A little slice of life for a town that has cryptocurrency miners moving in:
It’s midnight, and a jet-like roar is rumbling up the slopes of Poor House Mountain. Except there are no planes overhead, and the nearest commercial airport is 80 miles away.
The sound is coming from a cluster of sheds at the base of the mountain housing a cryptocurrency data center, operated by the San Francisco-based firm PrimeBlock. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, powerful computers perform the complex computations needed to “mine,” or create, digital currencies. And those noise-generating computers are kept cool by huge fans.
“It’s like living on top of Niagara Falls,” said Mike Lugiewicz, whose home lies less than 100 yards from the mine.
“When it’s at its worst, it’s like sitting on the tarmac with a jet engine in front of you. But the jet never leaves. The jet never takes off. It’s just annoying. It’s just constant annoyance,” he said. [WaPo]
While wandering around the house this morning, it occurred to me to consider this term, mining, and how it functions in this context. Let me illustrate:
Image: Our State
Yes, that’s Murphy, NC, site of the cryptocurrency mine mentioned in the WaPo article. Outside of the tan-ish river flowing through, it qualifies for the adjective bucolic, at least in terms of appearance.
And then here’s an iron ore mine near Virginia, MN:
Image: International Mining
Having been through the area and visited the museum, the name of which escapes me, I can state that it actually looks much worse, even after cleanup.
Environmentalists have been diligent in their efforts to paint various mining techniques, as well as mining in general, as devastating to the environment, and not without good reason. But mines have a more nuanced history than Mines be bad! Beyond their use as casual and formal punishment (“Send him to the mines!”), mines have been the source, the beginning, of the effort to make life better through the extraction of the materials with which we create, primarily, metals, as well as coal. This foundational material is used in buildings, sheltering us from weather to wild animals. The environmentalists have had to fight an uphill battle against mining because there is a certain gritty romance to mines and mining and miners. Just ask a coal miner, and discover their pride in themselves and their families for going down into the mines to extract the ore used by the nation to build cities.
Cutting the rhetoric short, the use of mine in cryptocurrency is, to some extent, an example of the willingness of programmers to borrow terminology liberally from other industries to illustrate just what we’re doing, and, in an unknown percentage of cases, to borrow the goodwill accorded the sources of these metaphors by the general run of humanity.
And that will color our thinking, I suspect.
So when we talk about cryptocurrency mining, the operationality isn’t comparable to real mining, and while many advocates will argue, in some level of of vagueness, to the advantages of cryptocurrency, the case remains profoundly unproven. I suspect it’ll remain unproven, a solution inapposite to the problem they claim to solve. Because of this, I think mining should be disdained by cryptocurrency critics, and just called it coin-generation, which is value-neutral and far more accurate.
