Some philosophers call garbage “the main product of human civilization”.
The enormous amount of garbage produced by our civilization during the industrial era has a tremendous value for archaeologists. In the primitive garbage heaps, an archaeologist can discover a coherent set of artifacts that reveal the face of human culture a million years ago. And if you mentally step a million years ahead, when human civilization (let's say) disappears, some interstellar archaeologist will, first of all, look for garbage dumps.
Garbage is the true message of civilization. As a philosophical joke, it was reported that an ideal civilization should be considered one that systematically concentrated all efforts on the production of garbage.
This was a joke in the 70s. Any resident of a developed country saw that the most useful and increasingly high-quality consumer items were being produced, and garbage was, well, just garbage. Any scientist could say: advanced waste production is, in a sense, the macro-level of the negentropic principle. A self-organizing system (whether it is a bacterium or humanity) is forced to expend energy on its orderliness and, therefore, according to the laws of thermodynamics, to throw out entropy (thermal waste) into the environment.
There is a very good science fiction novel called Edem by Stanislaw Lem. The book describes a factory for the production of entropy. This factory first produces some complex artifacts from raw materials, and then the same products are crushed, melted, and sent to the entrance, as raw materials. This cycle is de facto a factory for converting energy into entropy.
The book is fiction. But bitcoin mining is a reality. Just like the factory from Eden but digital. That factory was producing a meaningless tangible product, and the mining farm is producing a meaningless digital product. Electricity is dissipated through a computer in the form of heat when calculating new digital codes (coins) that are devoid of practical utility. This is an exemplary segment of a civilization that has entered the “digital era”.
A trip called "through thorns to the stars." Through the jungle of the formation of the credit and financial market and currency exchanges, through the computer digitization of money. Through the ubiquitous transition to fiat money. Through hedge funds, and the futures market, where not goods, and not money, are traded, but some differences between two numbers that do not reflect anything material. Huge volumes of meaningless numbers are pumped through these virtual exchanges, and the only tangible result is the energy that is dissipated by the coolers of billions of computers that produce thermal waste.
But Bitcoin is beautiful in its way. This is a step of humanity towards the way to the ideal of information-garbage civilization. A logical step after futures contracts, as the dominant commodity. After trading in greenhouse gas emissions (an illusion taken from the pseudoscience of "global warming"). After the degradation of electronic media to the state of advertising garbage pumps (in economics, politics, law, and art). After the fetishization of the "Internet of Things" (as the principle of stuffing computer-network modules into every household item, without any meaning but just following the fashion trend cobbled together by garbage media). And after the epidemic of business on copywriting, on spam, on the fight for morality on social networks, and the compulsion to use digital technology to spy on each other.
Bitcoin asserts itself as the most honest ideal-junk value of the digital world. When mining, you get a coin for the fact that you consume electricity and dissipate heat from the cooler into world space. Payment for the destruction of surplus energy goods. This is an advanced technology compared to the burning of surplus grain in the marketing crisis of agricultural products at the dawn of global capitalism. The chain of the destruction of goods to justify the production of goods is reduced to the shortest scheme.
Energy is produced - energy is sold - energy is pointlessly splashed out.
Basically, the best option is to mine bitcoins right at the power plant. Why transfer energy through wires to the consumer, if you can dissipate it immediately on the spot?
After several states and large financial players have joined the promotion of the paranoid idea of ??bitcoin, there is nowhere to fall. You can add some more minor tuning (for example, bank loans in bitcoins), but the bottom has been reached.
In 1969, the financier Milton Friedman proposed throwing money (paper at that time) from a helicopter - so that people would spend more. Cryptocurrency is more powerful than helicopter money.
In 1969 the human civilization reached the Moon and was preparing to explore distant planets. Then there were hopes for scientific and technological revolution and a rapidly wonderful future.
And now (after half a century) human civilization is engaged in ... well, you can see for yourself in what..
Our species will enter the next economic era (if it will enter at all) only after the entire colossal and senseless pyramid of digital finance has been reset. That pyramid, which now lies in the material-production sector, creating parasitic distribution costs, many times higher than all imaginable material costs.
“Beyond the horizon lies the secret of a new beginning” - Waterworld
