8 years ago, Wired destroyed 13 Bitcoins "to make a point"

Hi HODLers,

Today I am going to share a cool and kind of cynical story. Unfortunately, the internet records everything and despite the fact that most people change opinion about many subjects as it is the way the Human being is wired; internet reminds us who used to think differently.

Think about societal issues such as same-sex mariage for example. Obama when he was running for his 1st term was not supporting this issue as most Americans weren't either at the time.

Well, in this article published on October, 5th 2013; Wired which is usually a pro-technology source of information made a not so optimistic article about Bitcoin. Here is the full article if you have time to check it out.

I selected the conclusion for you:

But in the end, the answer was obvious. The world's most popular digital currency really is nothing more than an abstraction. So we're destroying the private key used by our Bitcon wallet. That leaves our growing pile of Bitcoin lucre locked away in a digital vault for all eternity – or at least until someone cracks the SHA-256 encryption that secures it.

I am sure they would like these 13 Bitcoin back (worth $750k today). Also, they did not even continue this experience for long. They were mining 2 BTC a day so just under a week. I guess they wished they had let this little box in the corner of their office...

I am 100% sure that the writer is now a fervent Bitcoin advocate and as many in his time were dismissing the inovation; I do not blame him.

In their experiment they got a small box mining righ from Butterfly Labs.

This small black box, which looks like a beefed-up Roku and burns as much energy as a light bulb, was built to do one thing: run hashing algorithms with the hope of winning Bitcoin's cryptographic lottery.

I also realized how hard and how secured the network became through the time it took to mine BTC with an ordinary PC:

2013: 13 hours
214: 14 days
2021: 10 years

Some would say it is now a rich people's game and they might be right but it also secures the network as so much capital would be needed to be deployed to try to break the network.

In the article, McMillan (the writer) complained that it had become about 10 million times harder to win the Bitcoin mining “lottery” since 2009.

Wanna know what is funny?

If they did not have destroyed their key. They might have been able to not spam me to subscribe to get a $5 subscription :D

That's all for today.

Stay safe out there and keep grinding,