As energy prices soar, the bitcoin miners may have struck fool’s gold | John Naughton

The rising price of electricity and the plunging value of the cryptocurrency could burst the speculative bubble for today's prospectors

In the bad old days, prospecting for gold was a grisly business involving hysterical crowds, pickaxes, digging, the wearing of appalling hats, standing in rivers panning for nuggets, staking" claims and so on. The California gold rush of 1848-55, for example, brought 300,000 hopefuls to the Sierra Nevada and northern California and involved the massacre of thousands of Indigenous people.

In our day, the new gold is bitcoin, a cryptocurrency, and prospecting for it has become a genteel armchair activity, although it is called mining", for old times' sake. What it actually involves is using computers to perform unfathomably complicated calculations to create cryptographic hashes" - codes that are, in practical terms, uncrackable.