AJTSheppard

5 ms·

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Show HN: My pocket-sized Personal IoT device. Data-local by default
4 points by AJTSheppard 1mo ago|0 comments
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AI Bubble – how it all ends
3 points by AJTSheppard 10mo ago|1 comments
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by AJTSheppard 1y ago
I suggest you read the FAQs and Pocket Manifesto. It's not a purely economic proposition. Not all cryptos are PoW. And, like compound interest, things accrue over time. Lastly, it depends on your future view of where crypto is going ve
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Show HN: My pocket device to mine cryptocurrencies using solar ("Pocket Miner")
1 points by AJTSheppard 1y ago|3 comments
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by AJTSheppard 2y ago
Truth be told, that is exactly how I used to generate my crypto keys. I would take 256 quarters (sometimes fewer and accept that some might be tossed more than once) and toss them to get ones and zeroes. Tedious, and somewhat error prone (s
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by AJTSheppard 2y ago
Correct.
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by AJTSheppard 2y ago
Election auditing. That's a quite interesting idea. I will put more thought into that. Thanks!
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by AJTSheppard 2y ago
This comment brought a smile to my face. When I showed the machine to my son, Nate, a mechanical engineer, he thought it looked like something from a 1950's sci-fi movie like "Forbidden Planet". Back then, plastics were high-
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by AJTSheppard 2y ago
The case I would make for the Satoshi9000 is that its method of generating randomness is intuitively understood by anyone from five years old to ninety-five years old, technical or non-technical. I think it would be a stretch to think you c
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by AJTSheppard 2y ago
On an historical note, ever since dice and coins have been used by humans (thousands of years), there have been efforts to "automate" their tossing in an effort to make the toss or roll fair (unbiased). See, for example, the Vettw
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by AJTSheppard 2y ago
I would argue that the future belongs to people who can actually make useful things! If we revert to cave dwelling (which perhaps we might given the way things are going!), then being able to flake flint tools might be a far better skill to
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by AJTSheppard 2y ago
That's a clever point. But I think a corner case. I suspect that when the user is loading coins or dice in the machine, they would notice any dirt that was significant enough to look as though it might be a problem. And oil deposits fr
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by AJTSheppard 2y ago
Correct. But that only requires you to run the machine with the same coins/dice in the shakers for two consecutive cycles. And to repeatedly do so into you have generated the desired length of 0/1 bit stream. Bear in mind the mach
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by AJTSheppard 2y ago
Correct. But it does allow you to walk-away (with other stuff from the machine) with the keys immediately after generating them, leaving a machine which is little more than a motor and some wires at that point. So what I typically do is pri
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by AJTSheppard 2y ago
Yma o Hyd! I started my working life at age sixteen as a coal miner at the Deep Navigation Colliery in South Wales. Today, building useful and interesting machines has a lot in common with coal mining. A lot of hard work, and the perpetual
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by AJTSheppard 2y ago
It's certainly the case that the coin/dice shaking is purely mechanical because before I built the control box, I operated the machine by simply connecting the motor to a bench power supply and applying the necessary voltage (whic
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by AJTSheppard 2y ago
Maybe this intuitive "proof" will help. Coins and dice and datums (solid objects with detectable outcomes) may, or may not have bias, it depends on how they were made and on manufacturing defects that resulted. But, at a minimum,
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by AJTSheppard 2y ago
The Satoshi9000 makes only one claim as a value proposition. Value proposition: The key value proposition of the machine is that it generates analog randomness in the physical world and converts it into digital (1’s and 0’s) randomness. Esp
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by AJTSheppard 2y ago
I like that idea. Someone also pointed out that it could be a live video feed online. Just take the bits (in pairs, left and right shakers, or singly, just left or right shaker, or some alternating choice of the two) you need in the way you
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by AJTSheppard 2y ago
For the demo video I had the printer output the key-pair twice. Once with the private key in plain (visible) text, and another for the demo video with the private key replaced with ######'s. I didn't think it wise for a public dem
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Show HN: Satoshi9000 analog BTC key generator (mechanical)
164 points by AJTSheppard 2y ago|89 comments