How Does Bitcoin Mining Affect Us?
While people are still debating whether Bitcoin is beneficial, Bitcoin mining has certainly made a negative impact on our society. As an enterprise in the Information and Technology industry, we have experienced this first hand with the soaring price of the GPU cards that we used in our smart city projects! Why exactly are the GPUs so demanded? Let us give you some context first.
Bitcoin & Bitcoin Mining
You have probably heard of Bitcoin from the mouths of some financial or IT specialists, but do you actually know what it is? Bitcoin is a kind of cryptocurrency developed by Satoshi Nakamoto, it is treated as an investment tool or currency for some particular transactions. Its market value in real life is far from your imagination. Back in the days when Bitcoin was still barely noticed, you could already buy a pizza with 1 Bitcoin. Up to now, 1 Bitcoin is equivalent to more than HKD 380,000, you can literally buy a Tesla with just 1 Bitcoin.
Bitcoin Mining is the digitized form of a gold rush, which is a process to let new Bitcoins enter circulation. To dig a Bitcoin, miners need to solve an extremely complicated computational problem and figure out a 64-digits hexadecimal set of numbers as quickly as possible. Random amounts of Bitcoins will be rewarded to the fastest miners of each blockchain. Obviously, it is impossible to manually solve the blockchains as they involve some computational problem, thereby sophisticated computer equipment is required to mine Bitcoins.
Graphic Processing Units (GPU) and Bitcoin Mining
GPU is used for Bitcoin mining after the ineffectiveness of CPU is discovered. Originally, GPUs were used to handle display functions, a lot of video gamers would seek a better GPU for a higher resolution. Apart from that, GPU is equipped with a huge amount of Arithmetic Logic Units (ALU), so it could handle various sets of data parallelly and accelerate the mathematical computations of your computer. Since Bitcoin mining involves a lot of complex data operating processes and it is the faster the better, a lot of miners tend to buy and install a GPU in their computers and try to solve the blockchain more effectively.
Impacts From Bitcoin Mining
GPU shortage
With that being said, there is a shortage of GPUs and the price of it is soaring dramatically, a piece of GPU costs at least a few ten thousand dollars nowadays and it is also very difficult to buy a qualified one. Earlier this year, there was a smuggling case busted by the customs. Up to 300 pieces of graphics cards are smuggled and they are worth approximately 2 million Hong Kong dollars. Unlike the usual smuggling cases of diapers or milk powder, this piece of rare news illustrated the popularity of Bitcoin mining and what impact it has brought to the market.
With the soaring price, the related industries are affected. For example, as a firm in the IT industry, Motherapp takes part in various smart city projects that involve the use of computer vision. A proper computer with a qualified graphic displaying component is essential to analyze different graphics captured by our lenses, not to mention teaching artificial intelligence to recognize a particular object. The rising price of GPU leads to the rise of our project implementation costs, which clearly is bad news for both us and our clients.
What’s worse is that the academic development of AI will also be hindered. Computer knowledge tends to be more common in this day and age, STEM education is promoted by the government and there are a lot of new courses for teaching computational knowledge. However, with the soaring price of GPU, a burden is placed on the students who would like to pursue a career in the AI development field. Without enough hardware support, it is less likely for the scholars to keep up with the advanced technologies and conduct related research or innovation.
High energy consumption
Environmentally, since Bitcoin investment is profitable, various companies are established to focus on Bitcoin mining. They set up a number of mines underground, equipped with an enormous GPU, and try to mine bitcoin as much as possible. Researches stated that over 133.68TWh are consumed in a year for Bitcoin mining because the computers take a lot of energy to operate. Bitcoin mining activities even consume more electricity than a lot of countries in the world, such as Sweden(131.80TWh) and Ukraine(128.81TWh). Although so much energy is devoted to Bitcoin mining, only the investors and the Bitcoin related companies are benefited, causing the energy misused and the injustice in our society. The constant growth of Bitcoin’s value and the non-stop mining activity lead to long-term energy waste and place a burden on the environment.
Seems like Bitcoin mining does more harm than good to our society. It is surprising how a virtual investment tool, we think as a kind of advance of technology, can make such an impact in the market, the environment, and some industries. If you want to learn about more fun facts we shared or our recent works, feel free to read more on our website.
Read More: The Difference Between CPU and GPU
In case you would like to know more about the difference between CPU and GPU, let’s take a second glance at them. As mentioned before, CPU stands for central processing units, so as the name suggests, it is responsible for controlling the computer-based functions, such as opening different software and default applications; while the GPU is focusing on displaying graphics in the best possible way, including images and videos.
Of course, the CPU can also handle some graphic displaying processes, but its operating speed will be very slow because of the multitasks it has. Also, with a huge amount of ALU, GPU is usually installed to assist the operation of a computer, to deal with graphics and enormous amounts of data, so that the CPU can focus on the central processing and increase the overall effectiveness.
To put it in other words, a CPU is like a boss of a company, monitoring and handling different parts of the business, but it lacks efficiency because it has more than one job to do. Hence, GPU is hired to help run the displaying department, so that the CPU can focus on the operation of other departments. The following image explained the duty and functions of both.
Therefore, it is important to equip your computer with both a CPU and a GPU if you want a smoother, agile operation.