**Recent evidence suggests humans may be approximately as intelligent as the Eurasian magpie (*Pica pica*) and other advanced bird species. (Bengt Nyman photo, CC-SA 4.0)**

Virtually useless

Maybe you have heard about Hans Forsberg, the Swedish engineer who has trained magpies to collect bottlecaps. Forsberg, who is a robotics expert, used a 3D printer to build an avian-oriented vending machine in his backyard – just for fun. When one of the birds inserts a cap, the machine dispenses a peanut or a feed pellet. Of course, it took a while for them to acquire this sophisticated consumer behaviour. They worked up to it in steps, first learning to press a button to receive food, then recognizing bottlecaps as a stand-in for the button.

It is well-known that magpies are smart. They have unusually large brains, in proportion to their body mass, and they appear to engage in social rituals such as grieving. Their ability to recognize their reflection in a mirror represents a level of consciousness shared by very few other animals (though no species can match Homo sapiens for preening self-regard).

Like certain other highly intelligent creatures, magpies can use tools – but the use of tokens is something different, involving a degree of abstraction. Forsberg’s bottlecap experiment seems to demonstrate that magpies can be trained to view a piece of garbage, with no utilitarian value, as having symbolic value. Essentially, they have been taught to use money.

I thought of this recently when I read reports of a new Bitcoin mining operation in Saint-André, in northwestern New Brunswick. A company called HIVE Blockchain Technologies Ltd., based in Vancouver, has three warehouses there, each filled with thousands of computers that grind away 24-7. A fourth building, now under construction, will bring the total to about 18,000 computers, devoting all their binary brainpower to the enterprise of generating virtual tokens.

Just to be clear, we’re not talking about some kind of digital sweatshop housing row upon row of workers who stare at glowing monitors and tap away on keyboards; these computers, stacked up to the ceiling, are just small electronic machines programmed to perform computations non-stop, requiring very little human oversight.

What they do require is a lot of electricity, which is one reason this location was chosen. The availability of hydro power allows the company to claim that the operation uses 100 percent “green” energy, like its Bitcoin facility in Quebec – and also its “data centres” in Sweden and Iceland, which mine a different cryptocurrency called Ethereum. The preference for renewable power is a gesture toward corporate responsibility, and it goes hand-in-hand with a preference for northern locations – because in warmer climates, the buildings would require even more energy to dissipate the heat generated by all those computers engaged in ceaseless computations.

If you’re looking for a comprehensive explanation of crypto, you have definitely come to the wrong place. But at its most basic level, it involves constantly tallying up transactions, performing the digital record-keeping that legitimizes the virtual currency. This ledger, replicated across the network, is known as the blockchain. As a reward for providing this service, the owners of the computers receive newly-minted units of the currency, in proportion to their computational capacity. This is known as “mining,” or sometimes “hashing.” The purpose-made computers are called “mining rigs.”

The operation at Saint-André, once completed, will have a capacity of about 1,650 Petahash per second (PH/s), or 1.65 Exahash per second (EH/s). Since those metrics are utterly incomprehensible to most people, the capacity is often expressed in terms of energy. For this facility, it will add up to about 70 megawatts – which, according to a recent CBC report, is enough electricity to power more than 7,000 homes.

Some say crypto is just a financial fad, while others believe that virtual currencies could ultimately take the place of dollars and dinars, rupees and shekels, euros and pesos, yen and yuan. The concept appeals strongly to anti-authoritarian types – because unlike conventional banking systems, cryptocurrencies are decentralized and non-hierarchical.

I can relate to that. Just hearing about someone sticking it to large financial institutions, symbolically or substantially, puts a spring in my step and a smile upon my face. I also appreciate the way crypto reminds us that money is just a phantom we choose to believe in, a game we agree to play.

The flipside, however, is that cryptocurrencies are rather lacking in stability and accountability, so they foster a gold-rush mentality. What started out as a tool or a token becomes a commodity unto itself, ultimately creating more noise and chaos in the speculative economy. There are boosters who claim that crypto is a democratizing movement, allowing more people to get in on the action. But isn’t that what we were told about the internet? (Ah yes, those were simpler times.)

Picture these brand-new industrial buildings in Saint-André, which look like they should produce something – perhaps actual widgets, or even broiler chickens. But nothing goes in and nothing comes out. Presumably they just hum. What must people think?

Bear in mind, this is a community of fewer than 2,000 souls, situated in the potato belt that straddles the Maine border. A potato flower is featured on the Saint-André coat-of-arms, along with the Latin motto “Fructus ex floribus,” or “The fruit follows the flower.” (The municipality’s charming website points out that this is understood to mean, “We reap what we sow.”) To make a broad generalization, I would venture that most residents take pride in the things they produce – food for the table, lumber for homebuilding – or the useful services they provide for others. Presumably they want the same for their kids – a sense of purpose in life. So what are they to make of their new power-hungry but non-productive neighbours?

Imagine being the parent of a young magpie who seems to have no interest in learning basic foraging skills, or in any social endeavour that might benefit the flock as a whole, but is instead obsessed with gathering and hoarding bottlecaps.

If you were to have a heart-to-heart talk with your wayward offspring, you might start off by saying, “Look, I get it. We all like shiny objects.” Maybe you would tell the fledgling that you are proud of him for applying his extraordinary avian intelligence to monetizing novel asset classes. Or maybe, at the risk of sounding like an old crow, you would admit to having serious misgivings about what the bird world is coming to these days. DL