https://spectrum.ieee.org/meet-an-open-source-pc-that-can-fit-in-your-pocket [ ] IEEE.orgIEEE Xplore Digital LibraryIEEE StandardsMore Sites Sign InJoin IEEE Meet the Open Source PC That Fits in Your Pocket Share FOR THE TECHNOLOGY INSIDER Search: [ ] Explore by topic AerospaceArtificial IntelligenceBiomedicalComputingConsumer ElectronicsEnergyHistory of TechnologyRoboticsSemiconductorsSensors TelecommunicationsTransportation IEEE Spectrum FOR THE TECHNOLOGY INSIDER Topics AerospaceArtificial IntelligenceBiomedicalComputingConsumer ElectronicsEnergyHistory of TechnologyRoboticsSemiconductorsSensors TelecommunicationsTransportation Sections FeaturesNewsOpinionCareersDIYThe Big PictureEngineering Resources More Special ReportsCollectionsExplainersPodcastsVideosNewslettersTop Programming LanguagesRobots Guide For IEEE Members Current IssueMagazine ArchiveThe InstituteTI Archive For IEEE Members Current IssueMagazine ArchiveThe InstituteTI Archive IEEE Spectrum About UsContact UsReprints & PermissionsAdvertising Follow IEEE Spectrum Support IEEE Spectrum IEEE Spectrum is the flagship publication of the IEEE -- the world's largest professional organization devoted to engineering and applied sciences. Our articles, podcasts, and infographics inform our readers about developments in technology, engineering, and science. Join IEEE Subscribe About IEEEContact & SupportAccessibilityNondiscrimination PolicyTerms IEEE Privacy Policy (c) Copyright 2022 IEEE -- All rights reserved. A not-for-profit organization, IEEE is the world's largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity. IEEE websites place cookies on your device to give you the best user experience. By using our websites, you agree to the placement of these cookies. To learn more, read our Privacy Policy. view privacy policy accept & close Enjoy more free content and benefits by creating an account Saving articles to read later requires an IEEE Spectrum account The Institute content is only available for members Downloading full PDF issues is exclusive for IEEE Members Access to Spectrum's Digital Edition is exclusive for IEEE Members Following topics is a feature exclusive for IEEE Members Adding your response to an article requires an IEEE Spectrum account Create an account to access more content and features on IEEE Spectrum, including the ability to save articles to read later, download Spectrum Collections, and participate in conversations with readers and editors. For more exclusive content and features, consider Joining IEEE. Join the world's largest professional organization devoted to engineering and applied sciences and get access to all of Spectrum's articles, archives, PDF downloads, and other benefits. Learn more - CREATE AN ACCOUNTSIGN IN JOIN IEEESIGN IN Close Access Thousands of Articles -- Completely Free Create an account and get exclusive content and features: Save articles, download collections, and talk to tech insiders -- all free! For full access and benefits, join IEEE as a paying member. CREATE AN ACCOUNTSIGN IN ComputingTopicTypeNews Meet the Open Source PC That Fits in Your Pocket The MNT Pocket Reform is a 7-inch clamshell with a real keyboard Matthew S. Smith 27 Sep 2022 3 min read A purple laptop on a desk The MNT Pocket Reform is an open source computer with a 7-inch display. MNT Research mntmnt reformpocketpcopen source Open source computing is coming to your pocket. MNT Research, creator of the Reform open source laptop and ZZ9000 add-in board for Amiga computers, is going small for its next project. The MNT Pocket Reform has a 7-inch screen with a clamshell design that, when closed, will be less than 5 centimeters thick. If its perky purple facade looks a bit retro, that's no surprise; the Pocket's inspirations read like a 'greatest hits' list of pocketable computers. "We had a mood board with several classic handheld computers: Nokia N900, Atari Portfolio, Cambridge Z88, Blackberry, Game Boy Advance SP, Alan Kay's Dynabook," says Lukas F. Hartmann, CEO and founder of MNT Research. "I have a Psion 5mx, which was kind of a benchmark for the keyboard." --------------------------------------------------------------------- Barely pocketable, very modular MNT initially sketched out a design with an even smaller, 5-inch display. This better delivered on the Pocket's titular pocketability, but the resulting device lacked space for a comfortable keyboard. Ultimately, the designers decided on a larger display with more internal space. It may require cargo jeans to carry but should prove more usable day-to-day. There are other ways MNT could have shaved down the device. The tiny Nokia N900, and many Blackberry devices, use a slide-hinge design. Some modern computers, like Lenovo's Yoga laptop line, have a 360-degree hinge. "We like to keep it simple," says Hartmann. "We are a very small team--you could say a