For fleeting moments of the day, I'm able to steer my eyes away from the gaze of Steemit and read a few stories from around the web. And today I found an interesting one on a popular tech blog, Gizmodo.

The story is titled:- 

How the Cryptocurrency Frenzy Is Interfering With Our Search For Alien Life

Yes, cryptocurrencies are in the news again and not for all the right reasons like changing the world's paradigm on money, but instead, we are denying mankind an opportunity to discover Alien Life.

For fuck sake the SETI@Home project has produced zero results in over 18 years and now they are whining that GPU's cost too much to complete their most important work.

Give me a break.

And although I was an early adopter of their 'give us your CPU cycles' program, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out they might actually be wasting their time.

 Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results - Einstein

Because after 18 years of searching the stars, they have found nothing, to suggest alien life it's out there and if they do it's likely to just be Earthlings bouncing signals off others planets anyway.

Crypto Mining isn't Sustainable on its Current Path

Now they do have a point that mining for cryptocoins requires an enormous amount of computing power if your name is Bitcoin. But as we can see with Steem, this doesn't have to be the case.

The shortage of GPUs is largely thanks to the cryptocurrency craze, as mining for cryptocoins requires enormous amounts of computing power. 

The funny thing about Bitcoin mining is, if 90% of the miners turned off their rigs, Bitcoin would still work and we'd use a shit load less power.

But it's a constant battle to get as many nodes as possible to prevent 51% attack on the network and because Bitcoin still has value more people want to mine the fuck out of it. And as a reaction, the algo just turns up the difficulty to maintain the magical 10 minute transaction time. Cough, cough!

Now contrast that to Steemit where we have around 300 witnesses, and shit all over the transaction throughput of Bitcoin.

But the world doesn't know it yet.

And therefore we don't have article written about us saying how Steemit is environmentally friendly and uses a lot less computing power than Bitcoin to achieve the same result.

How Steemit is Helping the Search for Alien Life

Yes, maybe one day we'll see news articles written about the positive impact Steemit has and not the negative impact of those legacy coins.

In fact, I'll be glad when Bitcoin dies (but before it does please let's establish another trading pair so I don't lose all my money)

And to those people in the SETI project, why don't you just create a SETI coin that has the smarts to process radio-wave data during the mining process. 

Then you can get access to as many GPU cards as you like.

Image sourced from Unsplash