Continuing on with my crazy gCn ideas, how might a Bitcoin miner be made? Just google bitcoin if you don't know what Bitcoin is. Even if it is very slow, just leave your calc on all day. Plus, the hub can operate as a pool to distribute the computing power. Just an idea to chew on.
For those wondering what Bitcoin is, I direct you to its Wikipedia article.
Quote:
When paying with Bitcoin, no exchange of digital notes or tokens takes place between payer and payee. Instead, the buyer requests an update to a public transaction log. All transactions are verified, timestamped, and recorded into this shared public database called the block chain. The operators of the computers that do such payment processing work are known as "miners" and rewarded with transaction fees as well as newly minted bitcoins.
While that might be an interesting proof of concept implementing the maths involved and dealing with the large numbers required make this pretty much a no go from the start. I'm pretty sure we have a topic around here going into the details as you are not the first to suggest this I'm sure.
TheStorm wrote:
I'm pretty sure we have a topic around here going into the details as you are not the first to suggest this I'm sure.

No other topics YET. Maybe people have suggested it on IRC. It seems to me that this might be useful for the main hub. And all the calcs can connect to the Rasberry Pi. The calcs can send instructions to the Rasberry and then the Pi sends out what keys need to be factored.
Making a (light, no blockchain) wallet out of a TI calculator may be a much better and useful idea, and something where the computing power of the calculator is probably enough, even if a bit slow. Graphic calculators are perfect devices for this sort of task, as they are air-gapped by default, which means nobody will take your private keys unless the calculator is physically connected to gCn. In fact, gCn is not needed at all (look at things like Trezor - http://www.bitcointrezor.com/ - which are purely a private keys manager).
I like the idea of using a calculator as a wallet (although I didn't realize you could have a wallet without a blockchain). As Jonimus/TheStorm said, a gCn bitcoin miner is completely infeasible for anything other than a "because I can" demonstration. The slowest ASIC miner, which can barely break even, is already many orders of magnitude faster at computing hashes than even the speedy HP Prime.
KermMartian wrote:
...infeasible for anything other than a "because I can" demonstration...


To be honest, I think the "because I can" demonstration time for Bitcoin mining on "exotic" hardware, is pretty much over... had this been a year or two ago, it would have made some sense, but it's been a while since I saw a "because one can" project. I guess it's because the difficulty of mining is now so high, that it would be pretty much impossible to even demonstrate a proof-of-concept.
Of course, you can create your own Bitcoin fork, call it Calccoin and declare it is purely for mining and using with calculators... but then you'd have to somehow protect it from being mined with "normal" harwdare in order to keep it feasible for calcs to continue mining, and avoid 51% attacks.
well, maybe it wouldn't need to be bitcoin specifically. Perhaps a new crypto currency, lets say "TICoins," could be made and have such easy minability that it can be mined with a calculator using gCn.

Of course, they'd have no worth at all, probably less than my beloved dogecoin, but it'd be a neat proof of concept thing.
qazz42 wrote:
...Of course, they'd have no worth at all...
Indeed, because you could just mine them with a computer and break the "economy". I doubt there would be any way to force a calculator to be the one computing the hashes, since we can emulate calculators at many times their actual speed on a computer.
KermMartian wrote:
qazz42 wrote:
...Of course, they'd have no worth at all...
Indeed, because you could just mine them with a computer and break the "economy". I doubt there would be any way to force a calculator to be the one computing the hashes, since we can emulate calculators at many times their actual speed on a computer.

Even if one develops a custom proof-of-work algorithm just for the calculators, one is free to implement it on a computer and even running it on a GPU or FPGA, outnumbering the hash speed of thousands of z80-powered calculators. This would make it impossible for calculators to continue mining, because as the difficulty re-targeted to take the GPU miner into account, calculators would no longer be powerful enough to mine at that difficulty. I suppose it's possible to disable difficulty retargeting, but then the network won't accommodate for a bigger number of calculators (or higher specs on some of them) mining.
In fact, the difficulty problem is big enough, that it would mean you'd need a cryptocurrency just for z80-based calculators, other for SH3/4-based calculators (Casio) and ARM-based ones (HP and Nspire), as certainly the latter would have much higher hash rates than the former.

The wallet idea, however, is far simpler (and more useful), and in fact I have already thought about coding one for the Prizm, but time goes faster than I'd like and I have many other things to keep up with. Additionally, projects like my Utilities add-in or Eigenmath port certainly benefit a bigger amount of users, than a Bitcoin wallet, so I prefer to spend my time improving them.
KermMartian wrote:
qazz42 wrote:
...Of course, they'd have no worth at all...
Indeed, because you could just mine them with a computer and break the "economy". I doubt there would be any way to force a calculator to be the one computing the hashes, since we can emulate calculators at many times their actual speed on a computer.


yeah, the entire thing would be held together on community trust not to break the rules and use a computer. Or it would have to be a very private thing that only a select few have privvy about.

oh well, a guy can dream.

edit: and so not to sound entirely pessimistic, I like the idea about the gCn calculator wallet. It sounds plausible enough.
Well there are hardware SHA-256 modules on the 84s and nspires, so technically they are ASICs, just S to the wrong A (paraphrasing commandblockguy)

There's a 3DES module on the nspires, and I don't see any coins using 3DES...
https://github.com/BlackBip/Ti-Basic-BTC-Miner

don't know if this has already been mentioned.
Here's a thought: I have [s]been working on[/s] thought about starting a project entitled (redacted bc I don't want anyone stealing my ideas lol) that is designed to be a relatively easy-to-mine (It'll probably be PoS in lieu of PoW) but designed specifically for making games (like Upland) and other low-power things. So the native coin (not token) wouldn't probably be worth very many dollars (if it'll even be worth any whole number of dollars at all) but I suspect that some other things on it might end up being quite valuable. No spoilers.
  
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