Jon Callas writes: -+---------------- | Did you know that if a Bitcoin is destroyed, then the value of all | the other Bitcoins goes up slightly? That's incredible. It's amazing | and leads to some emergent properties. |
I suspect that this is true of gold as well -- send it into space or bury it in dead people's bridgework and the economic value of the remaining gold surely rises at least insofar as the recovery of that lost gold, while possible, would require new work to do so. In any case, I just finished reading Glieck's _The Information_ and on page 361-362 of the hardcover edition, there is a passage discussing how Von Neumann got it wrong when he concluded that "every elementary act of information processing, every choice between two alternatives" pays an energy price. This claim was refuted by Landauer who showed that "most logical operations have no entropy cost at all. When a bit flips from zero to one, or vice versa, the information is preserved. The process is reversible. Entropy is unchanged, no heat needs to be dissipated. Only an irreversible operation increases entropy." Landauer was followed by Bennett who "pursued Landauer's principle by analyzing every kind of computer he could imagine, real and abstract, from Turing machines and messenger RNA to 'ballistic' computers, carrying signals via something like billiard balls. He confirmed that a great deal of computation can be done with no energy cost at all. In every case, Bennett found, heat dissipation occurs only when information is erased. Erasure is the irreversible operation. When the head on a Turing machine erases one square of the tape, or when an electronic computer clears a capacitor, a bit is lost and _then_ heat must be dissipated. Forgetting takes work." I may be mulling this over for some time. --dan _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list [email protected] http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
