Forget Bitcoin. Only Your Time Has Real Value.

Sitting on the cold tiles of the living room floor, it sucked in air and blew it over blinking circuit boards. The noise was considerable, like a vacuum cleaner constantly running. Like a jet engine, the machine sucked in air at one end and blew it out the other, all in service of keeping those circuit boards cool while they crunched near unimaginable numbers and turned nothing into something.

“Does it sound like that all the time?” my wife asked.

“All the time,” I answered.

We had to make money somehow. And back in the heady days of 2017, as bitcoin climbed to a then-unheard-of peak of $20,000, we decided to get in on the bubble before it popped. I had bought some bitcoin earlier in the year by accident, looking for a way to make untraceable online transactions (don’t ask). In the few days that I was holding it, I found that the value was noticeably increasing.

So I bought more. Before long, my money had grown like mushrooms in the rain. So I dived into the forums, learning arcane terms such as HODL and blockchain and fungible. It still didn’t make a lot of sense. Everyone was calling it the currency of the future, or digital gold, but whether it was a currency or a store of value or investment seemed to vary according to who you asked.

It’s made-up money. Then again, as bitcoin boosters love to point out, all money is made up. The only difference is, bitcoin wasn’t made up by a state government. It was invented by a man who doesn’t exist.

I found out how bitcoin is made. Or mined, to use the correct terminology. Powerful computers solving math problems to access portions of the 21 million bitcoins that are all that will ever exist. All recorded for anyone to see on the unalterable blockchain. I didn’t get it then, and I don’t really get it now. But if I could put a computer to work producing something that people would pay real cash for, I was sold.

So I bought this machine. An S9 Antminer, capable of generating value out of thin air. Not a lot of value, mind you. Even as the price of bitcoin kept climbing, my machine, christened Anton, could only produce a few pennies per day. In order to make anything, we needed to keep it running 24 hours a day.

So that’s what we did. I built a soundproof box and vented it to the outside of our one-bedroom apartment and kept my magical machine running in the living room night and day. Every so often, I would take the bitcoin it generated and sell it on an exchange for a little bit of money to keep us going.

At the time, we were living in Antibes, the gorgeous sun-soaked town on France’s Mediterranean coast, and we needed every penny we could get. Anton was never going to make enough to support us. But along with a few other projects we had going, he helped keep our heads above the dazzling blue water.

Source: https://medium.com/illumination-curated/forget-bitcoin-only-your-time-has-real-value-34313f796172?source=rss——-8—————–cryptocurrency