week. That's 1% of gpu customers who consume as much if not more electricity. I mean, just play around with the numbers; even if it's less it's not insignificant, and for all we know there are as many miners as gamers at this point. Or for every 10,000 gamers there's one guy who built a farm with 1,000 gpus in one location. 

I'm actually interested to know how much electricity does gamer use now, given that steam recently have record high simultaneous users for few months in a row now not for using it against gamers, but pure curiosity tbh

 

Pointing fingers at each other for electricity use is like a pot calling a kettle black, it's stupid as both sides consume electricity to do whatever they wish to do for their own endeavor.

[Ash_Kechummm]

I like the concept of cryptocurreny, but living in a place with frequent power cuts, I really want cryptocurrencies to shift away from mining (like ethereum is doing)

[Lord Bloobus]

17 minutes ago, wkdpaul said:

 

Pretty ironic to say people that are for crypto are sometimes using logical fallacy, when some arguments against it are also logical fallacies (only criminals are using it, has no real value, you can't use crypto coins, it's stealing hardware from people that need it, etc...).

 

Again, nobody argued against the fact that it uses a lot of electricity, or that ASICs miners aren't a waste of hardware, but realistically, as long as it's profitable, there's nothing anyone can do. Sure, governments can regulate against it, but take a look at Iran ; they have regulations, still, they've busted THOUSANDS of illegal mining operations, so again, as long as it's profitable people are going to do it, regulation or not.

 

Unless crypto currencies change how they're mined, nothing will change really.

I was asked by a school admin/my teacher to build an ASIC/GPU miner for study/club funding purposes right during the crypto bust, I said the same thing I say now, ASICs are wasteful, they're worth nothing once difficulty shifts beyond profit, or their recoup rate requires large investment to see any amount of real gains and I don't see them as a good demonstration piece. I said the same thing about GPUs miners except that we can repurpose most of it for gaming PCs for recreation/competition machines in the future, which is why we ended up buying several RX570's I believe.

I will still stand by my original statements, even with crypto having more value right now. I've been asked again to collaborate to make a new one and I said if they bring me a budget and a goal I can make it happen; but warned again, that this is a money pit and shouldn't be seen as anything but parts for computers later since we do have a small gaming community budding with competitions in the works so they an recoup in that way.

So to ASICs, I have nothing more to add than the original points except they're even worse offenders in the electronic waste area, but will admit they can be more energy efficient. And all my negatives have already happened, they're continuing to happen, and every day cryptomining continues, the effect worsens.

[TetraSky]

28 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

I'm actually interested to know how much electricity does gamer use now, given that steam recently have record high simultaneous users for few months in a row now not for using it against gamers, but pure curiosity tbh

 

Pointing fingers at each other for electricity use is like a pot calling a kettle black, it's stupid as both sides consume electricity to do whatever they wish to do for their own endeavor.

Bit hard to calculate, considering gamers are not playing 24/7.

If we assume, every single one of those 26M gamers on Steam are using their PC for gaming for 4 to 8 hours a day, varying between 200W to 500W in power consumption, that's 292~584kWh to 730~1460kWh, per user, per year.

It's already highly unrealistic to assume every single one of the 26M gamers are playing at the same time, each for 4 to 8 hours a day, every single day and I'm sure plenty of those 26M have lower end machines that consume less than 200W for some basic gaming... just like I'm sure there's a lot whose PC consume 700+W, but if they were, that would be 7.592~15.184 to 18.98~37.96 terawatt-hours per year.

Crypto mining is estimated to use 121.36 terawatt-hours per year.

But, again, extremely flawed calculation and doesn't include anything else that is not gaming.

 

So... Yeah, lets put that in perspective. The few crypto miners, use 3x more power than the 26M users on Steam even if they were to play 8 hours a day on high end gaming PCs, every day.

[akio123008]

4 hours ago, PCGuy_5960 said:

You could argue the same thing about gaming, lol.

Well.. yes actually. I never said I didn't feel the same about gaming. I don't like the idea of countless computers burning energy rendering frames either.

 

Now I don't think we could or should ban cryto currencies or gaming for that matter, but I think we should definitely look into how we can reduce power consumption of these activities.

