For Bitcoin, it was the man, the myth, the legend – Satoshi Nakamoto. Although there’s no clear information about the whereabouts of BTC’s mysterious daddy (or mammy – ed), his idea lives on to this day thanks to his spiritual offsprings, who help the new economic system chug along on its ambitious quest of dethroning fiat.
Yes indeed, ordinary people are contributing to the Bitcoin network daily, and they walk among us. Mike from accounting, your ex-schoolmate Derek, and that neighbor across the road whose roof is immune to snow in the winter. They have one common thing – they are miners!
They don’t need a pickaxe, a hardcap, or to do any serious physical activity. As we live in the digital age, mining means adding transactions to a newly created block and propagating it to the network. Why would anyone want to do that? Well, there’s a lucrative reward for someone who can solve a mathematical puzzle – the transaction fees included in that block and a fixed reward.
I’m not going to explain how the process works in detail because lots of more knowledgeable people can make you yawn instead of me. But what I will do in this blog post, is highlight some of the more bizarre and fascinating stories that revolve around this peculiar activity!
Theoretically You Can Mine On a Piece of Paper
Usually, Bitcoin mining is a race, where participants act like seagulls from Nemo, trying to claim the next block. No, actually it is a math race between beefy computers.
The human BTC hunters are stacking up some graphic cards to maximize the hashrate, build a big ol’ rig in the basement, and the only real computation they do relates to electricity bills this endeavor would result in. Well, that’s the old, ‘by the book’ method that may or may not yield actual benefits. But there’s another way created for extremely manly men, those who want to ‘mine Bitcoin’… manually.
If you’re as smart as Ken Shirriff, it is actually possible to decipher the SHA-256 algorithm using your raw brainpower. This math whizz showed us how it’s done in one of his videos.
Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper
‘Not surprisingly, this is a thoroughly impractical way to mine. One round of the algorithm takes 16 minutes, 45 seconds which works out to a hash rate of 0.67 hashes per day.’
This humble madman did his work without an eraser on that pencil, solving it like sudoku. There’s a new Shirrif in town, kiddos.
Kind advice to math teachers that might lurk here – theoretically you can mine bitcoin using students. You might need to get a bunch of universities on this assignment to be competitive, and even then, 5 GPUs in Derek’s basement will easily beat the brightest minds to the punch.
But still, as Jesse Pinkman once said, yeah science!
BTC To The Moon, Literally
Mining is not always about the money, it’s about sending the message!
‘We can do it this way, and there’s nothing that can stop us’ mentality is very prevalent in the game of crypto one-upmanship. You think doing computations by hand is cool? Ha!
Well, someone in the US space program said ‘hold my beer’ and hooked up a 1960s Apollo Guidance Computer to do its magic.
Originally, this booping machine was created to guide a US rocket to the moon, and it was fit for the purpose, passing all the necessary math tests. If it took NASA to the moon, surely it would manage to replicate the success with Bitcoin too? Nope.
The 16-bit computer was too slow to successfully mine a Bitcoin block, and it would take about a million times the age of the universe to successfully solve the puzzle. Who needs those rewards though, not many people can claim that they did anything close to that.
It was worth the try to realize how far we have come technology-wise.
Miners In The Place of Worship?
We go from the Moon to Iran, where people are using mosques to mine.
Mosques? Yes, exactly. In case you didn’t know, places of worship have free energy, so Iranians added 2+2 and have set up Bitcoin miners inside. Estimations from the 2019 article claimed that a mosque could produce around $260,000 USD a year. That’s a lot of money, especially for Iran!
Tavanir, the energy grid corporation, did not take kindly to this initiative and issued a warning to illegal bitcoin mining operations. By Tavanir’s calculations, illicit facilities increased two months of power consumption by more than 7%.
The corporation threatened to cut off the supply and find those who will ignore their request.
This mining rig in a mosque went viral, as this tweet seemed to be a direct statement of dissent against the Tavanir injunction to shut down. Follow me on Twitter, by the way!
