Buried within the complex ways the currency exchanges and elites use the ups and downs of the crypto market to expand their riches is what I feel is the true value of the most popular currencies, the ability to create their coins by “mining.”
I like to ask an AI assistant to help me find certain types of information. I will not get into why I use Bing to do my super searches, but it might have something to do with how I love and trust Bill Gates so much. At least I’m not asking Gemini.
When I was researching for this article I asked Bing if Ethereum was mined much like Bitcoin. I am told that I am free to use AI-generated responses without regards for copyright, a tradeoff, I guess, for how they steal from visual and written artists all the time. The answer was, “In PoW, miners use powerful computers, often equipped with graphics processing units (GPUs), to solve cryptographic puzzles. The first miner to solve the puzzle gets to add a new block to the blockchain and is rewarded with ETH.”
How do you make money from mining Bitcoin? This question gets this result: “Making money from Bitcoin mining involves a process where miners use powerful computers to solve complex mathematical problems that validate transactions on the Bitcoin network.” That cannot be entirely true. At face value that answer is supposed to make me believe that the ‘powerful computers’ whose processing power I grant the use of 24-7 is used just to validate a simple transaction? That’s some lawyer half-truth to say miners are allowing Bitcoin and Ethereum to do whatever they want with their computer power.
That being said, let me disclose to you what I feel Bitcoin and all this ‘mining’ has been doing this whole time—crunch zeros and ones to mine all of our data to learn how to sell to and manipulate us. This computational power has always been essential to create the coins.
“My truth” is that the cryptocurrencies are more about data mining or ‘puzzle solving’ than it is about decentralized currency and anonymous transactions. I feel they are most likely selling the computational power of their network of servers to the highest bidder.
We are living in the age where we have to just about give away every drip of information about ourselves if we want to use any social media platforms and apps. We grant the same companies access to our microphones and video cameras. This metadata has tremendous value to these companies. They, in turn, use this information for themselves as well as sell the information to the highest bidder. What good is all that metadata without powerful computers and artificial intelligence to sift through all that information?
What these cryptocurrencies actually do with the computer processing power they have at their disposal is anybody’s guess. I speculate that they sell this processing power to people for companies to use to mine through our data. Why purchase multi-million dollar supercomputers when you can rent the power of many. If you have a powerful enough computer and all the information, you can see strange patterns and correlations that humans can’t. It could be, for some reason, that people whose favorite dogs are labradoodles might eat at Applebee’s more often than normal people. A ridiculous and goofy correlation, but so are Applebee’s and labradoodles, so it could be true.
On social media platforms we give these companies access to our cameras and microphones. A powerful enough computer would be able to look at every facial expression and eye movement and pair it with our reactions to certain content. They hear every laugh and see every smile. This could be used to train artificial intelligence to read human emotions even better than humans one day.
Computer processing power is advancing by leaps and bounds. Quantum computers are the new thing. They process information in a truly “non-binary” way. They can look at many different possibilities at one time to solve problems faster, but they are extremely expensive and right now require subzero temperatures to operate. What happens when semiconductors get cheaper or they find or invent some semiconductors that operate at higher temperatures? Then they will become the preferred vehicle for processing information.
When this happens the processing power of all those binary servers will lose its value, which will lead to the collapse of the value of cryptocurrencies. The reality of their eventual collapse is well known and talked about among the people who invest in and trade it. Those same people might want to pay attention to my speculation if they want to try to predict when this eventual crash might occur.
Other, more educated scholars have already speculated that the future of the blockchain will become the mechanism of a worldwide single currency under some sort of United Nations or multi-country control. With the exponential growth of computational power, they will not need your equipment to be tied to their platform to process all their data mining efforts.
Bitcoin will eventually lose a lot of its value. The blockchain that runs it will remain, for the sole reason that it is such a revolutionary way to track and record transactions. However, I doubt when it comes under eventual federal control the ledger will remain public. It might be wise to think about coin mining and data processing when people assess if they want to get into crypto. In the meantime, if you own a labradoodle and are getting a lot of Applebee’s advertisements on your devices, you know why.
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