Is Bitcoin screwing over science?

"Bitcoin Fever Is Screwing Over Alien Hunters" or so it's claimed by Popular Mechanics.

Let's read what the BBC and Popular Mechanics has to say about the effect of Cryptomining has on science and disruptive research platforms like BOINC.

The global run on GPUs to mine cryptocurrency is a thorn in the side of science.

Add alien hunters and scientists studying the origins of the universe to the list of people getting frustrated with the cryptocurrency trend.

We'd like to use the latest GPUs... and we can't get 'em," Dan Werthimer, chief SETI scientist of UC Berkeley, tells the BBC.
Demand for GPUs has soared recently thanks to crypto-currency mining.
"That's limiting our search for extra-terrestrials, to try to answer the question, 'Are we alone? Is there anybody out there?',"

"We want to look at as many frequency channels as we possibly can because we don't know what frequency ET will be broadcasting on and we want to look for lots of different signal types.Is it AM or FM? What communication are they using? That takes a lot of computing power."

Werthimer's team at Berkeley currently has around 100 GPUs, and the Berkeley SETI Research Center was hoping to give the Green Bank, as well as the Project Phoenix at Parkes, Australia, an expansion. "We've got the money, we've contacted the vendors, and they say, 'We just don't have them,'" he says."

Now my take on this is that we may have some short-term supply related problems! But going off a purely unscientific hunch here... I think that the long-term effect of crypto mining will benefit GPU's and research associated with using GPU's, I think that the money made by GPU manufacturers during this boom will lead to better, more reliable GPU's.
That in time well see a dedicated low-cost crypto mining platform instead of GPU's.

So short term we may see some problems but in the long term, I think that crypto mining could have a knock-on effect of improving GPUs and distributive research. This is just a guess, it could all go wrong and we miss a warning from ET and get nuked by a giant Planet Killer...

Let me know what do you guys think? Will the GPU drought continue indefinitely? Or will something new come on the market?

BBC Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-43056744