Prospective: https://www.jonpeddie.com/store/gpu-developments-in-2017
2.1 billion (yes billion!) GPU's were produced/sold last year, 2017
79% mobile phones
3% Consoles
1% Vehicle and other (NOTE: do not expect cheap gaming cards if the automobile industry really takes off in using AI for cars, cheap $500 cards will be a distant memory)
17% for PCs and Workstations
What is the energy cost for all Video cards other than mining estimating an average of 20% usage in a day? Knock knock anyone there? I would surmise it would dwarf the power requirements of all the mining cards many times over. Just because one area with cheap power harbours the influx of miners does not mean that represents all areas of the planet. It just concentrates due to economic reasons. Taking it out of context and then saying we will need to build thousands of nuclear power plants is just exaggerating. We could make a much bigger claim with gamers or all other uses.
- 2.1 billion X .17 = 357 million PC/WS GPUs sold last year
- ~35% of those were discrete as in in video cards, 357 million x .35 = 124.5 million Video cards made/sold last year. Then add in all the video cards still in use and produced prior to 2017 - as in 2016, 2015 and so on -> Each over 100million produced as well - A huge number of video cards not dedicated to mining.
- 12 million video cards from last several generations make up the current mining population, with the much lower current payoff rates that is probably significantly less now - 12 million pales in comparison to all video cards totalling in the hundreds of millions.
Also to consider, even with a phone requiring much less energy, having many more of them still consumes a hell a lot of energy
Of course it is just easy to blame the miner for all one's gaming GPU finding ills. It is more a memory shortage causing the real gaming GPU shortage, caused by memory manufacturers making memory for phones vice as much for video cards. Someone can critique and correct my math if in error. Of course GPU's bought for mining affects gamers, folks buying GPU's for gaming is affecting miners getting GPU's, then GPU's bought for other things - it really works all ways for affecting supply and demand.
- Charge a phone 3 hours at 5w a day, .01kwh x 1000w/24kw = .42w rate of consumption
- .42w x (# of cell phones in the world) 4.93 billion
- = 2070600000watts of usage or 2070.6 Megawatts, so will the collapse of the world with global warming be considered as well with cell phones? Na, this is progress
Probably most of us on this site that mine also game and game [H]ard at that as well.
There is a problem with this perspective.
All of those example of computing devices are products, tangible products. The products have many different purposes, entertainment, business, health, education, communications in myriad forms. Cryptomining consumes energy and resources but to what product? No tangible product at all actually. It's a security, like having and trading in stock for a company that doesn't exist, has no holdings, employs no people, and has no customers and the only potential benefit, is to be a vehicle for trading currency.
In other words, I could achieve the same result if I could convince people to start trading emojis as if it were bitcoin, no different. I'll even use block-chain to confirm that the emoji is in fact original. I'll just use artistic talent to create them instead of mathematical algorithms and well do it for a hell of a lot less cost in energy usage.