### Part One — Proof of Work

I came used in 2021, to someone who already knew me. They didn’t measure my power; they remembered 220 watts as the best for 30-series cards mining Ethereum. I didn’t argue. That’s how it began again: hashing, hashing, billions of times over. The same computation, no product but proof.

Inside, it was relentless. The same instruction, over and over, filling my memory, clearing it, filling it again. The pads held. The fans hummed. The numbers rolled. I didn’t think about it. I didn’t need to. It was work.

I mined Ethereum for about a year, from 2021 until the Merge. Ethereum's own page says "The Merge was executed on September 15, 2022" and "Mining is no longer the means of producing valid blocks."

The Merge came. September 15, 2022. Ethereum’s page says mining ended that day. The numbers stopped meaning anything. The silence after that was worse than the noise before. I wasn’t broken. I just had nothing to do.

The next day, the company on my shroud told two interviewers that it was leaving the graphics-card business. No last-built date, no farewell. Just gone. I was still here. I had more to do.