Shopping mall foot traffic

There is something darkly poetic about Bitcoin mining electricity surging while shopping mall foot traffic collapses, as though the country had quietly decided to stop walking and start hashing. The food court is empty. The data centre is humming.

Two long trends moving sharply in opposite directions, with very different drivers. Bitcoin mining's electricity consumption has grown explosively as the network's hash rate climbs and ASIC farms expand, while shopping mall foot traffic has fallen for over a decade under pressure from e-commerce, the death of department stores, and changing retail habits. The correlation isn't causal; it's two parts of the same century-end transition from physical retail to digital extraction.

So the correlation is commerce migrating from a building to a server rack. Both consume something. Only one of them remembers what.