boutique--and we have to pick our battles. Complicated mechanical and multimodal designs can snowball into all kinds of problems, while most people don't actually need them or ask for them." The Pocket also differs in its approach to modularity. It's not built around a strict base specification and instead offers support for a range of modules from entirely different manufacturers. The base module is an NXP i.MX 8M Plus with four ARM Cortex A53 cores, but the list of alternatives includes the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 and Pine SOQuartz RK3566. The Pocket will also support reusing modules compatible with the larger MNT Reform laptop. Rendering of the blue MNT Reform Pocket mainboard.MNT's open source approach extends to hardware documentation.MNT Research An owner's choice will affect performance: The default NXP module balances portability with speed, while the Raspberry Pi CM4 (which uses quicker Cortex A72 cores) will offer better overall performance and will support Vulkan GPU drivers. There's also a selection of internal expansion options including NVMe and optional 4G/5G/LTE mobile data. "It's really about your individual needs--which features do you need most and which compromises you're willing to make. You can mix and match and find something that works best for you," says Hartmann. MNT is serious about open source hardware "Open source" has morphed into an elastic buzzword, which makes it easy to miss what MNT offers. MNT's open source promise is not limited to an open source operating system or select internal components The Pocket Reform, like MNT's full-size Reform laptop, will provide mainboard schematics, 3D models for physical components, and open source drivers, among other things. MNT's extensive GitLab repository for the full-size Reform laptop serves a taste of what's coming. This approach is not entirely unique, but MNT's extreme commitment to open source stands out. Competitors like Framework and System76 offer laptops with open source hardware and software, but still rely on some mainstream, proprietary components (such as Intel x86 processors or Nvidia graphics). Portions of the design remain opaque. "We are offering an alternative to the treadmill of vendor-controlled and locked-in devices." In this sense, the Pocket is perhaps better understood as a pocketable open source hardware platform than a purpose-built computer. The Pocket will ship in a configuration that can be used without modification, but there's obviously better devices for those who want to use an off-the-shelf computer. "Consumer-ready open hardware products that are fully documented and allow you to modify, repair, or even clone them are incredibly rare," says Hartmann. "We are offering an alternative to the treadmill of vendor-controlled and locked-in devices." Offering the Pocket with an x86 processor from Intel or AMD, as does Framework and System76, would surely expand mainstream appeal--but also runs against the Pocket's open source mission. Modifying, tweaking, and hacking the Pocket is more than half the point. The MNT Pocket Reform is still in development, with an initial launch planned on crowdfunding website Crowd Supply. MNT has yet to commit to a date, but a representative says the company will have more to share "later this year." Until then, you can keep up to date with the MNT Pocket Reform's development on the company's official blog or, if you want to see the nitty-gritty details, the Pocket Reform's GitLab page. Related Articles Around the Web * DragonBox Pyra Open Source PC, Handheld Games Console Pre ... > * Pocket P.C. Open Sourced! - Popcorn Computer > * MNT shrinks its open source Reform laptop into a 7-inch pocket PC ... > mntmnt reformpocketpcopen source {"imageShortcodeIds":[]} Matthew S. Smith Matthew S. Smith is a freelance consumer-tech journalist. An avid gamer, he is a former staff editor at Digital Trends and is particularly fond of wearables, e-bikes, all things smartphone, and CES, which he has attended every year since 2009. The Conversation (0) A smiling man in a suit and glasses The InstituteTopicTypeCareersProfile Stephen Welby: A Man on a Mission 4h 6 min read A robot with two orange ostrich-like legs and no torso sprints along a running track RoboticsTopicTypeNews Robo-Ostrich Sprints to 100-meter World Record 6h 2 min read Vector art of a head with circuits examining a quantum symbol ComputingTopicArtificial IntelligenceTypeNews Machine Learning Will Tackle Quantum Problems, Too 8h 3 min read Related Stories ComputingTopicMagazineTypeNewsSeptember 2022 RISC-V Guns for Raspberry Pi, Legacy Chips SemiconductorsNewsTypeTopic RISC-V Star Rises Among Chip Developers Worldwide DIYTopicHands OnType Building a Stereoscopic Camera With the Raspberry Pi 4 Compute Module ComputingTopicMagazineTypeFeatureSeptember 2022 The Spectacular Collapse