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Given that you can buy these Bitcoin miners and they are specialised ASICs for calculating SHA256 hashes in a specific way to find the first acceptable nonce, i
by starfallg 7y ago
Given that you can buy these Bitcoin miners and they are specialised ASICs for calculating SHA256 hashes in a specific way to find the first acceptable nonce, it's unlikely that Bitcoin mining hardware can be repurposed in this way.
- oarsinsync 7y agoCorrect. The vast majority of bitcoin miners are specialised ASICs for calculating BTC related hashes explicitly, and nothing else. Optimised for efficiency of the task at hand.
- mr__y 7y agoOn the other hand a manufacturer capable of designing and producing SHA-256 chips could be also capable of designing and manufacturing $other_commonly_used_hash_algo chips allowing for brute-forcing $other_commonly_used_hash_algo encoded passwords. The same manufacturer/design team could also probably prepare $popular_block_cipher chips. So, while BTC miner chips would not be useful themselves, having an industry capable of creating those chips is.