 

One thing with gaming for example, is that GPUs are just getting higher and higher powered. Why do we allow that? Why not set a cap for graphics cards power consumption, just like is already done for other products (I can only buy <900W vacuum cleaners these days).

 

The above may not be the best idea, but what I'm trying to get across is that we should be looking into ways of reducing the power consumption of power-hungry activities like crypto mining and gaming more than we do right now. 

 

3 minutes ago, TetraSky said:

varying between 200W to 500W

I think the average gaming power consumption is lower actually. A lot of games most people play most of the time aren't demanding on hardware and a lot of people also don't play on high end computers. I'd say 100-300W is more realistic. Nonetheless it remains guesswork.

[Moonzy]

14 minutes ago, akio123008 said:

I'd say 100-300W is more realistic.

I ran a wattmeter and my desktop at idle consumes ~70W (with undervolted CPU)

So around 250W for games isn't too unrealistic, imo

 

Also have to factor in display electricity, which I reckon would be around 50W per monitor.

 

But yeah it's hard to tell for sure, but that's a good ball park, around the TWh scale

And that's just steam users, have to account for non-steam users as well but yeah, roughly around there

[WkdPaul]

14 minutes ago, Lord Bloobus said:

I was asked by a school admin/my teacher to build an ASIC/GPU miner for study/club funding purposes right during the crypto bust, I said the same thing I say now, ASICs are wasteful, they're worth nothing once difficulty shifts beyond profit, or their recoup rate requires large investment to see any amount of real gains and I don't see them as a good demonstration piece. I said the same thing about GPUs miners except that we can repurpose most of it for gaming PCs for recreation/competition machines in the future, which is why we ended up buying several RX570's I believe.

I will still stand by my original statements, even with crypto having more value right now. I've been asked again to collaborate to make a new one and I said if they bring me a budget and a goal I can make it happen; but warned again, that this is a money pit and shouldn't be seen as anything but parts for computers later since we do have a small gaming community budding with competitions in the works so they an recoup in that way.

So to ASICs, I have nothing more to add than the original points except they're even worse offenders in the electronic waste area, but will admit they can be more energy efficient. And all my negatives have already happened, they're continuing to happen, and every day cryptomining continues, the effect worsens.

 

That I completely agree with, but my reply was about that specific sentence ;

1 hour ago, Lord Bloobus said:

Arguments for mining: whataboutisms, "decentralized currency", pushing blockchain, cheaper used hardware sometimes, I make money from it so it's fine

Arguments against mining: Energy waste, electronics waste, output allows for easier anonymous blackmarket dealings, at any time the output value can go to 0 with little to no recoup, hoards potentially scarce hardware, crypto can't be readily spent compared to most things

 

 

The argument about it being a fad that'll die down, about criminals and blackmarkets are 100% fallacies, criminals were transferring funds before cryptos were a thing, online blackmarkets existed before crypto, and if the value goes to $0, then at least with GPU mining, the hardware can be sold and reused.

 

Before scarcity, nobody cared about crypto mining, GPU or otherwise. I get the scarcity is frustrating, that ASICs mining farms are wasteful, but the above arguments I mentioned aren't real arguments against this.

 

The article here is about an ASICs Bitmain farm that's in a region with artificially low priced coal produced electricity. It's extremely wasteful and just plain greed, and I totally agree that it has to go. But, what they'll do is just move it to somewhere that also has cheap electricity and they won't care about anything else, that's just like putting a band-aid on a broken bone ; useless (IMO).

 

People need to start getting comfortable with crypto currencies, it's here to stay, I just hope more currencies switch to PoS instead of PoW, that would be a good start.

[akio123008]

19 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

I ran a wattmeter and my desktop at idle consumes ~70W (with undervolted CPU)

So around 250W for games isn't too unrealistic, imo

Those are realistic numbers indeed but the reason I think the average is lower is because of the vast number of people playing on laptops and playing games that require very little power to run. In my group of friends everyone games, and everyone has a steam account, yet I'm one of the rare ones that uses a desktop computer. 250W may be a good average for members of this forum but for people in general on average I suspect you'd be looking at a lower number.

