[dkhar]

This is a good opportunity to plug ORE, a Minecraft community specifically for this kind of thing:

http://openredstone.org/

That video on their main page is mind-boggling to me.

I have a friend who's a regular on that server, and he would occasionally explain to me things like how they take advantage of how Minecraft's redstone handling works to shave precious ticks off the latest ALU design's return time, or how they created a fully vanilla-compatible "internet," to pass data through wires between different people's machines.

They've got mods set up to copy and paste blocks, so you can build modular systems out of components and avoid repetitive block-placing, but AFAIK, everything else is vanilla. It's incredible.

[mdellabitta]

I have to ask: Has anybody managed to mine Bitcoin in Minecraft yet?

[kordless]

Interesting fact: If ENIAC was tasked with calculating the current Bitcoin hashrate, it would have to mass as much as the world's oceans and would require an earth's surface worth of solar panels to power it.

[viraptor]

Provided you set the input block, the implementation shouldn't be too hard. You need an incrementing counter included in the input, some feedback that will stop it and a huge field implementing the hashing. Likely much less complicated than the drive presented here... but much larger.