## After the miners became rich, they buried the money back at the mine

>In 2045, a cryptocurrency called "Stardust Coin" based on extraterrestrial meteorites suddenly appeared.
>The first batch of miners included a down-and-out miner who mined using decommissioned mine server farms.
>Three years later, Stardust Coin's market value surpassed Bitcoin, and the miner's net worth broke 10 billion.
>He didn't buy luxury houses or cars but instead purchased the abandoned mine and surrounding ten kilometers of land.
>Everyone thought he was expanding the mine until satellite images showed—
>He had buried a massive metal box that no one could open right in the center of the mine.

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In 2045, shortly after the "Atlas" meteorite with a blue-green tail streaked across the sky, Stardust Coin quietly emerged. According to the white paper, its core algorithm key was hidden within a certain extraterrestrial crystalline structure brought by the meteorite—mysteriously obscure. When Li Mo saw the news, he was guarding the last few nearly falling-apart old servers in the abandoned small coal mine back home in Shanxi. Their humming was the only vitality in the cave. His electricity bill was more urgent than a death omen. He spat and randomly installed the mining program for Stardust Coin, just to give these iron lumps some last entertainment.

In the first year, Stardust Coin's price was as dead as graveyard grass—dull and lifeless. Li Mo's computing power was barely enough to cover the electricity costs. He mockingly called himself a scavenger of the digital age, scraping for food in the garbage heap of the Bitcoin flood. The change happened in the third year when a top laboratory announced they had successfully reproduced the theoretical encryption structure of Stardust Coin from the Atlas meteorite sample. The market went crazy. Stardust Coin's price curve was like injected with adrenaline—soaring into the sky. In just a few months, its market value had surpassed Bitcoin.

Li Mo was awakened late one night by continuous alert sounds. Squinting with sleepy eyes, he opened that dusty wallet app. The long, ridiculously bouncing numbers on the screen made him think the server was infected with a virus. It wasn't until he trembled and tried to transfer out a small amount, converting it into real RMB, and saw the string of zeros suddenly appearing in his bank account, that he froze like struck by lightning. Net worth of 10 billion? He pinched his face—painful.

The news of sudden wealth spread faster than gas in a mine. Old acquaintances, new friends, media brokers—everyone crowded into the broken rental house he lived in. Li Mo was nowhere to be seen. He disappeared for several months. When he reappeared, he held the ownership documents for the abandoned coal mine and ten square kilometers of surrounding wasteland. The public was in an uproar. Buying a worthless abandoned mine and mountain range with huge sums? Financial analysts confidently claimed this was to rely on physical assets to build the world's largest "Stardust Coin" mine, creating an energy loop and a nascent computing power empire. The tech community, however, romanticized it more, speculating that there might be undiscovered rare mineral veins underground related to extraterrestrial civilizations.

Excavators and bulldozers rumbled into the mountain wasteland, but the instructions given to the construction team were extremely strange: clear out collapsed old tunnels, reinforce the main shaft walls, then, directly beneath the mine's thickest core layer, dig a cylindrical giant pit about a hundred meters deep and thirty meters in diameter. Once the pit was dug, a pre-made silver-gray metal box was transported in. The box was seamless, with no visible gaps, locks, or interfaces. Its surface was matte, absorbing all surrounding light. It was slowly lowered into the bottom of the pit by a specially designed crane, then concrete was poured in to seal the giant box completely. Finally, the entire giant pit was backfilled and compacted, restoring the ground as if nothing had happened.

Soon after, a high-resolution commercial satellite passed over the area as usual. The transmitted images were processed and displayed before analysts. The photos clearly showed that in the center of the wasteland, directly above the mine, aside from freshly disturbed soil, there was nothing else. No buildings, no equipment, no signs of expanded mining. Only a stark, orderly circular blank space. And at the very center of that circle, vertically downward for a hundred meters, was the coordinate of the sealed metal giant box.

People only then felt a chill. What exactly was stored inside that box? No one knew. The box was like an absolute period, riveted deep in the once endless wealth-spouting mine, silently resisting the world's curiosity and imagination. Only Li Mo occasionally stood on the empty land where stubborn weeds had regrown, listening to the deep underground—the silence of the earth itself, longer and heavier than any server humming. $BTC