The Noise Pollution of Bitcoin

In May 2021, residents of the small town of Lawrence, Tennessee discovered that the "data center" their town had agreed to let be constructed on their land contained a Bitcoin mine. Due to the excessive number of server computations needed to mine the (now mostly useless) digital currency at the rate the owners wanted, the computers needed ridiculous amounts of cooling via electric fans to prevent them overheating – which led to a noise volume that some residents likened to a jet airplane taking off in their backyards.