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production cost maybe? But yea, I wonder too. Anyways, it would be really nice for mining strange algorithms, especially if at that "price"

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No, this is targeted towards consumer, mobile devices. For cryptographic use you want small process, high bin, typically extremely large and expensive chips. The thing has integrated LED drivers, it's about as far from what you want for that application as you can get.

Quite handy for covert data exfiltration by modulating a "power" LED, though.

Probably easier to use the GPIO in your micro controller to transmit it with RF, unless you've also designed a Faraday cage phone.

The UART on this speaks IrDA natively, which would be a much more attractive target for covert exfiltration.

I (scare-)quoted the price in the title now, to indicate that it's not very certain.

The FPGA in question seems to cost less than $2 here in Sweden in unit quantities (from Digi-Key: http://www.digikey.se/product-detail/en/ICE40UL1K-SWG16ITR50...), so at least that component by itself doesn't have to blow up the parts cost.

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