/biz/ - Business & Finance

>>30398622
Not nearly as true.
Bitcoin and coins using similar algo can be mined with ASICs, that are very good at doing one job, but terrible at anything else. A single unit can eat up to 3.25 kW (Antminer S19 Pro). These are bought en-masse, there are whole datacentres of them. Once an ASIC stops being profitable, it cannot be repurposed. Pic related happens.
The environmental footprint is enormous, because it's possible to use more resources and more electricity to get more mining power. There's an active market for that.

Monero on the other hand uses RandomX. It's designed to be mined on x86 CPUs. No dedicated resources are used to manufacture mining devices. It makes it equally efficient to mine in a DC, as at home. The top CPU (Threadripper 3990X) eats 600 W, average unit used for mining is probably somewhere under 200 W. New devices can be later repurposed, old ones get second life, instead of landing in a landfill (most of electronics are not recycled, only some easily accessible metals are sometimes extracted). Mining at home contributes to heating, which removes the need to use other heating methods, 1 W used on mining, is 1 W less used on heating. A "dumb" 1 kW heater produces only 1 kW of heat, a 1 kW computer produces 1 kW of heat and computing power.

An interesting side note: if crypto and/or crypto mining gets banned (or sale heavily taxed) in some countries that host big Bitcoin miners, they will go out of business, the price of Bitcoin will drop, the miners in other countries go out of business, the price will drop… Do you see where it's going? Pic related is price dropping around November 2018 to under $4000 from over $6000 (and being on an over a year long down-trend from almost $20k in December 2017). It doesn't matter it's at $50k now, it was going down long enough to make it not profitable for many companies and make them close and trash their miners.
Monero will kept being mined at home and trading and use would just go underground.