Upon more review of the website I'd say it's some solar panels (the thin, 10% efficiency type) some sort of e-paper like display (like on calculators, lack of product pictures makes it hard to say) and a flex-PCB with a radio segment, extremely small battery and microcontroller on it. It's a smartcard with energy efficient display, antenna, capacitor and solar panels. My guess is the radio distance will in practice never make the 300m and if it does it wouldn't for very long (think <1m bursts). I also don't think it'd last very long without sunlight (which is not widely available in my wallet). Then again I don't think it'll actually do that much. It'll basically be a nearly passive radio and run arduino like applications. On the subject of mesh networks, they can be done in a lightweight manner. They just can't be done right like that. If you'd run a generic mesh of this thing it won't be secure and robust IOW: won't be useful. I doubt it'd do consistent addressing in a true-p2p manner. It looks like it's intended more for burst bitcoin transaction flooding, nothing more. And flooding can be done without addressing so that's good. It also makes sense that they'd have "gateways" and that tracking would be helped so much. Fun but site is build to hype it up. (someone referenced Apple, very justified) It's a BITCOINcard, make no mistakes. I actually do think it's quite awesome for Bitcoin transactions, and the formfactor makes more sense. 2012/6/22 Lodewijk andri de la porte <l@odewijk.nl>

I'm currently working on something that'll do world-scale wireless mesh networking, routing included, and I can confidently say that routing over infinite amount of nodes is impossible, if only because one cannot address an infinite amount of nodes directly. If you can only send to groups it will not scale.

True P2P is also very difficult, my technique uses central for speed and falls back on smaller scale freely setup true p2p. It's also presently impossible to prevent man in the middle attacks without either a large amount of trouble (think web of trust) or a central authority (think certificate authority).

Let's hope my technique will still be relevant when I release the paper :)

-- -- Zero State mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/DoctrineZero ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE