During the All-Star break I had some much-needed downtime to set up my new Bitcoin-mining enterprise. In case you forgot all the details from the last time I was talking about it, basically what happened is that Buddy (my twelve-foot-tall 3D-printed purple plastic naked sentient statue of Buddy Hield) built a hyper-advanced video card for my computer out of spare parts. Since I wasn’t nearly using it to its fullest just by making highlight videos and playing video games (Factorio doesn’t exactly need a high-end GPU to push its ugly-ass pixels), I decided to harness the computing power of this unfathomable circuitry in order to mine Bitcoin.
Bitcoin mining has gotten harder in the past few months, and I’m not just talking about the barrier to entry. I’m talking about the fact that, with each new coin mined, the amount of work needed for the next coin gets larger. That’s why solo miners like myself are pretty much out of the picture. There’s no way one person could have enough computational power at their disposal to reasonably hope to compete with the mining conglomerates and their huge facilities of Bitcoin-mining equipment.
However, with Buddy’s help, I think I’m turning that paradigm on its head. This thing churns through the mining algorithms like they’re nothing. When I first got the software set up and flipped the switch, I walked away for fifteen minutes to cram some Hot Pockets into my mouth. When I came back, I already had one twentieth of a Bitcoin. That’s, like, $150 right there just for running some software on my computer. When I saw how well the whole system worked, I high-fived Buddy and told him he was awesome. He liked that. I almost wanted to reward him with another trip to the zoo so he could pet the goats again, but then I remembered how last time we went to the zoo, he ended up killing five people in a series of bizarre executions. So I didn’t.
Now I’m thinking, the whole integrity of the Bitcoin system is predicated on the fact that no single party controls more than 50% of the blockchain. Theoretically, if an entity were to possess 50% of the computational power on the network, they would have the authority to overwrite entries in the blockchain ledger. They could move every Bitcoin in the world into their own wallet and nobody would be able to stop them because nobody would be able to force them to change the ledger back.
I wonder if Buddy could whip up a hundred more of his extremely high-powered GPU’s for me?