He mines bitcoins with a paper and a pencil

And if it was possible to do without powerful computers to make its own Bitcoins? This is what this computer scientist demonstrates, for whom "it's very simple".

Attention, reserved for the maths. Ken Shirriff is a nerd, a geek, a real one. A pure and hard. The kind of guy who likes difficulty and who explains it in detail in long articles particularly searched and documented on his blog. The kind of guy who dismantles an air conditioning controller to analyze the code or who takes his foot print Christmas greeting cards with a computer IBM 1401 of 1960.

You know what I mean.

And of course, the crypto-currencies and more precisely the Bitcoin have no secrets for him, any more than the blockchain, which have become new field of experimentation, or playground, as you want.

In an article that is as long as it is detailed and illustrated, Ken Shirriff explains in detail how he came up with the idea of ​​mining Bitcoins by hand, with just a pencil and paper, the old-fashioned way, so to speak. As a reminder, mining Bitcoins involves using computer hardware to perform complex mathematical calculations for the Bitcoin network to confirm transactions and increase security. As a reward for their services, bitcoin miners can receive "allowances" for confirmed transactions and newly created bitcoins. The profits are thus distributed according to the number of calculations made and paid in Bitcoins. A method that requires machines increasingly powerful and energy-consuming, which would begin to pose a problem from an ecological point of view.

Produce Bitcoins with bare hands to better understand the process
Not sure, however, that Ken Shirriff's motivation is to save the planet (or not only): if one refers to his article (published in 2014 at a time when the calculations were probably less complex), the boy would rather be motivated by the beauty of the gesture represented by this exercise in applied mathematics, as he explains: "I decided to see how practical it would be to use Bitcoin in pencil and paper. It turns out that the SHA-256 algorithm used for mining is quite simple and can actually be done by hand. Not surprisingly, the process is extremely slow compared to computer extraction and quite impractical. But running the algorithm manually is a good way to understand exactly how it works. "

That's the key to the trick: the guy is a fan of reverse engineering. Dismantling by hand the process of mining allows him to better understand it, and incidentally better master it, even if it turns out that making Bitcoins in this way does not seem very profitable.

I'll give you the details because I do not understand much about his calculations, and I invite the most armed in this area to read his post and why not try the experiment, but this story is also there to to remember the base: we are bathing in an environment where everything - even the most refined interfaces - is a matter of numbers.

Moreover, Ken Shirriff's reader cleverly reminds him: "You could as well perform a manual image processing, for example a blur filter, which is much simpler than the Bitcoin mining algorithm. The only problem is that to process a 12 megapixel photo the calculation should be run 12 million times