By Nick Bonyhady
Publication Date: 2026-03-09 18:00:00
Cryptocurrency is a bit like the household cockroach. It is resilient to disasters that would derail other projects, and it appears where you least expect it. A non-exhaustive survey provides reports on people being investigated and sometimes fired for crypto “mining” (the process of generating new crypto tokens using computing power) in a Texas school district, a professional esports league, and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.
But a paper quietly posted online in December raised a new and altogether more disturbing prospect: cryptocurrency mined by an AI tool that no one expected had anything to do with digital money.
