Mining has been always a dirty business. And environmentally polluting. Include Canada’s oil sands which mine oil in an environmentally unfriendly way. This has now expanded to the internet.

Bitcoin started the crazy act of mining for coins and this has spread all across the world with a lot of mining Bitcoins happening in China nowadays. From mom-and-pop miners, cryptocurrency mining has spread to become an organized business.

As a sign of things to come, a few days ago Norton Airvirus software company is planning to offer an anti-virus package that will also be mining for Ethereum using the unused horsepower of your computer. And take a share of the mined currencies with you (as a small fee). This is going to have major implications and going to change this industry. I am sure that several other companies will start jumping on this bandwagon. Perhaps offering a free PC which mines in the background and shares the income with you.

And better still while mining at home with your free PCs, please be sure to buy a farm or two, with a couple of hundred cows roaming around. An interesting anecdote is about a farmer who uses cow dung manure to generate electricity from biogas to run his Ethereum mining activity. Perhaps making this more sustainable. But then again there is the bigger question, will the value of these coins hold? They seem to be held aloft by speculation and human herd mentality behavior - rather than real underlying value.

References:

Norton antivirus adds Ethereum cryptocurrency mining - https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57345632

How cow poo is powering crypto mining - https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57199405

Ethereum crypto will soon be 99.95% more environmentally friendly - https://www.tomsguide.com/uk/news/ethereum-crypto-will-soon-be-9995-more-environmentally-friendly-heres-how