In olden times, people dug holes in the ground to look for gold. They called it mining. But why is gold valuable, anyway? Well, mostly because humans decided it was valuable. Yeah, but why gold? Well, one cool thing about element 79 is that it doesn’t interact with the oxygen in the air, so it stays shiny all the time. Also, it’s rare enough to be a status symbol. But really, money is just a social convention—we decide to make stuff worth other stuff.
What about cryptocurrency? This is also made up by humans. You can “mine” crypto using a computer to do pointless, gnarly computations. These systems are usually