Open source is Ayn Rand's 1949 movie & 1943 novel The Fountainhead: be your own independent architect, do what you love to do, put it out there, see if anyone else loves it too, find your birds of a feather, flock together, and f— everyone else, especially your competitors on similar projects.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_gain

The key words here are: "financial assets" and "intangible assets". Bitcoin mining is both of these.

from Capital gain's Wikipedia article:

The gain is the difference between 1) the selling price of the financial asset after the mathematics (or after WoW achievement) and 2) the purchase price of the intangible asset before the mathematics (or before the WoW achievement).

Keep track of expenses (e.g., equipment, floor space rental, electricity consumption) that serve as the investment for the BitCoin mining. This comes off the bottom-line profit. Otherwise, you would pay 'income' taxes on your 'outflow'.

flying electric scooter or flying electric motorcycle maybe, but no flight via pedal-only power means not a flying bicycle

electric scooter or motorcycle maybe, but no flight via manual pedal-power-only means not a flying bicycle

Well, The Police did put out an album entitled Ghost in the Machine, so perhaps that qualifies as Borg-Lite.

It is very difficult to make money in discovering something new. The EU & USA governments have already spent themselves to the max, so they cannot provide, say, a trillion dollars per year for needed R&D. The VCs like to pursue something either narcissistic or advertising based (or preferably both), because that is what they understand the most and looks like easy money.

If 1960s TANG was orange-flavored, what flavor will 2020s TANG be?

After having read several textbooks on BASIC, 8080 machine code, and 6502 machine code before I had access to a computer in rural Indiana, I wrote hand-assembled 6502 machine code by hand and POKED it in as binary numbers into RAM via BASIC. (By that point, I was bored by writing programs in mere interpreted BASIC.) Within a year, I had built my own 8088 IBM PC clone and wrote my own 8088 assembler in Turbo Pascal.

... turns over in its grave.

jraphic interchange format (not to be confused with Jurassic interchange format), whereas GIF with hard G stands for graphic interchange format.

No, its the pastel glop served at the restaurant during the restaurant in the 1985 Terry Gilliam film _Brazil_.

Derived: at least one noncosmetic change from the antecedent so that the derived FSM produces at least one different output from the same inputs in the same accumulated context in the antecedent FSM.
Isomorphic: the commonplace mathematical definition: Two FSMs are isomorphic if they both produce the pairwise-same outputs when given the pairwise-same inputs within the corresponding pairwise-same accumulated context. You are correct to observe that derived and isomorphic are not synonyms.

I am glad that you mentioned a patent's recitation of apparatus as being presumptively conclusive: from the footnote 18 of In re Bilski:

The salient question here is whether the assemblage of 2 pieces of paper stapled together is (still) an apparatus that is an article of manufacture that evokes the correct magic words to become patent eligible under Title 35 USC 101 or 103 (as that assemblage was post-1888 & post-1907). Similarly, the salient question is whether the assemblage of an FSM loaded transiently into an FPGA enjoys enough of the patent-eligibility status as an apparatus that is an article of assembly manufacture as when that same FSM lithographed onto a silicon die as an article of chemical manufacture. If it does, then does that same* FSM represented by sequential imperative instructions in a processor enjoy the same patent-eligibility status? If transiently-stored FSM in an FPGA were in fact found to be definitively patent eligible but that same transiently-stored FSM represented as imperative instructions is patent-ineligible, then what portion of Title 35 USC 101 or 103 implicitly inhibits or overtly prohibits the process of imperative instructions being patent-eligible subject matter, but conversely allows that same FSM to be patent-eligible subject matter when transliterated into a netlist loaded transiently into an FPGA or lithographed (a form of mere printing as words in a book) onto a silicon die. It seems that A) what is sauce for cooking the imperative goose is B) sauce for cooking the lithographed gander as well [and as well C) for the netlist gosling begat by the goose's fleeting transience & the gander's logic gates]. An FSM is an FSM is an FSM.

* Here a "same" FSM is topologically isomorphic with the pairwise-same outputs for the pairwise-same inputs in the pairwise-same accumulated context, even if transliterated into variant encodings: imperative instructions versus FPGA netlist versus silicon-die lithography.

For example, Intel not only patents the lithography process of silicon dies of x86 processors, but the logic circuit therein as well in separate patents. But that logic circuit can be implemented in a sufficiently large FPGA, which has software-like characteristics that strongly resemble loading a different sequential imperative machine-code program into a general-purpose imperative-machine-code processor, but with the key difference being the lack of sequential imperative instructions in the FPGA or lithographed IC (ignoring the sequentialness of pulsed timing waves of concurrent gate-flipping in the progress of computation in the FPGA or lithographed IC.)

Does teaching an administrative assistant a sufficiently-different shorthand script (or stenotype chorded keyboard) enable her to write in a different set of regular expressions that may be nonisomorphic to the original set of regular-expression shorthand-script?