>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.
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.
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.
If some of these projects go on to produce open source software of worth it won't all be for nothing.
Associating the ERC-20 protocol with the current mania and nonsense of cryptocurrencies doesn't seem fair. It's simply a method of creating a sub-currency, which yes is often unnecessary but marketing is a powerful force so it happens.
Having seen small rural communities try and fail to create their own local currency years ago it's only a matter of time before some try again digitally.
Care to elaborate how China has banned it? Last time i was there I had no problem using VPN, and a dozen or so services that utilise encryption, PGP didn't magically stop working the moment i touched down. Customs were far more concerned about my camera batteries than tools of digital freedom on my laptop.
Seems like you are conflating the efforts of the Great Firewall with the word encryption here.
Done by a government with proper legal oversight it certainly has its place and easily will be a net positive for society. Though lawmakers seem to be oblivious to tech advances moving far quicker than they can, don't hold much hope they can keep up.
Used by corporations it will be frustrating and take privacy intrusions to the next level. In the end though, democracies will survive fine.
The real issue is tyrannical regimes getting their hands on facial recognition, it's a terrifying prospect and likely to be used with great effect.
Plenty of available reading on cryptocurrency mining forums.