|
January 27, 2014, 11:11:09 AM |
|
Theoretically (as in, out of my uneducated ass), I suppose you could increase the number of passes required for SHA-256 password schemes to ridiculous lengths. If it takes 500 quintillion hashes to unlock something, it'd be practically impossible to brute-force for the foreseeable future except by other former miners, and maybe the NSA if they decide it's worth their time to spend resources on this bizarre cryptographic "super-niche." Since it's basically useless except as a heat source, you can have your ASICs going 24/7 to encrypt (and decrypt) sensitive documents for corporations, though I'm unsure if you can distribute that in a way where the data isn't revealed to the encryptors/decrypters (though I suppose you get some psuedo-security by decentralizing the work).
With the Scrypt ASICs coming out, assuming they show substantial improvement and become obsolete or irrelevant, you could combine the two ASICs to create a SHA-256/Scrypt hybrid scheme, where they work in parallel on the two sets of problems.
|