One man's side hustle

Lots of folks have a side hustle, a way to supplement their income with a little something extra. Personally, when I worked fulltime, I wouldn't have had the hours, or the physical and psychic energy, to do much of anything other than my job-job. Even if there had been something else I wanted to do - or would have been any good at.

Of course, there have always been side hustles. When I was growing up, the wallpapering biz in Worcester was firefighter territory. I knew teachers who spent the summer waiting tables, tending bar, or camp counseling. Back in the day, we just called it moonlighting. 

Now moonlighting's got a hipper name - side hustle - and there seem to be a lot more opportunities for it out there. Anyone with a car can drive for Uber or Lyft. There are all sorts of platforms where creatives can sell products using their designs without having to actually manufacture any products. (My niece Molly is in grad school. Her new side hustle is selling items using her cute fruit/veggie and pop culture designs on Red Bubble.)

And you can always be a crypto miner.

I am the first to admit that I find everything to do with crypto pretty cryptic.

Oh, at a high, abstract level I get what it is and how it works. But there's something about it that eludes me. And there's something about it that makes me do a lot of lol-ing when segments of it blow up. (Is anyone who's not directly, financially and/or legally impacted by the decline of FTX losing any sleep over the decline of FTX?)

Nadeam Nahas was a pretty minor player in the cryptic crypto game. And what he did as a pretty minor player in the cryptic crypto game was side hustling as a crypto miner.

Crypto miner, you may well be wondering...

Coinbase has as uncryptic an explanation as any:

Mining is the process that Bitcoin and several other cryptocurrencies use to generate new coins and verify new transactions. It involves vast, decentralized networks of computers around the world that verify and secure blockchains – the virtual ledgers that document cryptocurrency transactions. In return for contributing their processing power, computers on the network are rewarded with new coins...

Specialized computers perform the calculations required to verify and record every new bitcoin transaction and ensure that the blockchain is secure. Verifying the blockchain requires a vast amount of computing power, which is voluntarily contributed by miners...

The network holds a lottery. Every computer on the network races to be the first to guess a 64-digit hexadecimal number known as a “hash.” The faster a computer can spit out guesses the more likely the miner is to earn the reward.

That reward is "a predetermined amount of newly minted bitcoin." 

So, miners make a buck - or a bitcoin - by handling the process through which the crypto-currency is created. And bitcoin mining has been a chancy but pretty lucrative way to make some side money. 

Anyway, back in the day, pretty much anyone with a decent computer could don his virtual overalls, sling his virtual pickax over his shoulder, pack his virtual tin lunch box, and descend into the virtual mine and start mining. Now it requires a ton more processing power, not to mention cooling equipment to keep all those big old computers from melting down (think data center), which means most of the mining is left to the pros. Or to the amateurs who have some processing juice nearby.

It's not clear whether Nadeam Nahas - at best a bit bitcoin player - made any money with his side hustle. What is clear is that Nadeam Nahas kept his costs low by tapping into a "free" source of power at his place of employment. Nahas had been the assistant facilities director for the town of Cohasset, Massachusetts, and was running his mine in the crawl space under a Cohasset school.

The mine was discovered when Nahas' boss was poking around during a routine inspection "when he noticed electrical wires, temporary duct work, and numerous computers that seemed out of place." (Source for all references to Nadeam: Boston Globe)

Amazing that no one noticed that the school's electric bills were out of whack, which suggests that Cohasset - which is an affluent community - doesn't keep much of an eye on expenses 0r that Nahas had a small mine operation set up, but wasn't actually doing all that much mining. And thus not sucking too much juice out of the electric system.

Nahas resigned his position last , so if he's working it's no longer for the Town of Cohasset. Last I heard on the news, there's a warrant out for his arrest, but he's gone to ground. And he's definitely out a side hustle. No more loading sixteen tons a day for him! Maybe he should take up wallpapering or selling merch on Red Bubble. 

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Speaking of side hustles, here's a tote bag designed by my niece: