Reading this I really didn't get the impression the chips would be generating actual bitcoins. Just currency-like tokens for doing resource management and proving that something occurred.
Ok, continuing the argument from the article and not discussing practical methods of waste disposal...
Instead of using chemical rockets for the entire dV how about using a rocket to get into orbit and then using an ion engine driven by solar energy to lose the additional 20km/s? It seems the "fuel" weight required would be significantly less.
Old now '95. That is the an early pre-production version Pentium Pro running at 100 Mhz. The 256k L2 cache was really fast relative to memory because it was in that second die in the same chip.
This graph show the memory latency for a linked list walk that strides across a certain size buffer in memory. I used to use this picture for interviews and ask people to explain as much as they can about the processor from the picture. It end works for people who know nothing about processor architecture as I can walk them over what it says and see how they think and react to new information.
> A sticky overflow flag would be great... "if properly scheduled"
That is the rub right there. Think about what this means. Every ALU operation needs to read whatever register contains this state and write a new value. So every ALU operation becomes serially dependent all all previous operations. You have just totally killed performance on out-of-order processors.
Processor designers work really hard to avoid these kinds of operations. In fact between the Pentium and the Pentium Pro (aka p6) the behavior of condition codes on several x86 instructions were changed from "keep old value" to "always cleared". We couldn't find any code that cared and it was never previously documented.
This code doesn't have to use branches, it could also OR the condition codes to some register after every operation. This would also hurt performance, but only for code that cares instead of all code.
Yes is it all closed. Look at bittorrent-sync. Totally cool, but closed and controlled.
I don't see that working here, other than being used for porn and piracy.
No information on the website and it doesn't answer the key question. Why is this better than doing the same thing in Evernote? Evernode's free level is plenty for storing receipts.
Green? Because it runs off batteries? Is that all it takes.
OK, but didn't we just have a discussion on hacker news showing that helicopters with one large blade are more efficient than ones with many smaller blades?
Here is a part that I don't get. Do they actually change the magnetic strip on the 'coin'? Or does it have a fixed VISA number that is tied to your ID and owned by the 'coin' company. Then they just use the coin app and the timestamp of the transaction to know which card to charge in the backend.
That would mean the company gets a log of all transactions.
"we are less concerned with bitcoin as a financial instrument and more interested in bitcoin as a protocol"