of CryptoKitties, the First Big Blockchain Game A cautionary tale of NFTs, Ethereum, and cryptocurrency security Matthew S. Smith 10 Aug 2022 8 min read Vertical Mountains and cresting waves made of cartoon cats and large green coins. Frank Stockton Pink On 4 September 2018, someone known only as Rabono bought an angry cartoon cat named Dragon for 600 ether--an amount of Ethereum cryptocurrency worth about US $170,000 at the time, or $745,000 at the cryptocurrency's value in July 2022. It was by far the highest transaction yet for a nonfungible token (NFT), the then-new concept of a unique digital asset. And it was a headline-grabbing opportunity for CryptoKitties, the world's first blockchain gaming hit. But the sky-high transaction obscured a more difficult truth: CryptoKitties was dying, and it had been for some time. Dragon was never resold--a strange fate for one of the most historically relevant NFTs ever. Newer NFTs such as "The Merge," a piece of digital art that sold for the equivalent of $92 million, left Dragon behind as the NFT market surged to record sales, totaling roughly $18 billion in 2021. Has the world simply moved on to newer blockchain projects? Or is this the fate that awaits all NFTs? Blockchains, smart contracts, and cat genes To understand the slow death of CryptoKitties, you have to start at the beginning. Blockchain technology arguably began with a 1982 paper by the computer scientist David Chaum, but it reached mainstream attention with the success of Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency created by the anonymous person or persons known as Satoshi Nakamoto. At its core, a blockchain is a simple ledger of transactions placed one after another--not unlike a very long Excel spreadsheet. The complexity comes in how blockchains keep the ledger stable and secure without a central authority; the details of how that's done vary among blockchains. Bitcoin, though popular as an asset and useful for money-like transactions, has limited support for doing anything else. Newer alternatives, such as Ethereum, gained popularity because they allow for complex "smart contracts"--executable code stored in the blockchain. "Before CryptoKitties, if you were to say 'blockchain,' everyone would have assumed you're talking about cryptocurrency"--Bryce Bladon CryptoKitties was among the first projects to harness smart contracts by attaching code to data constructs called tokens, on the Ethereum blockchain. Each chunk of the game's code (which it refers to as a "gene") describes the attributes of a digital cat. Players buy, collect, sell, and even breed new felines. Just like individual Ethereum tokens and bitcoins, the cat's code also ensures that the token representing each cat is unique, which is where the nonfungible token, or NFT, comes in. A fungible good is, by definition, one that can be replaced by an identical item--one bitcoin is as good as any other bitcoin. An NFT, by contrast, has unique code that applies to no other NFT. There's one final piece of the blockchain puzzle you need to understand: "gas." Some blockchains, including Ethereum, charge a fee for the computational work the network must do to verify a transaction. This creates an obstacle to overworking the blockchain's network. High demand means high fees, encouraging users to think twice before making a transaction. The resulting reduction in demand protects the network from being overloaded and transaction times from becoming excessively long. But it can be a weakness when an NFT game goes viral. The rise and fall of CryptoKitties Launched on 28 November 2017 after a five-day closed beta, CryptoKitties skyrocketed in popularity on an alluring tagline: the world's first Ethereum game. "As soon as it launched, it pretty much immediately went viral," says Bryce Bladon, a founding member of the team that created CryptoKitties. "That was an incredibly bewildering time." Sales volume surged from just 1,500 nonfungible felines on launch day to more than 52,000 on 10 December 2017, according to nonfungible.com, with many CryptoKitties selling for valuations in the hundreds or thousands of dollars. The value of the game's algorithmically generated cats led to coverage in hundreds of publications. What's a CryptoKitty? Each CryptoKitty is a token, a set of data on the Ethereum blockchain. Unlike the cryptocurrencies Ethereum and Bitcoin, these tokens are nonfungible; that is, they are not interchangeable. +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ |Unique ID |Mother's ID, father's |Genes | | |ID | | |-----------------------+-----------------------+-------------------| |The unique ID makes a |The token contains the |The kitty's genes | |CryptoKitty a |kitty's lineage and |determine its | |nonfungible token. |other data. |unique look. | +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ Image of