Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Not a question but as a fellow Life enthusiast I thought I’d surface an alternative Life hack I made a few years ago based on physical Kong Bucks from Stephenson’s Snow Crash: https://kong.cash/

Each note is an actual flexible polyimide PCB containing a hardware storage wallet - the PCBs are translucent in parts or solid in others depending on a copper pour but overprinted with ink using a special UV process - but one of the security features is when one holds a note up to the light one can see a Game or Life program which when executed emits a corresponding number of gliders and oscillators as the notes value. This feature is to prevent one from “washing” a note and printing a different value as is done with $5 and $100 US bills for instance as the copper pour is “baked” into the medium.

Writing a c program to encode arbitrary numbers into a Game of Life program was a very fun distraction during an otherwise thorny project that involved connecting people from the print world to people from the electronics world while shaving a few thousand cycles off a crypto library with ECDSA P256 operations before the smart phone powering the chips via NFC turned off. Real engineering work to bring cryptographic proof of authenticity that unfortunately gets written off as a 'crypto scam' when the poc token attached to the circuit boards was the least interesting part.

One can see some of the denominations here: https://twitter.com/NoviolNFT/status/1341468948416512000



Consider applying for YC's Winter 2026 batch! Applications are open till Nov 10

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: