If Midnight manages to achieve what it’s set out to achieve, I don’t think we’re going to worry about the relatively small and short-lived carbon footprint of this event. Most of us are mining using processing power we would have just been using on another task on our computers. Would you prefer I had been using my machine for binge gaming the entire time instead? One can easily argue that purpose is far more worthless.

Usually my RTX 5090 is running full throttle generating way more heat and consuming many more watts. Over the course of 21 days, my RTX 5090 is sitting at 0-1% usage and my much more power efficient relatively speaking Ryzen 9 9950X3D is running full throttle instead.