BREAKING: Villagewoman in Turkmenistan mines last bitcoin
Lorna Blotfarrow is a reporter for Inside of Business Magazine. She covers scandals, cash cows, business news, and whatever fallout is still happening from the U.S invasion of Iraq.
Here’s the latest:
Aygozel Abdulov, a 72 year old grandmother residing in the pastoral village of Nokhun, mined the last bitcoin this Friday morning.
Mrs. Abdulov was miraculously able to mine the final satoshi—just 0.000001% of a single bitcoin—using a device her beloved son, Pürli, gifted her in 2009—namely, the Dell Inspiron 530.
“The hashrate on a Dell Inspiron is nothing compared to the ASICs you usually use. Plus, the last satoshi wasn’t supposed to be mined until the year 2140,” said Craig Wright, possible but unconfirmed visionary behind Bitcoin. “How the hell did this happen?” Wright rhetorically inquired. He continued, this time perspiring on his forehead: “Not that I care. It’s not like I’m behind Bitcoin or anything.”
Use of the decentralized coin (of which there are a finite 21,000) took off in 2009 with open source implementation, meaning accessibility to all. It’s typically mined on devices using a chip called Application-Specific Integrated Circuits, or ASICS for short. These chips process trillions of calculations per second, making them undeniably speedier than the Dell Mrs. Abdulov used to mine her satoshi. The hashrate, a measure of just how many cryptographic calculations a machine can perform a second, is literally a trillion times slower on the device Mrs. Abdulov used.
According to Mrs. Abdulov, her son Pürli asked her to keep the laptop running during his weeks of travel to Dagestan. “I don’t bother him with too many questions,” she told These Times. With the help of Pürli’s translation, Mrs. Abdulov has already released a statement about her impossible victory: “Whatever task my son asks of me, I fulfill diligently. He is my prize and my prince.”
Mrs. Abdulov and her son have already caught the attention of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management company and owner of 3% of all Bitcoin. A spokesperson from the company announced in a memo this morning: “We are greatly disturbed by Mrs. Abdulov’s selfishness in mining the last satoshi.” Rick Moranis (no, not that Rick Moranis), Senior VP at BlackRock said: “What’s she getting at? What kind of portfolio diversity comes with a lone satoshi?”
Mrs. Abdulov confirmed to 4.1 million followers on Instagram Live today that she simply felt happy to have made her son proud: “I’m not sure what BlackRock is,” Pürli translated as she spoke, “but my son is the smartest boy in all of Nokhun. And that means something.”