D eep beneath a mountain on the fjord-filled fringes of Norway, tucked within 28 kilometres of tunnels, are 15 shipping containers. Stacked three-high in neat rows, each container is filled with millions of dollars’ worth of computers that pump out thousands of dollars’ worth of digital currency each day through a process of electronic mining. Together with countless other operations around the world, these containers form the foundation of the bitcoin network.

Standing inside one of the 40-foot containers, the temperature is 45C and the roar of the cooling fans is so loud you can’t hear yourself speak. Unlike traditional money, bitcoin doesn’t have a central government or bank in charge of distributing and backing the currency. Instead, it relies on the processing power of computers to solve mathematical problems to generate new units of the cryptocurrency, while simultaneously verifying and recording any transactions on the network to an online ledger called the blockchain.