Bitcoin = Death Processors

What we call money is largely just cached murder. Bitcoin takes this lethal abstraction into direct competition with our own lives… by creating a makework network that sinks resources and electricity into pushing computers to their limits—for no actual purpose.

bitcoin Is Makeworky Unmoney

bitcoin is not exactly money. It’s a potentially valuable abstraction of computational ‘work’ that ‘earns’ bitcoin value. But what is bitcoin value and what is the nature of the work? The answers are bizarre because they are nonsensical.

bitcoin value is an abstraction of participation in the history of the network and its transactions. ‘Work’ is a (largely) nonuseful recomputation of, first, the transaction history of the network — which has to be reprocessed each time there is a bitcoin transaction. Then, continual banging away at some useless math with added ‘weight factor’ that makes it arbitrarily difficult for computers to accomplish the generation of a new record-set over time.

The bitcoin algorithms adjust this factor in order to require enough ersatz work so that the heartbeat of the system pulses (produces a block) approximately every ten minutes… and they scale the computational complexity accordingly via input from bitcoin’s own daily developmental activity.

By crossing an invented computational abyss, millions of computers and other machines, many of which have been secretly compromised by hacks, are working full tilt, around the clock… to simply generate a deeper abyss requiring ever-more powerful and numerous computers to cross. And this generates ‘blocks’ in an economy of numbers in machines. These numbers are not exactly money, and their actual value is more complex than cash. And the machines must be serviced, cooled, attended and backed-up, as must the results of their nearly useless hyperactivity.

Most participants are using machines specially designed to resolve these invented computational targets, and as we make faster computers to do this, the network amplifies the difficulty to throttle the pulse.