This latest assault comes from researchers at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI) and other similar institutions, who complain that they are having trouble acquiring the resources they need to expand operations at their observatories.

The culprit? — a computer chip shortage caused by soaring demand among cryptocurrency miners.

"We'd like to use the latest GPUs [graphics processing units]… and we can't get 'em," SETI researcher Dan Werthimer told the BBC. "This is a new problem, it's only happened on orders we've been trying to make in the last couple of months."

Although Bitcoin and other coins that run on ASIC-compatible hashing algorithms can no longer be mined profitably with GPUs, many networks — most notably Ethereum — remain ASIC-resistant and are thus most effectively mined with the same chips that are used for gaming and other general-purpose applications.