Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever
A bit off-topic, but the fact that criminals asked for help mining, instead of money or crypto-money, just gave me an epiphany:<p>The whole internet is showing the first signs of a digital Resource Curse [1] brought by crypto mining. Crypto mining changed the economics of the digital world in such a drastic way that it is poisoning all kinds of internet interactions. It is not just about disrupting how money used to work, it is disrupting every kind of interaction, even those that had nothing to do with money. Things that were completely economically neutral before, so people did them just for fun, can now be exploited to extract value, so naturally some people do it and the previous innocent/neutral status quo is lost. For example: most free unix shell providers, a fun tradition from nerds from the 90s, had to shut down because now there is such a big economic incentive to abuse such free service.<p>And while writing above I realized that crypto is probably the second internet curse, with Google's algorithm being the first. When Google became the near-monopoly in the early 2000s, linking to a website ceased to be an economic neutral activity, people realized they could extract value from linking, so link spam became a big problem and forever changed the web.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse</a>