i just came across this, this evening
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20150294308A1/en?oq=20150294308https://globaldossier.uspto.gov/#/result/publication/US/20150294308/117887Abstract
Mining circuitry may be used to mine digital currency such as bitcoins by computing solutions to a cryptographic puzzle. Successful computation of a solution to the cryptographic puzzle may provide a reward of the digital currency. The mining circuitry may partition the mined reward between a first digital wallet and a second digital wallet. The first digital wallet may be user-provided, whereas the second digital wallet may be hardcoded into the dedicated mining circuitry. The mining circuitry may include control circuitry and multiple processing core circuits. The control circuitry may control the processing cores to solve the cryptographic puzzle via exhaustive search over possible inputs to the cryptographic puzzle.
Digital Currency Mining Circuitry with a devfee built into the circuit itself so as you mine with the hardware, it also mines for the developer.
i don't see this as being successful, unless the hardware is free.
(oops... had wrong link for google... fixed)
