option8 ((Slashdot reader #16,509) writes: TL;DR: Mining Bitcoin on a 1MHz 8-bit processor will cost you more than the world's combined economies, and take roughly 256 trillion years.
"But it could happen tomorrow. It's a lottery, after all," explains the blog post (describing this mad scientist as a hardware hacker and "self-taught maker", determined to mine bitcoin "in what must be the slowest possible way. I call it 8BITCOIN....")

There's also a Twitch.TV stream, with some appropriate 8-bit music, and the blog post ends by including his own bitcoin address, "If you feel like you absolutely must throw some money at me and this project."

"Upon doing some research, I found that, not only were other 8-bit platforms being put to the task, but other, even more obscure and outdated hardware. An IBM 1401 from the 1960s, a rebuilt Apollo Guidance Computer, and even one deranged individual who demonstrated the hashing algorithm by hand. It turns out, those examples all come from the same deranged individual, Ken Shirriff."

Long-time Slashdot reader Ken McE shared a video of a new working prototype for a wearable tail.

Engadget reports: There are lots of companies who make wearable tails for humans, but they're usually for cosplay or other entertainment pursuits. Researchers at Keio University in Japan have created a wearable animated tail that promises to genuinely augment the wearer's capabilities -- not just appearance -- by improving their balance and agility.

The easiest way to understand what inspired this creation is to watch a video of monkeys effortlessly leaping from tree to tree. Their tails not only serve as an additional limb for grasping branches but also help them reposition their bodies mid-flight for a safe landing by shifting the monkey's center of balance as it moves. The Arque tail, as it's been named, does essentially the same thing for humans, although leaping from the highest branches of a tree isn't recommended just yet.... Inside the tail are a set of four artificial muscles powered by compressed air that contract and expand in different combinations to move and curl the tail in any direction.
Though the researchers have built a prototype, their video describes it as a "proposed tail" -- specifically, an artificial biomimicry-inspired anthropomorphic one. So how exactly would the tail controlled externally? The video describes its ability "to passively provide forces to the user's body based on the estimated center of gravity of his posture in order to correct his body balance." So basically, the tail would have a mind of its own, like the arms of Doctor Octopus?

"We also demonstrated a different approach for using the tail other than equilibrium maintenance, which is to change the center of mass of the user to off-balance his posture."

Long-time Slashdot reader Huxley_Dunsany writes: After much work rebuilding and upgrading it, my Macintosh SE/30 from 1989 is now connected via Ethernet to the Web, and is hosting a simple website and old-style "guestbook." The site has been online for a few days (other than semi-frequent reboots of the system when it gets overloaded with requests), and has served nearly 20,000 visitors. For a machine with a 16MHz CPU and 68 megabytes of ram, it's held up remarkably well!

I'm basically inviting a "Slashdotting" of my old Mac, but I thought this project might bring a few smiles here. Enjoy!
"Awesome," wrote one visitor in the guestbook, adding "You should join a webring!"

An anonymous reader quotes The Verge: Cybersecurity stock images are predictable at this point: a hooded man with a shadowy face in front of a keyboard or a mysterious person in front of binary code. A design firm called OpenIDEO thinks these images can be better, so it's hosting a contest to entice visual creators to make images that are eye-catching, informative, and clear.

"Cybersecurity," which could mean data breaches, hacks, or policy changes, is a difficult concept to visually represent, so OpenIDEO is going to reward creators for their work. The group, in association with a private organization called the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, issued an open call late last month for cybersecurity-related image submissions with plans to award $7,000 to up to five people.
The contest rules specify they're not looking for "Overused, stereotypical, fear-inducing images of cybersecurity. These create personal misperceptions and aversions, and may lead to a series of repercussions regarding public understanding of cybersecurity and data safety." And there's even a helpful collection of images providing examples of "What we're not looking for."

The deadline for submissions in August 16th, and all finalists must agree to using a Creative Commons license. "We believe that this type of licensing helps ensure your work reaches the widest possible audience..."

By the end of the year, Stop & Shop will have installed 500 "giant, gray, aisle-patrolling robots" in its chains of stores, reports Mashable, starting in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Jersey.

