asciilifeform: as discussed earlier, somewhere north of 20 million u.s. subscribers just for 'comcast'
asciilifeform: (which, where i live, has long ago gone packetized, yes)
asciilifeform: it is what folks pay for when they subscribe to 'cable tv'
asciilifeform: ^ i think jurov was speaking of 'tv-style' interface where schmuck is not aware that he is using the net, doesn't sit around hunting for warez, etc. but just sits with ir remote & drools
asciilifeform: i'm still curious, who is going to outcompete a hypothetical usg telecom monopoly inserting miners into cable boxes etc. and on what parameter ? cost of energy ? nope - schmucks pay. cost of manufacture? again, schmucks pay, indirectly. which is it ?
asciilifeform: but merely the minimal iron necessary to getwork() from usg and return results in a form that is unusable to mitmers
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: there is also a counter, yes
asciilifeform: they only appear complicated because 1) folks slept through school 2) lack of popular access to chip fab tech translates to lack of interest in even the most elementary aspects of engineering
asciilifeform: for the benefit of log readers, i will point out again, that a sha256 hashing circuit is dwarfed, complexity-wise, by all but the simplest 'homework' cpu, gpu, whatever other ic product
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: it won't be busting any markets. because 'how world works' (TM)
asciilifeform mined his first, and for long time, only bitcoin, on an fpga for which he wrote a very elementary miner, as an exercise
asciilifeform: but the overall complexity of the act of mining is not high
asciilifeform: it isn't the most optimal in the world (far from it) and a 'serious', 'grown man's' miner oughta be designed at discrete logic level
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: mine is ~450 lines of verilog
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: quite possibly they read the 2013 #b-a thread and took the advice of baking a hashing engine into an existing system-on-chip design
asciilifeform wasn't there, doesn't know at which in particular
asciilifeform: afaik no one alleged that this particular set is plugged in yet
asciilifeform: how this act is financed is a secondary consideration. for all i know, they are whoring out their daughters to pay for it
asciilifeform: is it entirely inconceivable that they are in fact churning out miners ?
asciilifeform: well, wrong about details, but basic idea
asciilifeform: the talmudists had it right, in their picture of wisdom being at peak (in their cosmography, in the era of moses) and fading away monotonically since
asciilifeform: what can i say, these folks have more distance between selves and the cultured times.
asciilifeform: to be fair, the item under review was a prng turd written for turdroid etc.
asciilifeform: pete_dushenski: i am still curious re: your hypothesis. was it that usg will not claim the remaining unmined btc, or that it doing so is uninteresting to us ?
