Bitcoin Miner

Did you know the NerdNOS Metal Edition makes the perfect Bitcoin price ticker for your desk?

Did you know the NerdNOS Metal Edition makes the perfect Bitcoin price ticker for your desk?

If (or when) Bitcoin is no longer a thing, ASICs [Application-specific integrated circuits] cannot be put to work to find cures for cancer or calculate future weather conditions on Mars. ASICs can only mine Bitcoin. When they’re burned out, usually after 18 months or so, they’re scrapped. For every 100 ASIC units coming off the factory conveyor belt today, only three will go on to guess the number correctly. Retired ASICs create around 37,000 tonnes of burned-out electronic waste every year; more than the Netherlands produces. For every one transaction entered on the Bitcoin blockchain today, the equivalent of two iPhones worth of e-waste was produced. And most of this burned-out kit is being shipped illegally to its final resting place in South Asia or Africa. The waste machines are often contaminated with so-called forever chemicals such as polyfluoroalkyl substances. Their use as a non-conductive coolant fluid is popular among Bitcoin miners. When improperly disposed of though, cancer rates and thyroid disease rocket. The chemicals’ persistence also causes environmental problems – forever.

This much is clear. CBS is being “murdered,” as Scott Pelley calls what’s happening, not because of economics but because of politics. Economically, “60 Minutes” is a gold mine. Politically, Trump thinks it’s dangerous as hell because it tells the truth about him and his regime, and wants it killed. It’s important to see all this as a systematic effort by Trump to silence the truth about what he’s doing to America. Trump’s increasingly corruption — rife with crony capitalism, corporate welfare, and payoffs to the powerful — is producing an increasingly corrupt economy in which everything depends on bribes and personal deals made by the biggest Republican loyalists and grifters, oligarchs and plutocrats, billionaires and multibillionaires, and monopolists. When political and economic deal-making become personal transactions — when greed and payoffs replace trust — what happens? Authoritarianism replaces democracy. And an economy collapses, as it did at the end of America’s first Gilded Age, in the Great Crash of 1929, leading to the Great Depression. One day we will look back on the murder of “60 Minutes” as one of the travesties of Trump’s despicable reign. In the meantime, thank you Scott Pelley for telling the truth. Thank you, former “60 Minutes” producers, correspondents, and staff, for telling the truth. And now, what do we do in the interest of the truth? We boycott CBS.