The good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. -- Andrew S. Tanenbaum

you asume that we burn through both ressources at equal speed. (ok, we don't reduce either but if we count 'we use it' i am pretty sure we would need more carbon-based material then we use silicon-based material)

Oh what a genius you are! You just solved the Problem!

by this time, we will have run out of carbon too..

congratulations! you did not understand opensource or FOSS

Well.. Bitcoin-Mining could be done without GPU-Support (but you wouldn't want to do it, since everyone else does it faster/more energy-efficient) you wouldn't make profit by mining, but you could "use" it still like regular money. Bitcoint too could be made to work for everyday use. If anyone would like to spend real money/effort on it. But why should anyone?

besides from trolling around (and i mean both of you for this one) there are good reasons for both approaches. the big problem i see is what evolves from the approaches on *nix we have these nice litle directory /etc and the config files per user in /home shurely the software should be designed this way you cant break it by configuration but... the most software i use IS designed this way and to the speed.. lets just say that users who need to run a desktop-environment which uses 3D would have worse things to complain about than some cycles lost because of the config on the other hand we have windows and his huge registry, saying that you should do everything and the user doesnt have to worry about this mess is nice.. but doesnt help, we all know sometimes you just HAVE to. this isnt good design this is horribly and by the way there is a reason why microsoft createt something equal to the user-home in the last years with much place for config files... i dont think eaven microsoft will still continue to call his registry perfect