Scraping the moss off a headstone from 1889 requires a specific kind of patience, a rhythmic back-and-forth that feels a lot like the steady hum of a hash board. I’ve spent 19 years as a groundskeeper here, tending to the permanent residents of this quiet hillside, and I’ve learned that the things people forget are often the things that were once the most certain.

People used to be buried with their boots on because they expected to walk in the afterlife. Now, we bury them with QR codes on their markers that link to dead websites. Everything shifts. I’ve seen families argue over the placement of a stone for 49 minutes only to never visit the site again. It’s all a form of proof of work, I suppose. The labor we put in to prove that something existed, that something mattered.

Harvesting the Air

I recently googled a man I met at the local hardware store. He was buying heavy-duty cooling fans and smelled like ozone and stale coffee. He told me he was “harvesting the air.” I found out he was a semi-retired professional poker player who lost his shirt in a tournament in 2009 and had spent the last decade chasing the sound of high-frequency electricity.

He’s the one who first whispered the word “Kaspa” to me. He said it with a kind of reverence that most people reserve for religious icons or rare whiskey. I went home and looked at my own modest setup, my aging hardware that was struggling to keep up with the global difficulty spikes of the bigger chains, and I realized I was digging in a plot that had already been picked clean.

My accountant, a man named Mr. Gable who wears ties that haven’t been in style since 1979, sat across from me last week as I explained my latest capital expenditure. I told him I was moving a significant portion of my hash power toward Alephium and ALEO. He paused, his pen hovering over a yellow legal pad. He asked me to spell them.

When I did, he looked at me with the same expression he uses when I tell him the drainage in the north quadrant of the cemetery is failing-a mix of pity and professional concern. “Are these… companies?” he asked. I told him they were protocols. He wrote “Kaspa” down, but he spelled it with a ‘C’ first, then crossed it out. He looked at the $3,999 line item for a new machine and sighed.

Every time a new asset class emerges, it goes through a period where telling someone you own it makes you sound like a lunatic or a victim of a very specific, very nerdy scam. Bitcoin used to have this moat. Back in 2009, if you told your brother-in-law you were “mining” digital coins on your laptop, he’d ask if you were feeling okay. Now, Bitcoin is a line item in pension funds. It’s respectable. It’s clean.

And because it’s respectable, the margins for the little guy have been compressed into nothingness. If you aren’t running an industrial-scale operation with a power contract negotiated at 0.029 cents per kilowatt-hour, you aren’t really mining; you’re just heating a room very expensively.

I think about the stones I clean. The names that are hardest to read are the ones that were carved into soft marble. They were beautiful once, but they didn’t have the density to withstand the rain. Granite lasts. It’s harder to carve, more stubborn, less elegant. Bitcoin is granite now. But the new chains, the ones with names that sound like discarded Star Trek villains, they are the ones where the retail operator can still find a gap.

The Death Sentence of Nostalgia

The information asymmetry is the profit. If the world doesn’t know how to pronounce Alephium, the world isn’t competing with me for the block reward. By the time Mr. Gable can spell it without asking, the difficulty will have climbed 199 percent and the opportunity will have moved elsewhere.

I’ve made mistakes before. I once spent 69 days trying to revive a defunct mining pool because I liked the interface, ignoring the fact that the underlying hashrate had migrated like birds in winter. I’m prone to nostalgia. I still use a manual reel mower for the older sections of the cemetery because the sound of a gas engine feels like an insult to the people under the grass.

But in the world of silicon and electricity, nostalgia is a death sentence. You have to be willing to look at a coin that looks like a joke and see the math underneath. The move toward Kaspa and Alephium isn’t just about chasing a higher number on a dashboard. It’s a rational reallocation of hope.

When you see the big institutional players moving into a space, they bring a certain kind of efficiency that is hostile to the individual. They buy up the ASIC miners by the thousands, they build warehouses that hum with the collective heat of 9,999 machines, and they leave the rest of us to fight over the scraps.

But these newer Proof-of-Work chains, they offer a temporary sanctuary. They are still in that wild, unrefined state where a person with a few machines in their garage-or in my case, the back room of a cemetery tool shed-can still earn alpha.

There is a specific physical sensation when you plug in a new unit. It’s a vibration that goes through the floorboards. I have 9 units running now, and the sound is a constant, low-frequency roar that masks the silence of my workplace. Sometimes I wonder if the residents here mind the noise. Probably not. They understand the value of staying busy.

The Encroaching Ivy

I find myself wondering about the guy from the hardware store again. I saw him 29 days ago, and he looked thinner, his eyes brighter. He told me he’d moved his entire operation over to ALEO. He said the privacy-centric nature of the chain was the only thing that made sense in a world where everyone is being watched. I haven’t googled him since. I realized that his past as a poker player didn’t matter as much as his ability to read the table today.

Mining is a game of diminishing returns and increasing costs. It’s a race against the inevitable decay of hardware, much like the way I fight the encroachment of ivy on the north wall. You can’t stop the ivy; you can only manage its progress. My old Bitcoin rigs are essentially heaters now. They still work, but they don’t produce anything of value. They are like the headstones from the 1839 era-they tell a story of what used to be, but they no longer serve their primary purpose.

The transition to new chains requires a certain level of technical humility. You have to admit that the “king” might not be the best place for your capital anymore. It’s hard to tell people you’re betting on something called Alephium. It sounds like something you’d find at the bottom of a box of cereal.

But when I look at the network growth, the way the miners are migrating, I see a pattern that I’ve seen 19 times before in different contexts. Capital flows toward the path of least resistance and highest potential energy. Right now, that energy is in the weird, the new, and the unpronounceable.

I think we’ve forgotten that scarcity is a promise, not a setting. Bitcoin’s scarcity is legendary, but the scarcity of opportunity within the Bitcoin ecosystem is also increasing. It’s becoming a closed loop for the wealthy. To participate in the security of a network, you shouldn’t need a 49-page contract with a local utility provider.

Yesterday, I spent 89 minutes trying to explain the concept of a blockDAG to a woman who was looking for her great-grandfather’s plot. She didn’t care about orphans or GHOSTDAG protocols. She just wanted to find where the old man was buried. I realized then that my obsession with these digital ledgers is just another way of trying to find something that lasts.

We want our work to be recorded. We want our proof of existence to be etched into something more durable than marble. Whether it’s a block of stone or a block on a chain, we are all just trying to make sure the record reflects that we were here, that we dug our holes, and that we kept the machines running.

I’ll keep tending the graves. I’ll keep the grass at exactly 3.9 inches. And I’ll keep adding to my stack of coins that my accountant can’t spell. Because in the end, the only thing that matters is whether the work was real. The machines don’t lie. The heat they produce is real. The noise they make is real. And the profit they generate, however embarrassing the name might be at a dinner party, is the only proof I need.

“I like mining because it is the only thing that doesn’t require me to lie to people. You don’t have to sell anything… You just provide the computation, and the protocol pays you.”

– The man from the hardware store

It’s the purest form of commerce I’ve ever found. It’s cleaner than the dirt I move every day. It’s a digital grave that never needs weeding, a monument that builds itself one block at a time. I have 59 more years, if I’m lucky, to watch this all play out.

By then, maybe Kaspa will be the granite, and my grandkids will be mining something even weirder, something that sounds like a sneeze or a forgotten color. And that’s okay. The work continues. It always does.