COLORADO — While excavating a mountainside for a highway tunnel near Aspen, construction workers stumbled upon a group of self-described “miners”. Strangely, these miners had no mining gear, even though their location was right at the edge of an old, defunct coal mine. They were carrying around laptops and what looked to be large CPUs, first asking their rescuers about WiFi access instead of water or food.

“They were all in their late 40s, I’d say, and seemed most concerned with finding a place to plug in their computers,” said Howie Patterson, one of the rescuers. “They started on some lecture about why work was better than steak or something, but they lost me early in that discussion,” he added.

The self-described miners had been there since about mid-September, they claimed, when they had to “go underground” to “preserve the true Ethereum network.” Medical staff onsite said that delusional behavior like this was a regular symptom of dehydration.

“We’ll get them hydrated, fed and rested,” said EMT Michael Blatterson, “then we can help them slowly accept the reality that the ETH proof-of-work hard fork was a bad idea and they better sell their equipment before it is just as worthless as ETHW.”

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