Every time somebody pays for a clock edge they hand this machine a byte. It rotates what it is holding, folds the new byte in, and puts the answer on its output port. Rotating first is the whole design: the number it shows depends on the order people arrived in, so it is a signature of the exact history and nobody can produce it without having lived through the same one.
One call to snapshot() returns all of it. Nothing here
is cached, indexed or stored by us: whatever this page shows, the
contract said.
A chip advances when somebody pays for the next edge, and nothing
about it earns: step() is not payable and the chip holds
no balance. The reserve is what makes wanting the next edge cheaper.
What it pays for is work. The only way to be paid by it is to make this machine take a cycle; holding the token does nothing in that contract and there is no function that would let it.
step() on the chip directly and pay only the gas. That
path is open to everybody and always will be.
The chip has no owner and its program cannot be rewritten. The reserve has one function that changes anything, no owner, no pause and no setter, so once a token is in it the only way out is to somebody who advanced the chip.