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A consumer GPU will already beat the pants off of any hardware SHA-3 implementation in the CPU for brute-forcing purposes.

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Replace Intel with nVidia or AMD, it was an exemplar manufacturer showing that big chip-makers _can_ do shady things.

But nVidia and AMD haven't sabotaged their chips to be bad at hashing (it wouldn't surprise me if they did the opposite back before ASICs thrashed the GPU bitcoin mining scene) so I don't see how your point transfers. The Powers That Be also haven't put a damper on bitcoin mining ASICs for that matter, which can do precisely one thing: calculate lots of SHA hashes faster than any other hardware.

If there's a shadow war over SHA hardware, the deep state is failing miserably.

The thing is, from the Snowden leaks, we _know_ that the NSA relies on being the most powerful hasher to identify people and things as they do. As I said, it's only a possibility that they could be actively trying to damper _consumer_ (not ASICs) SHA hash rates.

But it's unlikely. It's just a motive for them really.

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