"Attention shoppers: I've seen the future of grocery store technology, and let me tell you, we can do better." Each of the robots weighs a massive 140-pounds and costs a whopping $35,000. Oddly, all of the robots are named Marty, and atop their tall frames -- which tower over my own 5 foot, 3 inch stature -- rests a large pair of google eyes. You know, so as not to come off as complete faceless, emotionless, lifeless bots. If you're confused as to what these rolling mechanical columns do, Martys also wear the following description on their bodies like a name tag:

This store is monitored by Marty for your safety. Marty is an autonomous robot that uses image capturing technology to report spills, debris, and other potential hazards to store employees to improve your shopping experience.

Essentially, once Marty identifies a hazard using its sensors, it stops in its tracks, changes its signature operating lights from blue to yellow, and repeatedly announces "caution, hazard detected," in English and Spanish. One of several catches to their existence, however, is that the robots don't actually clean anything...

[O]ne of the robot's major flaws that its sensors appear to treat each hazard with the same level of caution. A harmless bottle cap or errant piece of cilantro will elicit the same response as a spill of clear liquid that someone could genuinely slip and injure themselves on, which means that in certain cases an employee may have to take time that could be spent interacting with a customer to walk across the store and grab a puny little grape that escaped a bag.
One customer complained on Twitter that the robot "just roams around and makes ominous beeps constantly."

And one employee confided told the New Food Economy site that "It's really not doing much of anything besides getting in the way."

An anonymous reader quotes the New York Post: John McAfee of antivirus software fame has arrived in London from the Dominican Republic, where he had been detained for several days with his wife and several others for entering the Caribbean nation with a cache of weapons on his yacht, his lawyer said Friday. Authorities "asked him where he wanted to go, and he decided on London," his attorney Candido Simon told Reuters....

While in custody, McAfee retweeted a photo posted by his wife of himself sitting shirtless in a cell... [And another shirtless photo with his cellmate.] "My crime is not filing tax returns -- not a crime. The rest is propaganda by the U.S. government to silence me..." he wrote in a July 19 tweet.
In fact, McAfee now "is laying the blame on the CIA and 'an extremely corrupt Bahamian official,'" CNET reports.

McAfee "confessed in a tweetstorm earlier this year that he hasn't paid the IRS in eight years," reports the New York Daily News, adding that this week McAfee was "essentially deported" to London. "He previously fled to Guatemala from Belize when he was sought for questioning concerning the murder of a neighbor, Reuters previously reported." Earlier this month, Reuters also reported that McAfee had again fled to Cuba "after suspecting that U.S. law enforcement was trying to extradite him from the Bahamas."

CNET also quotes McAfee as saying that he now wants to run simultaneous campaigns to be both president of the United States and Prime Minister of England. "I believe I am one of the few people stil alive who could qualify for the combined position."

An anonymous reader quotes the New York Post: The National Weather Service in Omaha, Nebraska, baked biscuits in a car Friday amid a major heat wave in the Northeast and Midwest... Within 45 minutes, the dough had begun to rise, the NWS said. After an hour, the pan had reached 175 degrees, and the tops of the biscuits were at 153 degrees.

"This is a good time to remind everyone that your car does in fact get deadly hot. Look before you lock!," the NWS said... After baking in the sun for nearly eight hours, the biscuits were edible, but the middle remained "pretty doughy." The pan maxed out at a blazing 185 degrees.

An anonymous reader quotes the Atlantic: Suze Orman wants young people to stop "peeing" away millions of dollars on coffee. Last month, the personal-finance celebrity ignited a controversy on social media when a video she starred in for CNBC targeted a familiar villain: kids these days and their silly $5 lattes. Because brewing coffee at home is less expensive, Orman argued, purchasing it elsewhere is tantamount to flushing money away, which makes it a worthy symbol of Millennials' squandered resources...

In the face of coffee shaming, young people usually point to things like student loans and housing prices as the true source of the generation's instability, not their $100-a-month cold-brew habits... Orman and her compatriots now receive widespread pushback when denigrating coffee aficionados, a change that reflects the shifting intergenerational tensions that are frequently a feature of the post-Great Recession personal-finance genre. The industry posits that many of the sweeping generational trends affecting Americans' personal stability -- student-loan debt, housing insecurity, the precarity of the gig economy -- are actually the fault of modernity's encouragement of undisciplined individual largesse. In reality, those phenomena are largely the province of Baby Boomers, whose policies set future generations on a much tougher road than their own. With every passing year, it becomes harder to sell the idea that the problems are simply with each American as a person, instead of with the system they live in. "There's a reason for this blame-the-victim talk" in personal-finance advice, the journalist Helaine Olen wrote recently. "It lets society off the hook. Instead of getting angry at the economics of our second gilded age, many end up furious with themselves."

