Electrical Grid Issues and Grey Goo Scenario
About six months ago, I wrote about a Grey Goo Scenario where all energy would be consumed for crypto mining. Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that blackouts in Iran might have been caused by crypto mining.
With Bitcoin and other crypto hitting all time highs, mining might start to make sense. It makes even more sense when the power for it is paid for by someone else. Or if you can harvest back some of the energy used for mining to offset the energy costs.
Do we need to start regulating power consumption for computing? Is there even a way to do this? Is there an opportunity for a non-mined coin or one that uses green means of solving hashing problems?
There’s a need to find some new means of computing to avoid runaway power consumption from mining. Let’s hope some runaway malware doesn’t brick all GPUs by converting them to miners.
