Decoding Hash Rate "Alchemy": Characteristics and Challenges of Bitcoin Computing Power Assets

Science seeks to understand the nature of things, while alchemy seeks to make things into what people want. In other words, science's main goal is truth, while alchemy's goal is to obtain controllable success. —George Soros, "The Alchemy of Finance" Economic Value of Computing Power Bitcoin is a new computing paradigm. It abstracts storage, communication, and computation from specific hardware. All nodes independently verify each transaction and new block, making choices about the chain with maximum computing power. Bitcoin achieves state replication without central coordination.