DIY Cash, 1930s Style; the CoinSummit Boosters; and Hot Pockets

There are many ways in which the local conditions helped the experiment to flourish; the local economy was much more localised than it is today, and levels of despair were much higher.

John Law highly recommends others more astute than he take a long look at Michael Unterguggenberger's remarkable feat, and in the cybercurrency zeitgeist now afoot take another crack at it on the back of a local currency experiment.

The CoinSummit San Francisco event over the past few days was profoundly optimistic - some might say irrationally so, given the latest half-rumour/half-news that China has slapped bitcoin down yet again.

Is your Android phone burning through battery life? Is it sluggish and unwilling to be your friend? You could have secret mining software, unwittingly installed alongside an apparently legitimate app.

The sages say, phones are far too weedy to mine.

A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that a modern quad-core phone can probably manage around 1 MHash/s if you don't mind it getting hot and having the battery life of a mayfly on crystal meth, or just running while the thing's charging.

There's no reason why a mobile phone only altcoin couldn't be created, with all the parameters tweaked to have reasonable behaviour on such limited resources.

It'd take a bit of extra smarts to stop people building mining rigs that merely pretended to be phones, but the phone system has been created to prevent fraud and enforce identity so the network has the requisite tools.

Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should - a lesson John Law may not quite have learned yet - but the idea of a mobile-only cash ecosystem may open up more efficient in-game purchases, or a way to stop phone spam by charging for received texts or calls from unknown numbers.

Shark soup, sunny dog and phone crisis images via Shutterstock.