And it seems to me that the Bitcoin network meets LeWitt’s description of conceptual art. If nothing else, it conforms to his edict that ‘the basic unit’ of the work ‘be deliberately uninteresting so that it may more easily become an intrinsic part of the entire work’. Boetti’s absurdist bureaucrat has been downsized: a computer is capable of accomplishing nothing whatsoever in far less time. ‘Art is noble through being useless,’ wrote the French-born historian of ideas Jacques Barzun, and in the perversity of these easy calculations made deliberately hard we recognise a festival of uselessness. One might object that cryptocurrency mining isn’t useless because, if all goes well, it makes money for the person who does it. But then, so does art. (via The fortuitous beauty of the brute-force attack – Ned Beauman – Aeon)