>I'm legitimately worried about the long term future of my hobby (PC gaming)
The equipment required for gaming loses value very quickly. Old 7970's released in 2012 command amazing resale prices in 2018. Everything else in a rig back then is now worthless apart from scrap metal.
GPU's are one of the biggest expenses for gaming, as a hobby it got far cheaper. The fear is unfounded and this is typical alarm-journalism.
My i7 2600k from 2011 is still doing great now, even not overclocked. Maybe not much resale, but I would guess it would play almost all games today fine (not much of a gamer myself). Actually, the upgrade from DDR3 to DDR4 is probably as much of a factor.
As an avid gamer, with an i7 2600k@5GHZ I can confirm that it's still up to the task with anything I've thrown at it so far, the bottleneck is pretty much always the GPU, and it's not looking like that will be changing anytime soon.
And I'm still sticking with DDR3, which runs with way sharper timings compared to DDR4.
> Old 7970's released in 2012 command amazing resale prices in 2018. Everything else in a rig back then is now worthless apart from scrap metal.
RAM is much more expensive and keeps resale value well. I could sell my 16GB from 2012 now almost for twice the price (!!), which is also keeping me from upgrading to 32GB.
Gaming value? Actually the reverse is true - everything in my i5-3570K's rig is from 2012, except for the GTX 1080 and it ran everything 2017 @1440p very well.
Admittedly no BF1 or PUBG as I grew tired of the FPS genre a long time ago.
Highly recommend Four Fish by Paul Greenberg, does a good job showing all sides of the fishing industry and the projected future if we keep going the same way.
The bitcoin blockchain is a crappy database that's incredibly secure because it's backed by an amazing amount of irreversible thermodynamic energy. Anything you put into it is there forever, even quantum computing couldn't undo anything a few hours old. That's all the public needs to know.
These articles are a bit tiring, despite being an aficionado somewhat keen for a blockchain winter.
The analogy is to nuclear winter (life after a hypothetical nuclear world war) or AI winter (after the fall of the Soviet Union led to decreased military-funded spending on AI).
Taught that in case of a real attack the US would have gone on an all-out offensive, Petrov told his bosses the alarm must have been caused by a system malfunction.
The only proven countermeasure so far is delegated proof of stake, which has "trusted" parties doing the staking. But this goes against the idea of decentralisation.
Some people wonder if pure proof-of-stake is even possible. Ethereum is likely going with DPOS, yet to see a single solution to the nothing-at-stake problem.
There's huge energy oversupply in Sichuan province, you can't just keep storing hydropower infinitely, it has to be released to protect the dams.
All this outrage is misguided, the market incentives mean miners go to where the cheapest power is, all the industrial scale mining is located next to large renewables sources in China, Pacific NW, Scandanvia/Iceland.
The largest ethereum mine in the world is 100% renewable.
That's interesting. The non-recyclable waste is normally packaged up into black bags here in the UK and it's often pretty noxious. They're not gonna slice them open so a camera can have a look, so people can put almost anything in them so long as it fits.
Plenty of available reading on cryptocurrency mining forums.