a cat with multiple colors and numbers on itself. Dapper Labs What's more, the game arguably drove the success of Ethereum, the blockchain used by the game. Ethereum took off like a rocket in tandem with the release of CryptoKitties, climbing from just under $300 per token at the beginning of November 2017 to just over $1,360 in January 2018. Ethereum's rise continued with the launch of dozens of new blockchain games based on the cryptocurrency through late 2017 and 2018. Ethermon, Ethercraft, Ether Goo, CryptoCountries, CryptoCelebrities, and CryptoCities are among the better-known examples. Some arrived within weeks of CryptoKitties. This was the break fans of Ethereum were waiting for. Yet, in what would prove an ominous sign for the health of blockchain gaming, CryptoKitties stumbled as Ethereum dashed higher. Daily sales peaked in early December 2017, then slid into January and, by March, averaged less than 3,000. The value of the NFTs themselves declined more slowly, a sign the game had a base of dedicated fans like Rabono, who bought Dragon well after the game's peak. Their activity set records for the value of NFTs through 2018. This kept the game in the news but failed to lure new players. Today, CryptoKitties is lucky to break 100 sales a day, and the total value is often less than $10,000. Large transactions, like the sale of Founder Cat #71 for 60 ether (roughly $170,000) on 30 April 2022, do still occur--but only once every few months. Most nonfungible fur-babies sell for tiny fractions of 1 ether, worth just tens of dollars in July 2022. CryptoKitties' plunge into obscurity is unlikely to reverse.Dapper Labs, which owns CryptoKitties, has moved on to projects such as NBA Top Shot, a platform that lets basketball fans purchase NFT "moments"--essentially video clips--from NBA games. Dapper Labs did not respond to requests for an interview about CryptoKitties. Bladon left Dapper in 2019. What went wrong? One clue to the game's demise can be found in the last post on the game's blog (4 June 2021), which celebrates the breeding of the 2 millionth CryptoKitty. Breeding, a core mechanic of the game, lets owners pair their existing NFTs to create algorithmically generated offspring. This gave the NFTs inherent value in the game's ecosystem. Each NFT was able to generate more NFTs, which players could then resell for profit. But this game mechanism also saturated the market. Xiaofan Liu, an assistant professor in the department of media and communication at City University of Hong Kong who coauthored a paper on CryptoKitties' rise and fall, sees this as a flaw the game could never overcome. "The price of a kitty depends first on rarity, and that depends on the gene side. And the second dimension is just how many kitties are on the market," Liu says. "With more people came more kitties." More players meant more demand, but it also meant more opportunities to create supply through breeding new cats. This quickly diluted the rarity of each NFT. Bladon agrees with that assessment of the breeding mechanism. "I think the criticism is valid," he says, explaining that it was meant to provide a sense of discovery and excitement. He also hoped it would encourage players to hold on to NFTs instead of immediately selling, as breeding, in theory, provided lasting value. The Game A flow chart with arrows between cartoon kittens.The CryptoKitties blockchain game involves collecting, selling, and breeding nonfungible felines. The example here assumes your kitty is female. Dapper Labs The sheer volume of CryptoKitties caused another, more immediate problem: It functionally broke the Ethereum blockchain, which is the world's second most valuable cryptocurrency by market capitalization (after Bitcoin). As explained earlier, Ethereum uses a fee called gas to price the cost of transactions. Any spike in transactions--buying, siring, and so on--will cause a spike in gas fees, and that's exactly what happened when CryptoKitties went to the moon. "Anything that was emblematic of CryptoKitties' success was aped. Anything that wasn't immediately visible was mostly ignored."--Bryce Bladon "Players who wanted to buy CryptoKitties incurred high gas fees," Mihai Vicol, market analyst at Newzoo, said in an interview. "Those gas fees were anywhere from $100 to $200 per transaction. You had to pay the price of the CryptoKitty, plus the gas fee. That's a major issue." The high fees weren't just a problem for CryptoKitties. It was an issue for the entire blockchain. Anyone who wanted to transact in Ethereum, for any reason, had to pay more for gas as the game became more successful. This dynamic remains a problem for Ethereum today. On 30 April 2022, when Yuga Labs released Otherdeeds--NFTs that promise owners metaverse real estate--it launched Ethereum gas fees into the stratosphere. The average price of gas briefly