I posted this on one of Alex Ms vids, and as a lot of people are talking about what I would encapsulate as a trend toward debasing science akin to turning a house of prayer into a casino, I thought I would add it to the main page:

We are losing our way - RE: Bitcoin mining mentioned at 21:10. For those (like me) who were confused in regards to what bitcoin mining is, or how you can mine something that is intangible and how a power plant can be used for it, I found a couple of articles that were incapable of explaining anything well. I will try my best to explain my understanding (which is incomplete) here.

Bitcoin uses very large numbers of 64 digits in length with each digit being from 0-15 (hexadecimal), and each one of these numbers uniquely identifies a bitcoin transaction. These numbers are generated by a hashing algorithm. My experience with hashing algorithms is for obfuscating passwords, and what it does is take your password in its plain text form, and generate (ecrypt) into a code which is always the same for the same password, but uninteligible, and very difficult to unencode (or decrypt) back in to your password. the encryption process is quick, the decryption process is very slow hard and involves lots of trial and error and as the hacker does not know what your password is before hand, they need to use clever methods to determine if they have succeeded or a huge amount of computer power (brute force).

Bitcoin mining is the process of decryption, and uses a HUGE amount of computer power (because clever is too hard), which uses a HUGE amount of electricity. I may be wrong, but I suspect that generating the numbers just involves adding one to them consecutively, and I suspect that each bitcoin miner is generating many of the same numbers. The computers are not doing anything clever or useful, but if they can add one more quickly, then they can generate more numbers which increases the chance of winning a bitcoin. Bitcoin use this as a method of verification for security which is unnecessarily wasteful.

This is a most fatuous exercise to earn money, a more stupid, wasteful, energy consuming, lazy use for computer power could only be compared with the current use for Artificial Intelligence (AI) to generate bad poems art and pornography, an exercise that humans can do better, and there is an unemployment problem. All we need now is AI that can appreciate the bad poems, art and pornography to completely obfuscate our reason to be here...

https://theduran.locals.com/post/7553620/russia-brings-massive-law-claim-for-frozen-assets-return-eu-advised-to-settle-huliaipole-captured?cid=8685665