The search for riches in the ground has motivated some of history’s most extravagant endeavors. It has inspired explorers, enslaved populations, and put opera houses in dusty mountain towns. But when the boom ends, the miners themselves have often been left in the lurch. They handle the raw material, turn it from hard earth to something potentially of value. Fabulous wealth comes to only a few, who rarely hold onto it long enough to be considered lucky. The search for bitcoins is little different.

The Bitcoin Center NYC, the self-described “center of the Bitcoin revolution,” inhabits a retail storefront on Manhattan’s Broad Street, a block from the New York Stock Exchange. The staff of an Asian-infused kosher steakhouse next door occasionally shoos loitering Bitcoiners from the sidewalk, indifferent to the revolution allegedly underway. Inside the Bitcoin Center, two small tables off to one side house a menagerie of Internet-age extraction equipment: Bitcoin mining machines. They resemble boxy desktop computers, only larger and without screens or keyboards attached. Only one of them, the CoinTerra TerraMiner IV, was in use during a visit I paid to the Center last November, emitting a purr of white noise. But the thing was still pretty much dead weight.

The TerraMiner IV rests on the table horizontally, encased in black metal, with rack-mounts and two stainless steel grates on either end that look like the eyeholes of a deep-sea diver. The grates cover fans that cool its array of application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs—advanced chips that do little else but churn through the complex cryptographic math that processes transactions for Bitcoin, the world's most famous virtual currency system. In return for their calculations, miners earn payouts of new bitcoins from the network, plus transaction fees from users. Like its non-virtual namesake, mining cryptocurrencies can be lucrative. But this TerraMiner IV has little hope of reward.

At just about a year old, the miner represents a particularly rapid and fateful instance of the obsolescence that awaits every gizmo that alights on the cutting edge. Because of competition from faster, sleeker models now on the network, it can no longer mine enough bitcoins to pay for the electricity it burns. Even the newest miners may no longer break even, as the value of a bitcoin continues its free fall from a high of over $1,100 in late 2013 to less than $250 today; the 25 bitcoins that the network spits out about every 10 minutes may not be worth the trouble it takes to earn them. CoinTerra, the TerraMiner IV's maker, filed for bankruptcy on January 24. Like a used-up gold mine, the machine lends even the Bitcoin Center's busiest evenings the sensation of a ghost town.