Belief is a powerful drug. It’s easy to believe that computer technology and electronics will make the world more efficient and reduce its dependence on fossil fuels, not least by reducing how much of that energy needs to be performed by physical things acting in a wasteful way. But this is the same set of core technologies that gave us bitcoin.
In a demonstration of how perverse incentives can be in economics, bitcoin and the other blockchain protocols that evolved around it fell into an arms race that make just burning currency for heat look vaguely sensible.
The first miners just used the Intel processors in desktop PCs. But that quickly changed as the value of bitcoin and interest in mining for it increased. The protocol behind the cryptocurrency was designed to ratchet up the amount of work needed to compute the hash codes that guarantee the authenticity of the blockchain to maintain a more or less constant rate of bitcoin creation. People armed...