This is just at the beginning of the story to be fair. Later on he is mining in his living place and also writes about the electrity cost needing to be covered by the mining revenue.
Is tech still counter culture now that it pervades every place in society? Is it still okay to completely shirk the law now that many tech companies, for all intents and purposes, write the laws?
These are interesting questions to me.
Tech is not counter culture (and has in my personal observation never really been). Hacker culture, on the other hand, was counterculture from beginning on and still mostly is.
And Hacker News is run by YCombinator, which has an application form that asks applications to explain a time when they cheated ("hacked") a system for personal advantage.
Besides, breaking the law is not inherently a bad thing.
Edit: Also, I absolutely didn’t get rich from this if that’s what you’re concerned about for some reason. We cashed out after an early price spike, pocketing several thousand dollars each, which with both considered to be a major windfall.
Only a handful of people were mining Bitcoin in 2009, which is the same year it was created.
Maybe it was different in the US. In Europe I get the impression the FOSS community is predominantly left-leaning. My local Debian community certainly is, and they're anti-cryptocurrency (like myself).
Slashdot was also quite skewed against bitcoin, and that was a pretty international geek readership.