Zcash Touts Nuclear Waste-Fueled Random Number Generator

[Domithra]

Just days after the IMF chief warned that cryptocurrency mining was an environmental hazard, Zcash enthusiasts said, ‘hold my beer.’ The developers at the Powers of Tau Ceremony, a ritual coined by a couple of Zcash engineers, incorporated a radioactive artifact from the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown — more specifically from the Chernobyl Unit 4 nuclear reactor — as the entropy source in a hardware random-number generator for cryptographic use.
Developers Ryan Pierce alongside Andrew Miller took the device airborne in a Piper Cherokee aircraft in an attempt to “reduce the risk of side-channel attacks,” all the while assuring that the radioactivity emitted from the tube that was recovered from the “Chernobyl Exclusion Zone” and used in the device — “a geiger counter and a Chernobyl reactor graphite sample” — was nonconsequential, saying it was only slightly higher than “normal background radiation