Not only is Bitcoin destroy the major planet thanks to itsinsatiable appetite for vigour , it could be hinder the search for alien living . A tuner - astronomertold newsperson at the BBCscientists are having a grueling fourth dimension accessing computing machine hardware because of a surge incrypto - currency excavation .
" We ’d like to employ the latest GPUs [ nontextual matter processing units ] … and we ca n’t get ‘em , " Dan Werthimer , chief scientist at the Berkeley Seti ( Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence ) Research Center , told the BBC .
Seti researchers are hoping to expand action at two observatories – one in West Virginia ( Green Bank ) and one in Australia ( Parkes ) – but these programme are being delay by the GPU shortage .
GPUs are cow chip design to process images , television , and life for the computing machine screen but they are progressively being used for non - graphic tasks that involve a lot of insistent computing – say , mining for crypto - currency or listening out for foreign signal .
" At Seti we want to front at as many frequency channel as we mayhap can because we do n’t live what frequency ET will be circulate on and we want to calculate for slew of unlike signaling type – is it AM or FM , what communicating are they using ? " Werthimer added .
Unsurprisingly , this sorting of thing charter up a lot of computing power . At Berkeley , there are or so 100 GPUs sifting through the various radio frequencies whizz through our coltsfoot at this very second .
Aaron Parsons , from the University of California at Berkeley , told the BBC his squad has program to expound their radio telescope ( the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionisation Array , or HERA ) but the GPUs they have had their eyes on double up in terms within just three months .
" We ’ll be able to brave out it but it is coming out of our contingence budget , " he say . Parsons estimates the whole matter will be an additional $ 32,000 and warn succeeding projects could be put on handle if this trend bear on .
Bitcoin has been call , at various points , a “ noxious poisonous substance ” , “ the female parent of all bubbles ” , and “ a Ponzi scheme and an environmental disaster ” . But , despiterecently plummet in value , it remain popular and it ’s been estimate that Iceland will consumemore energy in Bitcoin miningthan in the home base in 2018 .
Meanwhile , other crypto - up-to-dateness are riding the Bitcoin - mania wave . Ethereum , for example . According to cyber - security expert Matthew Hickey , Bitcoin miners are now using special Asic chips but it is still possible to make money in Ethereum using regular GPUs .
[ H / T : BBC ]
