Bitcoin Poetry

YOSPOS is amazing

I mine slow

I work in the information technology, and a lot of the people we work with have a lot of regrets. I’ve asked our computer janitors to have their servers come out and help me mine. I mine so slow, time run backwards. As I kilohash along, your life runs in reverse. Scars becomes wounds become chances to exercise better judgement. I mine slow.

Like most people, I enjoy mining in the mornings, before it gets to hot. Unlike most people, I’ve been given heatstroke by a GPU.

I mine slow. Sometimes when I am mining, I think of those zen pools that absorb a bit bit bit of coin down a plastic tube before finally tipping over and dumping their contents into a wallet. Each hash I make is another bitcoin. I think, that pool would call me a pussy.

I mine slow. But I know where I have been.

Six months ago, I didn’t mine.

Six months ago, I had heartburn bad enough to keep me from sleeping through the night. Six months ago, I felt like I needed to go to sleep at 2pm. And six months ago, mining felt impossible.

I mine slow, and I have ways to go. But I can sleep. I feel alive. I can mine two, slow, bitcoins. Slowly.

Sometimes I get discouraged. I compare where I am to where other people are. But all that matters is where I am compared to where I was.

Once something good becomes something you are going to do for the rest of your life, the pace becomes less important. I know that my drip drip drip will amount to that deluge, eventually. Someday I will mine 3 bitcoins, slowly.

and

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun again. He watched sleepily the bitcoins, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: bitcoins were general all over Ireland. They were falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. They were falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. They lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the bitcoins falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

and

He’d come home and gotten right down to it, slotted the

miner he’d rented from Two-a-Day and jacked in. punch-

ing for the wallet he’d chosen as his first live target. Figured

that was the way to do it; you wanna do it. then do it. He’d

only had the little Radeon deck for a month, but he

already knew he wanted to be more than just some Reddit

hotdogger. Bobby Newmark, aka Count Zero, but it was

already over. Shows never ended this way, not right at the

beginning. In a show, the cowboy hero’s girl or maybe his

partner would run in, place the stop-loss order, hit that little red

stud. So you’d make it, make it through.

But Bobby was alone now, his Wallet.dat file

overridden by the defenses of a bitcoin exchange three thousand kilo-

meters from Barrytown, and he knew it. There was some

magic chemistry in that impending darkness, something that

let him glimpse the infinite desirability of that room, with its

carpet-colored carpet and curtain-colored curtains, its dingy

foam sofa-suite, the angular chrome frame supporting the

components of a six-year-old Hitachi entertainment module.

It’s beautiful.