Re: USB Block Erupters as RNG sources?

d.nix <d.nix@comcast.net> writes:

Curious; anyone know much about what these inexpensive (comparatively, price seems steadily falling) ASIC Block Erupter USB Bitcoin miners can be adapted to doing? Could they be repurposed as RNG sources?

"Very little", and "no". They're basically custom Bitcoin-mining ASICs, I looked at one a while back for use in password-cracking and they're really not suited for it at all, you load a vector in and say "go" but since they're quite I/O-limited you can't easily adapt them for hash-breaking. As for RNG use, they're entirely deterministic, how would you use them as an RNG source? Peter.