That misdirection is useful for people in power, including self-help gurus who want to sell books... [W]hen it comes to money, says Laura Vanderkam, the author of All the Money in the World: What the Happiest People Know About Getting and Spending, there are usually only a couple of things that actually make a difference in how stable people are. It's the big stuff: how much you make, how much you pay for housing, whether or not you pay for a car.

"The World Chess Federation (FIDE) announced Saturday that it caught chess grandmaster Igors Rausis cheating during a tournament in France," writes Bleacher Report. According to ESPN.com, the FIDE noted that Rausis was "caught red-handed using his phone during a game." A cellphone was found in a toilet that Rausis had used during the competition, and Rausis later admitted to using it to cheat.

Per Chess.com, Rausis said the following regarding the scandal: "I simply lost my mind yesterday. I confirmed the fact of using my phone during the game by written [statement]. What could I say more? ... At least what I committed yesterday is a good lesson, not for me -- I played my last game of chess already...."

The 58-year-old Rausis was born in the Soviet Union and currently represents the Czech Republic after previously representing Latvia and Bangladesh. Rausis became a grandmaster in 1992, and he is the No. 53 ranked chess player in the world, according to the FIDE.
It's not the first time this has happened. A Georgian national chess champion was also found to be cheating with an iPhone hidden in a toilet stall more than four years ago. But in this case, "The 58-year-old Latvian-Czech grandmaster had raised suspicions after he increased his rating in recent years to almost 2700," reports Chess.com.

The director-general of the FIDE said they've now reported Rausis to the French police, and that they'd been suspicious of him for a long time. "It is impossible to completely eliminate the cheating, but the risk of being caught has increased significantly, and the penalties will become much more significant."

The Hustle profiles a community for whom entering online sweepstakes are a way of life. And they "consistently land hundreds of prizes year after year -- vacation packages, cars, event tickets, electronics, and cash -- and their hauls sometimes amount to tens of thousands of dollars..."

"Winning online sweepstakes is supposedly an act of pure luck -- but some contestants claim to have it down to a science." According to an informal poll of 585 respondents, roughly half of all regular sweepers report winnings equivalent to $1,250 or more per year; a quarter win $3k+ in prizes. What about that small 4% fraction that rakes in more than $12k per year in prizes? Are they just extraordinarily lucky or do they have some kind of system that increases their odds of locking down that dream vacation? To find out, we spoke with several women who have collectively made more than $500k winning contests online...

Carolyn Wilman (AKA, the "Contest Queen") has raked in $250k in her sweepstaking career using a quantitative strategy based on sheer volume:

- She creates a new email specifically for sweepstakes.

- She uses sweepstake aggregators (resources that list thousands of legitimate promotions in one location) to find form-based competitions.

- She uses software to auto-fill hundreds of entry forms with her information.

In a one hour-long sitting, with a few clicks, Wilman can enter more than 200 sweepstakes. The goal is two-fold: To enter as many contests as humanly possible, and to minimize the amount of time it takes to do it. "Luck has nothing to do with winning," she says. "It all comes down to effort and persistence."

Her persistence has paid off. In her best month, she won 83 prizes; in her best year, earnings topped $60k. Highlights include a $40k vacation package to the 2010 winter Olympics, a trip to London to visit the set of Harry Potter, and tickets to the British Open in Scotland.
One member of the "sweeper" community brags that they don't engage in highly risky behavior -- "But with sweepstakes, I can pretty much guarantee I'll win."

Design firm Baggar writes: A user assumes certain actions to be in a certain place or color because interface designers worldwide have been collaboratively educating users and feeding them these design-patterns. But what happens if we poke all good practice with a stick and stir it up? What if we don't respect our self-created rules and expectations, and do everything the other way around?

That's exactly why we created User Inyerface: An interface that expects you to do the hard work instead of doing it for you. We created a simple interface, that isn't your friend. An interface that doesn't want to please you. An interface that has no clue and no rules.

