- The channel debated whether Bitcoin’s proof-of-work is wasteful; one side argued it is unproductive electricity use, the other that it is the necessary cost of a tamper-resistant, distributed ledger.  
- Participants explored DIY semiconductor fabrication for Bitcoin ASICs, noting commercial chips are at 28 nm and asking how many larger-feature-size devices would be needed to stay competitive, while linking to the DIY CMOS wiki (homecmos.drawersteak.com) and Bryan Bishop’s homebrew ASIC notes.  
- Energy-parity observation: at retail electricity prices the market value of newly-mined bitcoins roughly equals the electricity cost, so only miners with ultra-cheap or renewable power can profit long-term; improving ASIC efficiency or inventing cheaper power does not reduce total network energy use because difficulty adjustments restore equilibrium.  
- Discussion examined second-hand FPGA mining rigs as inexpensive reconfigurable hardware for non-Bitcoin experiments, lamenting that ASICs quickly obsoleted FPGA clusters, and compared early scrypt ASICs (e.g., Gridseed 360 kH/s, 7 W) with FPGA claims of 10 MH/s, noting GPUs remain competitive where electricity is cheap.  
- Asset protocols on Bitcoin were compared: Open Assets (colored-coins style) allows free, offline creation of asset types verifiable by traversing a limited set of Bitcoin transactions, while skepticism was voiced about tokens representing physical goods like gold due to custodial and legal enforcement issues.  
- fenn proposed using DNA self-assembly to build distributed biological computers; kanzure requested evidence that DNA frameworks have produced working semiconductor devices.  
- Home-brew silicon feasibility was discussed: 10 µm feature sizes of the original Intel 4004 were cited as potentially within reach of non-billion-dollar fabs, with 8051 masks and open-source CAD tools (python-brlcad bindings to 470 BRL-CAD libraries) mentioned as starting points.  
- Debugging BRL-CAD Python bindings: kanzure reported a segfault caused by a missing RT_HRT_INTERNAL_MAGIC constant (0x6872743f) when running wdb_example.py, and participants debated simplifying BRL-CAD’s API by collapsing dozens of cryptic primitives into a small set like {cuboid, ellipsoid, cone, torus, mesh}.