exceeded the equivalent of $450, up from about $50 the day before. Although CryptoKitties' demands on the network subsided as players left, gas will likely be the final nail in the game's coffin. The median price of a CryptoKitty in the past three months is about 0.04 ether, or $40 to $50, which is often less than the gas required to complete the transaction. Even those who want to casually own and breed inexpensive CryptoKitties for fun can't do it without spending hundreds of dollars. Blockchain games: two steps forward, one step back The rise and fall of CryptoKitties was dramatic but gave its successors--of which there are hundreds--a chance to learn from its mistakes and move past them. Many have failed to heed the lessons: Modern blockchain gaming hits such as Axie Infinity and BinaryX had a similar initial surge in price and activity followed by a long downward spiral. "Anything that was emblematic of CryptoKitties' success was aped. Anything that wasn't immediately visible was mostly ignored," says Bladon. And it turns out many of CryptoKitties' difficulties weren't visible to the public. "The thing is, the CryptoKitties project did stumble. We had a lot of outages. We had to deal with a lot of people who'd never used blockchain before. We had a bug that leaked tens of thousands of dollars of ether." Similar problems have plagued more recent NFT projects, often on a much larger scale. Liu isn't sure how blockchain games can curb this problem. "The short answer is, I don't know," he says. "The long answer is, it's not just a problem of blockchain games." World of Warcraft, for example, has faced rampant inflation for most of the game's life. This is caused by a constant influx of gold from players and the ever-increasing value of new items introduced by expansions. The continual need for new players and items is linked to another core problem of today's blockchain games: They're often too simple. "I think the biggest problem blockchain games have right now is they're not fun, and if they're not fun, people don't want to invest in the game itself," says Newzoo's Vicol. "Everyone who spends money wants to leave the game with more money than they spent." The launch of CryptoKitties drove up the value of Ether and the number of transactions on its blockchain. Even as the game's transaction volume plummeted, the number of Ethereum transactions continued to rise, possibly because of the arrival of multiple copycat NFT games. That perhaps unrealistic wish becomes impossible once the downward spiral begins. Players, feeling no other attachment to the game than growing an investment, quickly flee and don't return. Whereas some blockchain games have seemingly ignored the perils of CryptoKitties' quick growth and long decline, others have learned from the strain it placed on the Ethereum network. Most blockchain games now use a sidechain, a blockchain that exists independently but connects to another, more prominent "parent" blockchain. The chains are connected by a bridge that facilitates the transfer of tokens between each chain. This prevents a rise in fees on the primary blockchain, as all game activity occurs on the sidechain. Yet even this new strategy comes with problems, because sidechains are proving to be less secure than the parent blockchain. An attack on Ronin, the sidechain used by Axie Infinity, let the hackers get away with the equivalent of $600 million. Polygon, another sidechain often used by blockchain games, had to patch an exploit that put $850 million at risk and pay a bug bounty of $2 million to the hacker who spotted the issue. Players who own NFTs on a sidechain are now warily eyeing its security. Remember Dragon The cryptocurrency wallet that owns the near million dollar kitten Dragon now holds barely 30 dollars' worth of ether and hasn't traded in NFTs for years. Wallets are anonymous, so it's possible the person behind the wallet moved on to another. Still, it's hard not to see the wallet's inactivity as a sign that, for Rabono, the fun didn't last. Whether blockchain games and NFTs shoot to the moon or fall to zero, Bladon remains proud of what CryptoKitties accomplished and hopeful it nudged the blockchain industry in a more approachable direction. "Before CryptoKitties, if you were to say 'blockchain,' everyone would have assumed you're talking about cryptocurrency," says Bladon. "What I'm proudest of is that it was something genuinely novel. There was real technical innovation, and seemingly, a real culture impact." This article was corrected on 11 August 2022 to give the correct date of Bryce Bladon's departure from Dapper Labs. This article appears in the September 2022 print issue as "The Spectacular Collapse of CryptoKitties." From Your Site Articles * Climate-Friendly Ethereum Is One Merge Away - IEEE Spectrum > Keep Reading |Show less {"imageShortcodeIds":[]}