I've got a son preparing for college. He's on his way to getting his first job, driver's license, and has ambitions of growing facial hair beyond a fuzzy, patchy stubble. One child into that magical journey of parenthood and we decided repeating the trials and tribulations wasn't our thing.
Then, a year ago, my wife had these shipped to our house:
They're voraciously hungry. They whine incessantly. And sometimes, just sometimes, they wake us at night with their crying.
Texas it turns out isn't the best place for mining. So damn hot in the summers. In our former house, our children had a room for themselves. (She may have assigned cuter network names but all I know them by is their local IP and model numbers. Such a terrible parent.) Our new house though, we've had to put the miners in the garage and get creative about cooling.
We used to live in a city with a Municipal Power company. This mostly meant we were captive customers stuck paying for their bloated and unnecessary infrastructure and their failed attempts to play big shot on the open market. The citizen "owners" were often assured they were getting great rates and rarely allowed to voice their opinion.
Since moving however we've found the open electricity market in Texas, unlike the weather, can be very friendly for miners. (I found a plan which not only was 100% wind generated but charged fractions of a penny on all KWH past 1000 in your billing cycle. My only question was "where do I sign?")
Cryptocurrency mining is my wife's hobby. I'm mostly just along for the ride and to hit the reset button every so often (a feature glaringly absent for our biological child). I still can't fully explain the entire hashing, public ledger, mining process with 100% accuracy. What I do know though is cryptocurrency and decentralized, distributed computing is the future.
So, the little screaming toasters have grown on me - enough that I've used them for inspiration for my upcoming novel. To be honest, I haven't seen much about cryptocurrency in science fiction which I find odd. I'd be curious if anyone could point me toward any fiction which includes the concept.
Okay, off to check the temperature in their crib!