I've mounted a growing suspicion that Bitcoin was developed to create a need for SHA-256 ASICs. Well, here they are, and it's much easier to brute-force a SHA-256 hash collision than it was 5 years ago. In fact you can compute billions of hashes per second for less than the cost of a PC.
As an owner of a Bitcoin ASIC, I don't _think_ they're usable for general SHA-256. I think they're all specialized for SHA-256(SHA-256(X)), where X must be a packet in a bitcoin-specific format.
Comments
I've mounted a growing suspicion that Bitcoin was developed to create a need for SHA-256 ASICs. Well, here they are, and it's much easier to brute-force a SHA-256 hash collision than it was 5 years ago. In fact you can compute billions of hashes per second for less than the cost of a PC.
As an owner of a Bitcoin ASIC, I don't _think_ they're usable for general SHA-256. I think they're all specialized for SHA-256(SHA-256(X)), where X must be a packet in a bitcoin-specific format.
Correct, they cannot compute SHA256() or SHA256(SHA256()) of arbitrary data.
Well, I stand corrected. Especially in light of the analyses provided in sibling comments.