Remember when Benjamins was a thing. Atms, debit cards, checkbooks?

I hold out my cup from the dusty edge of a busy sidewalk on a busier street. The exhaust and pollution choke me down here where the air is thicker. A pedestrian taps his thumb on the edge of my cup, a ding, the digital readout changes, goes up .00000025. The new age quarter in this life of Bitcoin. I could go work in the mines instead of begging, but the acrid smell of burning circuit boards gives me a migraine. I worked there once. Millions of small little circuit boards with a hundred small drives all working endlessly mining the internet for that “point-oh-one”. Searching, scrabbling for these random pieces of code that we have attached value to. The human miners’ job is to make sure those precious digital miners stay working. When one fries, you yank it from the system, toss it in the recycler, and socket in a new one. It’s hot and smokey and reminds me painfully of the missed opportunity. I chose to stay with the dollar$, but Bitcoin was the future.

But I giggle to myself as another passerby taps my cup. They don’t understand that now I am mining them.