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Hello friends, and welcome back to Week in Review! Last week we dove into Bezos’s Blue Origin suing NASA. This week, I’m writing about the unlikely and triumphant resurgence of the NFT market. If you’re reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can get this in your inbox from the   newsletter page , and follow my tweets   @lucasmtny . The big thing If I could, I would probably write about NFTs in this newsletter every week. I generally stop myself from actually doing so because I try my best to make this newsletter a snapshot of what’s important to the entire consumer tech sector, not just my niche interests. That said, I’m giving myself free rein this week. The NFT market is just so hilariously bizarre and the culture surrounding the NFT world is so web-native, I can’t read about it enough. But in the past several days, the market for digital art on the blockchain has completely defied reason. Back in April,   I wrote about a platform called CryptoPunks   that — at that point — had ban

Bitcoin-Mining Power Plant Secretly Launched in Alberta, Tapping Dormant Gas Well from the power-plays dept. "When residents of an affluent estate community in Alberta started hearing noise from a nearby power plant, they didn't expect their complaints of sleepless nights would lead to a months-long investigation that would find a bitcoin mining operation had set up shop without approval," reports the CBC: Now, Link Global, the company behind the site, is being ordered by the province's utility commission to shut down two plants until it can prove it's allowed to operate — a move the company says will cost jobs and cause the oil and gas infrastructure in which it operates to sit dormant.... Vancouver-based Link Global had set up four 1.25 MW gas generators at the site, pulling power from a dormant natural gas well owned by Calgary-based company MAGA Energy. The natural gas powers thousands of computer servers that run programs to "mine" digital currency.

Malaysian authorities have taken to an extreme measure to prove the point that it is illegal to steal electricity in order to run cryptomining rigs: crush them with a steamroller. The video making the rounds shows what looks like Antminers laid out and filling a parking lot at a police headquarters before the ruthless hands of justice drove an actual, honest-to-God steam roller over the entire lot of them.  The 47-second video doesn't show each and every device getting crushed, but according to   PC Gamer , none of the 1,069 illicit mining rig was spared, which is definitely not nice. The offending computers were seized in six raids conducted jointly by Malaysian police and Sarawak Energy Berhad (SEB) around an airport in the Sarawak region, where miners had allegedly tapped into SEB power lines to divert as much as $2 million in electricity to power the rigs.