Author: Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton 2021-02-03 14:07:24
Published on: 2021-02-03T14:07:24+00:00
In a conversation with Luke on February 3, 2021, ZmnSCPxj discussed the impact of power efficiency on Bitcoin mining. According to ZmnSCPxj, increasing power efficiency does not reduce the amount of actual energy consumed by Bitcoin mining since rational miners will pack more miners in the same number of watts rather than reduce their watt consumption. This logic also applies to purchasing decisions for beowulf clusters. The inherent "arms race" in Bitcoin mining results in very few players being able to create Bitcoin mining ASICs at all, which could leave the entirety of Bitcoin open to hardware backdoors. Geometry costs are an exponential scale and 3nm is estimated to cost around USD 16 million for production masks. ZmnSCPxj expressed concern over the fact that if everybody follows the same logic, then no matter the performance/watt, nobody wins, and in fact, everybody loses.
Updated on: 2023-06-14T17:14:41.162668+00:00