Re:The Evolution of Bitcoin Hardware [pdf]
by simias on Friday February 02, 2018 @07:50PM
(#16295444)
Yeah I conveniently avoided to talk about that, but this is more like exploiting a weakness in the bitcoin protocol, it wasn't really meant to be feasible (and made many people angry when it was patented). That is innovation however, I grant you that.
There's a bit more to this; there's clever optimisations you can do (based on the Merkle–Damgård structure of SHA256 and the format/semantics of the data being hashed): http://www.mit.edu/~jlrubin/public/pdfs/Asicboost.pdf
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.00575.pdf