alt Hacker NewsI would definitely call that an inefficiency. Heat is wasted energy that in theory could be turned into useful work. The electricity used that created that heat (that is, not including the electricity that "went to" the computations themselves) ended up serving no useful purpose.
It would be wonderful if we could capture that waste heat and give it a useful purpose, like heating homes, or perhaps even generating new electricity.
(And this is before getting into the fact that I believe mining cryptocurrency is a wasteful use of electricity in the first place.)
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> wasted energy that in theory could be turned into useful work
Even if turned into useful work, the end result of that work is still ultimately heat.
All computations eventually becomes heat. There is no computers that doesn't generate heat.
We can generate less heat per computation but it eventually cannot be avoided.
> The electricity used that created that heat (that is, not including the electricity that "went to" the computations themselves) ended up serving no useful purpose.
Computational results do not contain stored potential energy. There is no such thing as energy being "used up" doing computation such that it doesn't end as waste heat.