Bitcoin: Currency of the future! Speculative bubble! Somewhere in between those two! Wherever you stand on the viability of the hot-button crypto-currency, chances are you’ve seen (and potentially been beguiled by) references to Bitcoin mining, the process by which hyper-powerful computers work through a series of hyper-complicated computations in hopes of stumbling across some digital gold.
The whole process is a little difficult to wrap your head around, but fortunately, the good folks at Wired have been mining BTC for a little while now and logging the process. There’s even a livestream showing the mining happening, which you can watch above. Warning: it is very boring.