Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year
As an engineer, it saddens me to see the huge inefficiencies inherent to cryptocurrency mining these days. Surely, when we're spending in the billions on wasteful hashing, we could dedicate a small fraction of that to engineering better consensus algorithms.<p>Unfortunately, we have an ecosystem where everyone is incentivized to ignore the problem because they're too invested in maintaining the price of Bitcoin and other PoW cryptocurrencies. They often don't pay for the externalities — environmental costs. The specialization of mining also severely hurts the distributed and decentralized nature of these crypto-currencies.<p>I'm a huge fan of crypto-networks, and have made a career in the space. But, I want Bitcoin to die off and leave room for newer generation technology.