When people will do anything to make money, no matter how unproductive, like using money to make money from money for the masterbatory purpose of making even more money, we’ve really disappeared down the behavioral sink.
Michael Lewis once described the blowback he received from Wall Street over “Flash Boys.” The book describes men who exploit computers and super-fast internet connections (high frequency traders, HFT) to make millions off stock trades. It works not unlike the way The Sting‘s Henry Gondorff and Johnny Hooker used delay the delay of “the wire” to con Doyle Lonnegan. They cheat.
Lewis explained that “anyone in an established industry who stands up and says ‘The way things are being done here is totally insane; here is why it is insane; and here is a better way to do them’ is bound to incur the wrath of established insiders, who now stand accused of creating the insanity.”
Like bitcoin mining. US News explains it for those interested. Frankly, it’s not worth my time. But in East Tennessee about 40 miles north, it’s become an immediate nuisance (Washington Post):
LIMESTONE, Tenn. — It started as a low hum one day last spring. Then it got louder, and soon some residents said the noise was like a jet engine idling on a nearby tarmac.
The unincorporated clutch of homes and churches at the base of the Appalachian Mountains offers expansive vistas of lush farmland, thick woods and towering ridges in all directions. Neighbors know one another. Most residents have family bonds spanning generations or moved to this tranquil patch to escape city noise.
Instead, the noise came to them in April last year when the Tennessee-based firm Red Dog Technologies opened a plant in Limestone to mine (or create) new bitcoin, the original and still-largest cryptocurrency.
The process relies on massive computers performing complex calculations — all while kept at a constant temperature by equally massive cooling fans — and that can get noisy.
The Limestone mine operates day and night, growing louder at night and on weekends when bitcoin’s electricity-hungry computers can take advantage of down time and lower prices on the electricity grid and ramp up their algorithmic-solving power.
And the social benefit is what? Keeping neighbors awake at night? Limestone has only buyer’s remorse. The county has sued Red Dog.
Kent Harris, a Washington County commissioner, looks back on his vote authorizing the Limestone crypto mining operation and shakes his head.
“It looks like a German POW camp,” Harris said of the bitcoin mine, which is surrounded by barriers, cameras and fencing topped with razor wire.
Forget the sounds of birds chirping and creeks (branches) babbling that people in rural areas cherish. There’s funny money to be made. In Cherokee County, N.C. in an abandoned factory in Marble about 80 miles east, there’s another bitcoing mining operation:
Phoebe Thompson, a Bowdoin College environmental and oceanic sciencesgraduate, moved to the adjacent town of Murphy two years ago. Her family founded the publication Bird Watcher’s Digest and are active environmentally. She laments the damage to the area’s wildlife and peaceful character.
“I grew up where I heard birds, insects, frogs; the quiet here was a huge draw for me,” Thompson said. She said the quiet has been smothered by the whir of the mine and created an “ecological dead zone” that disorients wildlife.
[…]
“The mine operator said this mine was in the middle of nowhere, but to us, it is not the middle of nowhere; it is our home,” Harris said.
Tough. You snooze (or don’t snooze), you lose.
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