Gaming provides recreation, companionship, stimulation, evolves spatial sensing and orientation, and generates good ol' fun. Bitcoin...is bought and HODLed. You tell me which one "produces" more in a society.
The degree to which it does this is debatable, and there are certainly more ecologically friendly ways to accomplish all of that (e.g. "touch grass"), which is the point. If you measure crypto by how much energy it consumes then expect to be measured by the same standard, a contest gaming will lose hard.
Pointless if the data is not fully intact. All well and good if you recover 20% of the data of a file, but you need the other 80% which has now been lost due to damage.
There may be other clues and information on the drive; a seed phrase, for example. So yes, the actual wallet file might be damaged but if there are other clues on there, they might not be.
Apparently, crypto is backed by the resources and "mining" that go into solving complex cryptographic nonesense formulas that somehow materialize into real tangible value that you can't actually every hold, touch, smell. Bitcoin (and others) by design (by the NSA), are to accustom us to digital currencies/coins/tokens, so that when the Crypto-crash happens, the Central Banks will usher in something that the people are already familiar with - enter CBDC. It'll be up to us to resist it.
I see we've attracted the conspiracy theorist x goldbugs that don't understand how open source works now. Splendid.
I searched for examples of viable bitcoin mining installations powered by solar but didn't find much. I did find a report looking into the viability of it and it didn't look promising. They were using a hypothetical example in California and stating that it would take 8 to 9 years to pay back - I couldn't quite picture anyone putting in that sort of investment into something that's so volatile (bitcoin, not the sun). They also needed a large number of panels and not everyone has the space. Also not everyone lives in California and obviously it would only provide power during daylight hours unless you add energy storage which is yet more cost. In short I call BS. Do you power your rig via solar? If not, why not?
There have been examples posted on this very site of bitcoin mines powered by dams. As for solar mines, you didn't look very hard, because I found this alone in a matter of seconds:
https://coloradosun.com/2022/06/28/olathe-colorado-crypto-mine-solar/
As for me personally? I mine as a hobbyist, using my main, single GPU on my main desktop. I don't have solar panels on my house but it's on the long list of upgrades I am considering. I have not mined, however, at all this summer, due to the heat, but do during the fall and winter as it warms up the office nicely.
The grids are designed to cope with millions of users so your individual usage spikes really just don't matter. The real issue (at least to the planet) is whether you're needlessly using way more power than you need in the vague hope of making a quick buck.
Scale that one person up into the millions and you have residential usage writ large, which is a challenge for grid operators to manage. Crypto mining, like any other industrial activity, represents a steady consumer of electricity that will use power when no one else is, shut down easily when emergencies demand it, and which plants need because, like I said before, they can't just shut down for the night. Which is the point I was trying to address in the first place - that "bitcoin bad" because miners run 24/7 versus the "virtuous residential gamer" that does not, when the reality is the exact opposite.
