I suggest you read the FAQs and Pocket Manifesto. It's not a purely economic proposition. Not all cryptos are PoW. And, like compound interest, things accrue over time. Lastly, it depends on your future view of where crypto is going versus the US dollar. In some ways the Pocket Miner can be thought of as a device for converting US dollars to crypto in a friendly way; do that conversion now (and over time) and perhaps benefit later? It depends on your view of where crypto is going.
I read the FAQ and Pocket Manifesto. It provides zero information on the maximum hashrate of your device on various PoW systems. So the user has no idea whether, given current blockchain hashrates and coin prices, they can expect to make $0.01 per day or $0.00001 per day. Do you have any idea?
What is the expected mining time to make 1 satoshi?
Perhaps you could state that the user can only expect to make back a small fraction of the $169 cost in a lifetime of mining, and that its primary purpose is instead that of a functional piece of art, which I think it is.
Unfortunately it cannot mine with the PoW I created [1], or I might be tempted to buy one.
Truth be told, that is exactly how I used to generate my crypto keys.
I would take 256 quarters (sometimes fewer and accept that some might be tossed more than once) and toss them to get ones and zeroes. Tedious, and somewhat error prone (see below). Then do the calculations by hand, also somewhat tedious and error prone.
There is plenty of research that demonstrates that humans are poor at tossing coins in an unbiased way. People cheat (especially if money hangs on the outcome) and people are also lazy, so that the first toss is vigorous and diligent, and so the coin tumbles end-over-end many times before coming to rest for a result (heads or tails), but after several hundred tosses, the vigor and diligence are gone and the coin barely leaves their hand.
Part of my motivation in building the Satoshi9000 was to automate this manual process and at the same time take out human bias. Which is to say, automate away the human part and automate the math of key generation. But at the same time, make it secure by having the machine air-gapped (that is, no connection to the outside world beyond a power cord) with the ability to walk-away with anything that might leave a clue as to how, why and when the machine was last used; what I refer to as "walk-away randomness" in the video. After removing the coins, SD cards (OS and user programs) and printout, what is left is little more than a motor and some wires. An adversary looking to recover your keys would have no clue as to whether the machine had ever been used, yet alone what for. Maybe it was simply used to generate a quick-pick for tomorrow's drawing of Powerball. You would have now way of knowing.
(As an aside, you could even walk away with the remaining paper roll from the printer, so an adversary would not even know how much had been printed! Also, the printer uses no ink and has no buffer/memory, which was a deliberate choice in the design.)
When I showed the machine to my son, Nate, a mechanical engineer, he thought it looked like something from a 1950's sci-fi movie like "Forbidden Planet". Back then, plastics were high-tech and new, and with the acrylic domes, the Satoshi9000 would not look out of place on the set of that movie.
He suggested that every coffee table should have one!
The case I would make for the Satoshi9000 is that its method of generating randomness is intuitively understood by anyone from five years old to ninety-five years old, technical or non-technical.
I think it would be a stretch to think you could pull a random person off the street, point to a wall of lava lamps, and ask "do you see the randomness, how does it work?" Whereas, I think if you pull a random person off the street, let them watch the Satoshi9000 do its thing, and ask "do you see the randomness, how does it work?" you might get an answer that makes sense.
That, in a nutshell, is the value proposition behind the Satoshi9000.
On an historical note, ever since dice and coins have been used by humans (thousands of years), there have been efforts to "automate" their tossing in an effort to make the toss or roll fair (unbiased). See, for example, the Vettweiss-Froitzheim Dice Tower, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vettweiss-Froitzheim_Dice_Towe...
The reason is simple. Humans are terrible sources of randomness. Especially true if money hangs on the outcome!
There are two principal components for bias of a coin or die toss/roll: 1) the coin or die itself (manufacturing defects, etc.), which if it exists is typically minuscule, and 2) the act of tossing or rolling by a human (a twist of the wrist, or a flick of the fingers), whose bias is enormous and which, as I say, is particularly pronounced if money hangs on the outcome.
The Satoshi9000 solves problem 2, the human element, by removing the human from the process altogether. Other than to press the "run" button.
I would argue that the future belongs to people who can actually make useful things! If we revert to cave dwelling (which perhaps we might given the way things are going!), then being able to flake flint tools might be a far better skill to have than being a social media "influencer".
And today, most physical products require a combination of mechanical, electronic and programming skills. Fortunately, I have all three. I suggest people likewise diligently acquire all three.
It's also fun to build useful machines.
I worked in banking all over the globe for 30 years. I did not acquire my useful skills in that profession. Money yes. Useful skills no.
I acquired my mechanical/electronics/software skills long, long ago while a postgraduate in experimental physicist at Oxford, building space instrumentation. Why did I go into banking then, you ask? Poverty is the answer!
I suspect that when the user is loading coins or dice in the machine, they would notice any dirt that was significant enough to look as though it might be a problem.
And oil deposits from your fingerprints I would imagine are so minuscule as to be insignificant in creating varying bias.
Even then, in both cases, you could wipe the objects with an alcohol swab before putting them into the shaker cups.
It could be argued, I suppose, that every micro-collision of the coin or die with the cup removes a few atoms, but I would suggest that its effect on the bias of the coin or die over time is again minuscule. Indeed, unmeasurable over a full sequence of cycles (128 for example) of the machine when generating a Bitcoin key.
But that only requires you to run the machine with the same coins/dice in the shakers for two consecutive cycles. And to repeatedly do so into you have generated the desired length of 0/1 bit stream.
Bear in mind the machine is fully configurable/programmable. You always choose what goes into the shakers, how many cycles are run, for how long they shake, how vigorously they shake, and what are done with with the 1's and 0's that result.
Implementing Von Neuman's algorithm on the Satoshi9000 is trivial.
