Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall

by Zeke Faux

The system depends on economic incentives. The miners who confirm transactions have made such a large financial investment—in buying computers to compete in the guessing game—that it wouldn’t make economic sense to undermine Bitcoin by entering false transactions. But that also means it does make economic sense to run tons of computers to guess random numbers in hopes of winning the Bitcoin reward. As one person put it on Twitter, “Imagine if keeping your car idling 24/7 produced solved Sudokus you could trade for heroin.”

It reminded me of a maxim called the “bullshit asymmetry principle,” coined by an Italian programmer. He was describing the challenge of debunking falsehoods in the internet age. “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it,” the programmer, Alberto Brandolini, wrote in 2013.