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Trinary logic hardware will perform better for the PoW in low energy environments, which is extremely important for IoT. It's either ambitious and visionary, or

Trinary logic hardware will perform better for the PoW in low energy environments, which is extremely important for IoT. It's either ambitious and visionary, or else insane. Personally I think it's the former, cutting edge technology always seems insane until it doesn't. Time will be the judge.

SAI_Peregrinus 9y ago
They've never actually shown that trinary logic hardware will work better in low energy environments. CMOS transistors can be very efficient at switching, but waste power like hell if used at intermediate voltages. You REALLY don't want to be running your MOSFETs in the triode region. Which leaves the option of making trinary logic out of bi-state FETs, which requires extra die area and wastes power, or inventing an entirely new process/transistor type that is more efficient than modern CMOS and happens to be trinary... Good luck with that.
- jabronij 9y ago
  Look into radix economies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_economy
  - SAI_Peregrinus 9y ago
    I'm aware of that. I don't really see the relevance to modern semiconductor engineering for cryptographic applications though. Differences in radix economy are typically only significant for very small numbers, far smaller than those used in cryptography. The decrease in number of required transistors is rapidly overwhelmed by the increased voltages required to discriminate between states and the resistive (heat) losses incurred by having a mid-valued state. If IOTA were a cryptocurrency for vacuum tubes where the power use is dominated by the cathode heater it might make sense to use trinary. But the last time I checked pretty much every processor around used CMOS FETs... Edit: Idea! Hipstercoin - Trinary cryptocurrency for tube amplifiers! Play your vinyl and mine for hipstercoins at the same time!

SAI_Peregrinus 9y ago

They've never actually shown that trinary logic hardware will work better in low energy environments. CMOS transistors can be very efficient at switching, but waste power like hell if used at intermediate voltages. You REALLY don't want to be running your MOSFETs in the triode region. Which leaves the option of making trinary logic out of bi-state FETs, which requires extra die area and wastes power, or inventing an entirely new process/transistor type that is more efficient than modern CMOS and happens to be trinary... Good luck with that.

jabronij 9y ago
Look into radix economies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_economy
- SAI_Peregrinus 9y ago
  I'm aware of that. I don't really see the relevance to modern semiconductor engineering for cryptographic applications though. Differences in radix economy are typically only significant for very small numbers, far smaller than those used in cryptography. The decrease in number of required transistors is rapidly overwhelmed by the increased voltages required to discriminate between states and the resistive (heat) losses incurred by having a mid-valued state. If IOTA were a cryptocurrency for vacuum tubes where the power use is dominated by the cathode heater it might make sense to use trinary. But the last time I checked pretty much every processor around used CMOS FETs... Edit: Idea! Hipstercoin - Trinary cryptocurrency for tube amplifiers! Play your vinyl and mine for hipstercoins at the same time!