The task is simple: complete the forms as fast as you can. It might suck the life out of you, but it is possible if you simply look and forget everything you have grown accustomed to.
Ars Technica collected some screenshots of their favorite screens, calling it "a hilariously and deliberately difficult-to-use website created to show just how much we rely on past habits and design conventions to interact with the Web... a gauntlet of nearly impossible-to-parse interactions that are as funny as they are infuriating."

At one point, the site gave me a warning that my chosen password "was not unsafe."

NPR notes today's "supercomputer-driven" weather modelling can crunch huge amounts of data to accurately forecast the weather a week in advance -- pointing out that "a six-day weather forecast today is as good as a two-day forecast was in the 1970s."

Here's some highlights from their interview with Andrew Blum, author of The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast : One of the things that's happened as the scale in the system has shifted to the computers is that it's no longer bound by past experience. It's no longer, the meteorologists say, "Well, this happened in the past, we can expect it to happen again." We're more ready for these new extremes because we're not held down by past expectations...

The models are really a kind of ongoing concern. ... They run ahead in time, and then every six hours or every 12 hours, they compare their own forecast with the latest observations. And so the models in reality are ... sort of dancing together, where the model makes a forecast and it's corrected slightly by the observations that are coming in...

It's definitely run by individual nations -- but individual nations with their systems tied together... It's a 150-year-old system of governments collaborating with each other as a global public good... The positive example from last month was with Cyclone Fani in India. And this was a very similar storm to one 20 years ago, that tens of thousands of people had died. This time around, the forecast came far enough in advance and with enough confidence that the Indian government was able to move a million people out of the way.

"An updated version of the classic board game Monopoly has done away with cash entirely and now uses a voice-activated AI banker instead," reports MarketWatch, asking whether this teaches game-players the wrong lessons: This is not the first time Monopoly has reflected today's cashless world. A 2006 edition of the game in the United Kingdom featured Visa-branded credit cards instead of paper play money. Similar versions of the game are also available in the U.S. Last year, Hasbro even released a version called Monopoly for Millennials in which players compete to buy experiences rather than real estate.

The new technology may appeal to kids used to interacting with voice-activated digital assistants such as Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri or Microsoft's Cortana. Financial experts, however, remained on the fence about the game's educational value... By removing the physical element of the game, some argue that Monopoly's usefulness as a tool to teach children about money is reduced. "Removing physical Monopoly money reduces the educational benefit of the game by glossing over the important task of learning to manage and count your money," said Nicole Strbich, director of financial planning at Buckingham Advisors in Dayton, Ohio.
In the new version of the game, "The omnipotent talking top hat also will yell, 'YOU'RE BANKRUPT!' at you," reports CNET...

"Hey, Monopoly cheaters. Here's a version that won't let you sneak extra hundreds from the bank or neglect to pay your taxes."

The Hustle tells the story of a mysterious legend who "produced thousands of the ugliest counterfeit $1 bills ever made...so poorly done that the Secret Service thought the perpetrator was intentionally mocking them" -- using a small hand-driven printing press in his kitchen: It was printed on cheap bond paper that could be found at any stationary store. The serial numbers were "fuzzy" and misaligned, the Secret Service later said. George Washington's likeness was "clumsily retouched, murky and deathlike," with black blotches for eyes. And just for good measure, the ex-president's name was misspelled "Wahsington"...

He also never spent money in the same place twice: His "hits" spanned subway stations, dime stores, and tavern owners all over Manhattan. Investigators set up a map of New York in their office, marking each $1 counterfeit location with a red thumbtack. They handed out some 200,000 warning placards at 10,000 stores. They tracked down dozens of folks who'd spent the bills. But 10 years came and went, and the search for Mister 880 turned into the largest and most expensive counterfeit investigation in Secret Service history. By 1947, the Secret Service had documented some $7,000 of the distinctively terrible fake $1 bills -- about 5% of the $137,318 of fake currency estimated to be in circulation nation-wide. As it turned out, the worst counterfeiter in history was also the most elusive...

Agents busted into the brownstone, expecting to find a criminal mastermind. Instead, they were greeted by a jovial 73-year-old -- "5'3" tall, [with a] lean hard muscled frame, a healthy pink face, bright blue eyes, a shiny bald dome, a fringe of snowy hair over his ears, a wispy white mustache, and hardly any teeth." It was Emerich Jeuttner, the old junk collector. Juettner seemed unfazed and endearingly aloof. When answering questions, he'd pause and offer a toothless grin...

