Waiting for Elon Musk to crypto tanks for miners to leave our RTX 3080s alone

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• Waiting for Elon Musk to crypto tanks for miners to leave our RTX 3080s alone

So Elon Musk made headlines this week. No, not by absolutely feeling it during his time on SNL, although he actually did. Nope, the figurative love child of Howard Hughes and Nikola Tesla broke the hearts of a coven of crypto speculators this week when he suddenly reversed Tesla's recent policy of accepting Bitcoin as payment for a new electric car.

Tesla and Bitcoin pic.twitter.com/YSswJmVZhPMay 12, 2021 More information At first glance, this is not a surprise. The flagship crypto token that travels like real currency has seen great success in recent years, sucking the raw computing power in cryptomines and turning it into nebulous carbon emissions with the sole aim of making wealthy investors even richer than ever. what they are. are. But unlike a real currency with which you can buy something, the price of cryptocurrencies is extremely volatile, fluctuating wildly up and down by hundreds or even thousands of percentage points in less than a year. As Bitcoin soars, supported by plumes of thicker methane and CO2 pumped by coal-fired power plants in China and natural gas wells around the world, everyone from Musk to Goldman Sachs has been looking to profit from the speculative gains from cryptocurrencies while mining is good. . Pour Tesla, une entreprise ostensibly vouée à sauver l'humanité du changement climatique grace aux véhicules électriques, se lancer dans la speculation sur les crypto-monnaies a toujours été une solution discordante et étrange (tant que vous oubliez que leur premiere priorité est juste de earn money). In all honesty, Tesla suddenly exiting the cryptocurrency game probably has little to do with its expressed concerns about the environmental devastation that cryptocurrency mining is contributing to and more to do with the future price of cryptocurrencies in general. The environmental impact of cryptocurrency mining was known long before Musk and Tesla decided to get into crypto. At the end of the day, Musk is a businessman and Tesla is in the business of making money and he and his company are probably doing well as long as things are going well. Although Musk's statement indicates that Tesla will not sell Bitcoin, there is no real way to stop them. Musk's tweet expressing concern about Bitcoin's environmental impact has great energy, I'm shocked shocked! For Silicon Valley, venture capitalists will be liquidated as soon as possible, and almost certainly before they end up taking losses. Aside from all that, it can only be a good thing for the rest of us.

(Image credit: Yevhen Vitte / Shutterstock)

Why cryptocurrencies are horrible

Elon Musk is a man, at the end of the day, but unfortunately he has a lot of influence. He has a dedicated following of budding contract minions who will follow him to the Red Faction on a mining footprint on Mars when the time comes, but for now they're all on Dogecoin, pushing the market cap out of a literal cryptocurrency joke. at just over €72 billion (approximately €51,6 billion / A €92,5 billion) at the time of writing. Although he is sad in himself, there is something to be said for "the efficiency of the capitalist market", and he certainly is not. If there has ever been an unproductive use of capital, cryptocurrencies are certainly eligible. Even putting environmental impact aside, we are currently facing real scarcity problems. And not just with graphics cards or other PC hardware and consoles, but with semiconductors found in cars, medical equipment, and everything in between. Diverting productive use of the semiconductors we desperately need for real products towards cryptocurrency mining may not be the only culprit behind the semiconductor shortage, but it certainly doesn't help. Frankly, a cryptocurrency price crash should be celebrated by just about anyone who isn't deeply involved in it, which isn't a lot of people after all, so hopefully Musk's Bitcoin bailout is the start of one. trend. It's too early to tell, but given that the only two things Bitcoin is really good at, financial speculation and criminal activity, make me optimistic that Musk's abandonment of crypto is a harbinger of days to come. .

(Image credit: Shutterstock/GreenBelka) While there's no way to really know how much crypto mining reduces everyone's ability to get their hands on semiconductors for other purposes than just graphics cards, it's certainly a factor, and a factor on the that we can probably do something. While increasing semiconductor manufacturing capacity will take years, cryptography works largely without interference from people with irrelevant power to regulate it. All they have to do is decide to do something. The recent Colonial Gas Pipeline ransomware attack highlights the other annoying downside of cryptocurrencies: they are extremely attractive to criminals. While many crypto advocates dispute this claim, it's inevitable that an untraceable "coin" is exactly the sort of thing that will attract criminals. It's the modern equivalent of a briefcase full of unmarked bills, except it's even more secure since no one has to go looking for the briefcase. The fact that this group has done something as foolish as seize the gasoline reserves of tens of millions of Americans on a whim for a reported payment of €5 million in an unnamed cryptocurrency certainly adds to the pressure on the US government. The US to deal with cryptocurrencies. as the potential threat to national security that they represent. Ransomware like this could hardly exist without cryptocurrency payments that protect anonymity from hackers, and therefore the most natural way to fight ransomware that is increasingly targeting critical infrastructure is to regulate cryptocurrencies from aggressively to make them much less useful to criminals. Not surprisingly, Musk released his statement the same week that a ransomware attack hit critical US infrastructure. It is far more likely that the potential cryptocurrency crackdown, not the environmental damage that crypto has caused, has led Tesla to move away from Bitcoin. Hopefully, others will follow Tesla's lead.

(Image credit: Zotac)

Can Elon Musk's tweet help you get an RTX 3080?

While Musk won't just bake crypto, drawing attention to the issues he raises, no matter how dishonest, will have an impact on how people view him. With a tweet, Musk lowered the price of Bitcoin by 12%. Hopefully, his move will signal to others that perhaps it's time to get out of the cryptocurrency game before its price falls further, and with the potential for US government action after the pipeline hack. Colonial, that's a bet. Much more likely than him. . weeks ago. Remove the demand for cryptocurrency and you remove the incentive to mine it, which would mean fewer miners would buy every RTX card they can get their hands on. This won't make an RTX 3090 or RX 6800 XT more immediately available, but in a fairly short period of time it would reduce the demand that Nvidia and AMD are struggling to meet, meaning they'll be a bit closer to installing a new graphics card. in the hands of whoever wants. Overall, I would call it a win that has been a long time coming.