Iran is low key a hot hub for efficient crypto mining, as many places worldwide will charge between $0.10-0.30 per kilowatt-hour, but in Iran prices are reportedly as low as $0.006 per KWh. I’m not telling you to move there and set up your own rig, but still.
‘Debt is haram, Bitcoin is halal.’
American Hustle Culture Stems From The Dorms
Being a student is certainly an experience, especially if you find yourself in the US of A.
You go into crippling debt to eat ramen and share a crammed space with hungry and horny peers, and while that might sound like music to your ears, that’s hardly a luxury life. Some students look for a way to get an extra buck!
There is this dormitory desperado named Blake Kaufman that has won the S9 miner in a conference raffle. He immediately thought about how he could put that baby to work and ran to the dad’s office, to test it out. The boy was taken aback by the sheer loudness and heat that S9 produced, but during his initial test he had a lightbulb moment.
His university provides free electricity, so he could mine Bitcoin from a dorm. The only problem is, the humm of the miner was too loud.
$5 investment in a mini fridge, and after 2 hours of drilling, the lad had a Bitcoin mining cooler box that was as loud as an air conditioning unit. Did he break any rules by siphoning dorm energy in this fashion? Not really.
‘I looked up all the rules and it didn’t say anywhere you couldn’t mine a Bitcoin or use a Bitcoin miner. So if they say you can’t do this, I’d be like, okay, you didn’t say I couldn’t.’
As they say, there’s a story behind every warning sign. Now the young hustler is generating roughly 0.000001 BTC or “about a dollar a day” in fiat-money terms, eating away 900 watts an hour. Not the worst way to offset a $30,000-a-year tuition and ‘stick it to the man’!
Hold Your Mining Rigs, Salvador Has a Volcano!
Pencil and paper, cooler fridge, a rusty computer from the fifties… that’s all really cute.
But what happens when a country with abundant natural resources, like El Salvador, enters the frame? I’ve read that they are planning to construct a renewable power generation park and unleash 241 Megawatt “Volcano Energy” to fuel the growth of Bitcoin mining.
That sounds like rock
and roll to me.
“This project is a transformative journey that will establish one of the world’s largest Bitcoin mining farms. Located in the El Shiste hamlet, within the municipality of Metapán, Santa Ana, this chosen site boasts exceptional solar and wind energy yields in the country.” – says the press release.
The government of El Salvador assumes a pivotal role in the orchestration of this initiative, undertaking the crucial tasks of planning and execution. With a grand total commitment of $1 billion, the project embarked on its journey with an initial investment of $250 million, courtesy of influential leaders within the industry.
This ambitious endeavour aims to merge the forces of innovation and sustainability, and if this works as expected, more countries with a similar hand of cards can join the mining game.
For Dessert We Have CrypTOMATOES and EtheRUM
Miners tend to think outside of the box and break some rules to get to the next block.
But there’s another way to go about mining – use heat, the mining byproduct, not only to warm up your residence, but to create something in addition to BTC. How about some food? MM, food…
In 2018 Kamil Brejcha shared that he used excessive mining heat to grow ‘cryptomatoes’ in a greenhouse! Apparently, cryptocurrencies and agriculture go together like peanut butter and jelly.
One person asked Brejcha about growing cannabis plants with the excess mining heat.
“Unfortunately, because of local strict rules, we were unable to obtain a license for medical marijuana growing so we had to choose tomatoes and other vegetables instead,” Brejcha added.
It’s a shame these cute tomatoes could have never seen the light of day, but everything happens for a reason. While making a crypto cannabis farm may be illegal in your area, pot-friendly places might want to seriously explore that option. Even if not, there’s always the alcohol route.
Because In 2017 Avi Aisenberg found a smart application of mining in the spirits industry, by using excessive heat to warm his rum barrels. Heating and cooling of rum barrels imitates the passing of seasons, and gives Avi the license to call his drink EtherRum.
One thing is for sure, creativity is intelligence having fun, and today we have once again proved that Bitcoin attracts free thinkers and free spirits.
If you want to continue finding out something new, you might check out my blog. Let me know if you would be interested in part two, the continuation of this story. There a lot of other peculiar ways to mine crypto!