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Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

Would this NSA capability tell them how much compute capacity China has as result of being the world center of bitcoin mining? Would it tell them whether this capability could repurposed?

Also, can any actor be certain distributed compute capacity can't be harnessed in the fashion of concentrated capacity? How many GPUs does is take to make a Cray, etc?

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> Would this NSA capability tell them how much compute capacity China has as result of being the world center of bitcoin mining? Would it tell them whether this capability could repurposed?

I suspect the answer is yes, and also that they monitor bitcoin mining rates to see if large bitcoin miners in adversarial countries suddenly disappear.

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.

Correct. 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.

On 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.

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