"They were only $1 bills. I never gave more than one of them to any one person, so nobody ever lost more than $1."
The likeable 73-year-old was given a lenient sentence of 1 year and 1 day, the article points out -- meaning Jeuttner was eligible for parole after four months. And he was given a fine of exactly $1.

Jeuttner then sold the rights to his life story for a 1950 film (which won an Academy Award) -- bringing him more money than he'd earned during all of his years as a counterfeiter.

Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot brings us news about the southern hemisphere of Mars: The University of Arizona HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) has posted a photo of curious chevron shapes in southeast Hellas Planitia that are the result of "a complex story of dunes, lava, and wind."

"Enterprising viewers will make the discovery that these features look conspicuously like a famous logo..."
RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) adds that "For those wanting to try to find it on a Mars map, it's at Latitude (centered) -49.325Â Longitude (East) 85.331Â."

Since 2005 Randall Munroe has been the author/illustrator of the popular nerdy comic strip XKCD -- and he's now planning to publish "the world's least useful self-help book." How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems offers readers a third choice beyond simply doing things either the right way or the wrong way: "a way so monumentally bad that no one would ever try it," according to a new page at XKCD.com: It describes how to cross a river by removing all the water, outlines some of the many uses for lava around the home, and teaches you how to use experimental military research to ensure that your friends will never again ask you to help them move.
To promote the book Munroe has already scheduled visits in 14 nerd-friendly cities (including New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, and Raleigh). But a final 15th city will be chosen "based on the results of a challenge..." The challenge: Write the best story using nothing but book covers. Arrange the titles of your favorite books into sentences that tell a story, assemble a single continuous line of people holding up the covers, and take a photo or video documenting your feat.

You can make the story as long as you want, but each book needs to be held by a different human. Creative grammar is fine, and you'll get extra credit for including as many books and people as possible.
Photos should be either shared on social media with the hashtag #howtoxkcd, or emailed to that address on Gmail. "Submit your entry between June 10 and July 31," explains the site, adding that a winner will be announced in August.

"Make sure to include your location (city/state, US only) so we know where to find you!"

"It took 10 months to get it done, but the Granite State is now officially a Geeky State," writes Concord Monitor science reporter David Brooks.

"The latest New Hampshire Historical Highway Marker, celebrating the creation of the BASIC computer language at Dartmouth in 1964, has officially been installed. Everybody who has ever typed a GOTO command can feel proud..." Last August, I wrote in this column that the 255 official historical markers placed alongside state roads told us enough about covered bridges and birthplaces of famous people but not enough about geekiness. Since anybody can submit a suggestion for a new sign, I thought I'd give it a shot.

The creation of BASIC, the first programing language designed to let newbies dip their intellectual toes into the cutting-edge world of software, seemed the obvious candidate. Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code has probably has done more to introduce more people to computer programming than anything ever created. That includes me: The only functioning programs I've ever created were in vanilla BASIC, and I still recall the great satisfaction of typing 100 END...

But BASIC wasn't just a toy for classrooms. It proved robust enough to survive for decades, helping launch Microsoft along the way, and there are descendants still in use today. In short, it's way more important than any covered bridge.
The campaign for the marker was supported by Thomas Kurtz, the retired Dartmouth math professor who'd created BASIC along with the late John Kemeny. "Our original idea was to mention both BASIC and the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System, an early system by which far-flung computers could share resources. They were created hand-in-hand as part of Kemeny's idea of putting computing in the hands of the unwashed masses.

"However, the N.H. Division of Historical Resources, which has decades of experience creating these markers, said it would be too hard to cram both concepts into the limited verbiage of a sign."

The highway marker calls BASIC "the first user-friendly computer programming languages... BASIC made computer programming accessible to college students and, with the later popularity of personal computers, to users everywhere. It became the standard way that people all over the world learned to program computers, and variants of BASIC are still in use today."

In the original submission, an anonymous Slashdot reader notes that last month, Manchester New Hampshire also unveiled a statue of Ralph Baer, whose team built the first home video game sold as Magnavox Odyssey, sitting on a park bench. "The Granite State isn't shy about its geek side."

"Caterpillar Inc. is trying to stop a tiny cafe from using the word cat," reports Fast Company.

