There is no longer any doubt that the cryptocurrencies fever is real, although what is not yet known exactly are the consequences that this can have for today's society. After seeing that the increase in mine mining was already consuming more energy than 159 countries, another parallel problem is now revealed: the supply of GPUs is not high enough to cover every market, which has been partially depleted as a result of the mining of cryptocurrencies miners.

As reported by the BBC, researchers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) have encountered this problem by wanting to expand the power of their radio telescopes to run various processes, finding that the most powerful graphic processing units are now in short supply. These have become a highly coveted object in recent times, even becoming objects of speculation in some cases.

"It is a new problem, it has only happened with orders we have tried to make in the last couple of months,"explained the head of the SETI project. In fact, recent times have been the most convulsed in the cryptocurrenies panorama, giving rise to a growing interest in mining as more and more people began to meddle in the world of virtual currencies.

These supply problems are due, in part, to the fact that the amounts needed to expand the U. S. and Australian research centers are truly large, on the other hand. To get an idea, this researcher explains that some telescopes may require up to 100 GPU units working at the same time to achieve the necessary computational power.

And it's not the only problem they're facing, as GPU demand has driven vendors to significantly increase the value of their GPUs. Some of the most sought-after models have practically doubled in price over the amount of public sales a few months ago, something that can be easily dealt with in small units, but that undoubtedly wrecks havoc when it comes to huge volumes, as is the case.

This is a problem that other astronomers, such as those at the University of California, have also encountered. In his case, the search for the first stars of the universe has been slowed down by scarce supplies and high prices. They estimate that the expansion of their radio telescopes will eventually cost about $32,000 more than expected.

If we are invaded and destroyed by aliens in the near future, at least we can blame it on Bitcoin, right?