[MageTank]

1 hour ago, Lord Bloobus said:

Arguments for mining: whataboutisms, "decentralized currency", pushing blockchain, cheaper used hardware sometimes, I make money from it so it's fine

To be fair, I've seen just as many whataboutisms as counterarguments for mining. Let's not use generalizations that both sides of the argument are guilty of as a means of rationalizing ones point. You made plenty of good points already, no need to water them down with broad generalizations.

 

1 hour ago, Lord Bloobus said:

Arguments against mining: Energy waste, electronics waste, output allows for easier anonymous blackmarket dealings, at any time the output value can go to 0 with little to no recoup, hoards potentially scarce hardware, crypto can't be readily spent compared to most things

As I eluded to above, these are all valid points as proper criticisms of crypto mining. I am perfectly fine with these points being made, my only gripe in these threads is when people conveniently leave them out when gaming or other less-damaging hobbies are put under the same lens. As long as the criticism is applied universally to everything without bias, I am fine to agree with these points (and I do).

 

1 hour ago, Lord Bloobus said:

Cryptomining is not good; Cryptomining generates a pseudo investment currency in its current state, that Crypto has no protections, Cryptomining takes power and silicon and turns it into something less real than game currency since at the end of the day it represents nothing except what people think it is and what countries allow it to be.

I need a little more clarification on what you mean by the phrasing of this. If you are speaking subjectively, as in you believe it's inherently evil, you and I may have a disagreement and I am open to explore your thoughts on this. If you are speaking in the context of the potential harm cryptomining has on the environment and limited natural resources, then I am inclined to agree again, as long as we can both agree that it's not the only hobby doing so (and gaming, while not as guilty in terms of sheer scope of resource usage, is guilty nonetheless, as is most forms of our entertainment). My problem with the moral aspects of debates is that we often do not apply our feelings evenly or "fairly", and tend to base our emotional decisions on what it is we dislike, not what is objectively true. Just know that I am not a believer in the whole "My hobby is not as bad as this hobby, so that makes it okay" mentality, I am fine with labeling things as right & wrong as long as we come to a common consensus without having to apply a degree to everything to justify our involvement in said hobbies.

 

1 hour ago, Lord Bloobus said:

Arguing about anything but the negatives is a useless argument (especially here) since despite them, people are making money till it makes a large enough power bubble that needs to get squashed (look at the title of this article). If you have hardware already and mine with it, that's fine; if you're purchasing new equipment to mine more, I wish you the best but I also hope crypto still dies quickly as I'm sure many others would like it to. I'm also really tired of seeing people posting cards mining when there are dozens of threads daily about people still unable to get one for their intended purpose, just so people can squeeze a few more dollars out of nothing.

This is the part of your post that most impressed me as it's probably the first objective response I've seen on this forum from someone against cryptomining that makes sense and I can relate to. People often get fixated on their own jaded views on cryptomining because they couldn't secure a GPU for gaming, so they come into debates halfcocked and arguing against it from the perspective of morality without understanding how hypocritical that is. Arguing strictly on the basis of the negative impacts mining has on the environment and natural resources would likely yield much more sympathy to your cause. Otherwise, people start to accuse you of being hypocritical for using the guise of championing environmental efforts when you own hobby can be viewed as environmentally damaging. These very people would also call those that act this way "entitled", and that only further frustrates people that wish to consume products for their own hobbies.

 

I also sympathize with your frustration of seeing miners bragging about their setups. Believe me when I tell you this was one of the bigger turnoffs to me when it came to cryptocurrency and I got tired of my friends repeatedly telling me that I needed to get into it, and the non-stop bragging about their income over it. I feel the same way for anyone that flaunts their wealth or tries to force their lifestyle on others simply because they believe it's right, even if they are doing so from the perspective that what they are doing is altruistic.

 

I don't share your desire to see crypto die, mostly because I am completely indifferent to it as I do not understand enough about it either way to form a proper opinion on crypto in general, most of what I've been arguing in these threads is the hypocrisy behind most of the posts here and trying to destroy the sentiments of those that cannot discern between their wants & needs. I don't really have a dog in this fight, but I'd love to reach a point where I can visit threads like these on this forum without seeing the discussion devolve into baseless insults and generalizations from both sides and getting nothing of value out of it. It's tiresome in the long run.