[EthanHeilman]

Why not ASICs, they used to have their own fab.

Rumors:

* Intel prints chips for them.

* Sun Microsystems put special instruction into their CPUs to aid in faster decryption efforts.

If I was designing such a system I'd stick a bunch of GOST, AES, SHA256, Blowfish ... brute forcing cores embedded in a small reconfigurable mesh. It would make a very effective multipurpose brute forcing device.

Antminer S2-b4 can do 2 trillion hashes a second and costs 1200 USD[0]. Imagine you are the NSA with tens of billions of dollars to spend on rigs, access to major fabs and you've been attacking crypto for the last 60 years.

[0]: https://bitmaintech.com/productDetail.htm?pid=00020140926075...