[HN Gopher] Get a Life
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       Get a Life
        
       Author : akkartik
       Score  : 61 points
       Date   : 2021-02-28 18:36 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (crypto.stanford.edu)
 (TXT) w3m dump (crypto.stanford.edu)
        
       | zabzonk wrote:
       | Here's one by me at exactly the opposite end of the performance
       | spectrum:
       | 
       | https://latedev.wordpress.com/2011/06/25/a-poker-chip-comput...
        
       | rezmason wrote:
       | Oh, excellent timing! I've got a question for Ben Lynn, who will
       | hopefully show up here to answer questions.
       | 
       | I'm in the early stages of porting my decade old Flash Wireworld
       | player ( http://rezmason.net/wireworld ) to HTML5 (
       | http://rezmason.github.io/wireworld-player ), and I was planning
       | on finally tackling a HashLife based implementation down the
       | road.
       | 
       | May I use or adapt your Wireworld HashLife implementation for my
       | project? Also, can I brainstorm with you the likely
       | characteristics of other types of optimizations?
        
       | gumby wrote:
       | Have you discussed this with Bill Gosper?
        
       | gfody wrote:
       | this reminds me of the drama around when Bitcoin forked into BTC
       | and BCH - I recall there was some optimization that allowed
       | miners to land at digests equivalent to some huge hash rate
       | without actually computing that many hashes and since it was
       | baked into ASICs that would be rendered useless after the
       | optimization was nullified they had no choice but hard fork.
        
         | px43 wrote:
         | I think you're talking about ASICBOOST, more importantly the
         | "Covert ASICBOOST" drama, which was almost entirely fabricated
         | as a political ploy to turn the /r/bitcoin community against
         | the mining community. It was used to justify the soft fork
         | inclusion of SegWit (Segregated Witness) but in reality had
         | zero impact on the actual ASICBOOST capability, which was an
         | overly complicated and incredibly mild hashing optimization
         | which no one really actually used. The risk of orphaning blocks
         | was likely higher than and potential profits from the extra
         | advantage.
        
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       (page generated 2021-02-28 23:00 UTC)