Long-time Slashdot reader UnknowingFool writes: Caterpillar wishes to cancels the coffee shop's trademark claiming that the trademark on shop's apparel and footwear is too similar to theirs and would cause confusion for consumers. For reference, the coffee shop's t-shirts and merchandise feature a cat and a cloud. This is not the first time Caterpillar has made dubious trademark claims on "Cat" or "Caterpillar".
"Another small business faces a crazy legal challenge from a big company that should know better..." writes Inc. "There are literally hundreds of trademarks listed that include the word cat and that are intended for clothing. Without having a trademark or license, technically Cat & Cloud wouldn't be able to sell that merchandise without permission (whether from Caterpillar or one of the many other companies with cat-related trademarks for clothing)."

The coffee shop responded by setting up a GoFundMe campaign (which is now "trending" and has so far raised $12,482) for their legal defense.

They're arguing that Caterpillar's efforts "would effectively set the precedent for them to OWN the word 'cat', making it un-useable by any business in the US."

"I am not saying that Neal Stephenson is Satoshi Nakamoto," writes the features editor at Reason. "What I am saying is: Would it really be surprising if he were?"

This prompted a strong rebuke from CCN Markets: The article starts, "Consider the possibility that Neal Stephenson is Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin."

Let's not do that. That's like saying let's consider the possibility that anyone at all is Satoshi Nakamoto. In one respect, it doesn't matter. In another, it's exhausting the lengths people will go with this... if someone doesn't advance the idea that they are Satoshi Nakamoto themselves, there's no reason to put that sort of grief upon them. If someone is just brilliant, you can tell them that without insinuating that they invented the blockchain and Bitcoin.... You don't just off-handedly claim someone might be Satoshi Nakamoto. There needs to be a reason.
Reason had written that "For nearly three decades, Stephenson's novels have displayed an obsessive, technically astute fascination with cryptography, digital currency, the social and technological infrastructure of a post-government world, and Asian culture," and that the science fiction author "described the core concepts of cryptocurrency years before Bitcoin became a technical reality."

They also note later that "Satoshi Nakamoto's initials are SN; Neal Stephenson's are NS."

Coin Telegraph writes that the question "has seemingly come to a head over the last couple of months, as a number of people have gone a step further" -- not only publicly claiming to be the creator of bitcoin, but even filing copyright and trademark claims. Their list of "Satoshi posers" includes Craig Wright, Wei Liu, and the brother of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. (And another new theory also suggests "global criminal kingpin" Paul Le Roux, the creator of encryption software E4M and TrueCrypt.

Long-time Slashddot reader Rei writes: On the face of it, sodium seems like about the worst thing you could make a wire out of — it oxidizes rapidly in air, releases hot hydrogen gas in water, melts at 97.8 degrees Centigrade, and has virtually no tensile strength. Yet, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Nacon Corporation did just that — producing thousands of kilometers of high-gauge sodium wiring for electrical utilities — and it worked surprisingly well.

While sodium has three times the (volumetric) resistivity of copper and nearly double that of alumium, its incredibly low density gives it a gravimetric resistivity less than a third of copper and half of alumium. Priced similar to alumium per unit resistivity (and much cheaper than copper), limitless, and with almost no environmental impact apart from its production energy consumption, sodium wiring proved to be much more flexible without the fatigue or installation damage risks of alumium. The polyethylene insulation proved to offer sufficient tensile strength on its own to safely pull the wire through conduits, while matching its thermal expansion coefficient. The wiring proved to have tamer responses to both over-current (no insulation burnoff) and over-voltage (high corona inception voltage) scenarios than alumium as well. Meanwhile, "accidental cutting" tests, such as with a backhoe, showed that such events posed no greater danger than cutting copper or alumium cabling. Reliability results in operation were mixed — while few reliability problems were reported with the cables themselves, the low-voltage variety of Nacon cables appeared to have unreliable end connectors, causing some of the cabling to need to be repaired during 13 years of utility-scale testing.

Ultimately, it was economics, not technical factors, that doomed sodium wiring. Lifecycle costs, at 1970s pricing, showed that using sodium wiring was similar to or slightly more expensive for utilities than using alumium. Without an unambiguous and significant economic case to justify taking on the risks of going larger scale, there was a lack of utility interest, and Nacon ceased production.