[ekimekim]

This is one of the coolest things about these kinds of bootstrapping projects + reproducible builds IMO. One could imagine creating an incredibly simple computer directly out of discrete components. It would be big, inefficient and slow as molasses, but it could in theory conform to instruction set architecture, and you could use it to build these bootstrap programs, and you could then assert that you get the same result on your fully-understood bad computer as you get on not-fully-trusted modern hardware.