01-10-2020, 08:19 AM
No.
I'm sure you'll get all the reasonable answers about how ASICs work and why they wouldn't work for cracking passwords/hashes in the same way, even if you could make them fast. I'm going to go a slightly different route here and discuss the blockchain/cryptocurrency aspect of this, though only briefly, since most people just assume you know better than to suggest it instead of explain why it doesn't make sense.
There are so many reasons this wouldn't work or even couldn't work that it's difficult to actually pick the largest/most important. Probably the most major is that you can't prove a hash didn't crack but that you did do the work to test it. You also can't crack some hashes, they are simply impossible. Couple those together and you have no way to prove that a miner did anything at all unless they produce verifiable cracks, which the second point very clearly says won't happen every time. Thus, miners could spend forever and be rewarded nothing, forever. Pooling resources and producing a shared payout is also not really possible to verify, since the first point still applies, and a miner could do nothing and just report " not found ". Blockchains only work in specific cases, and they really only do ~1 thing and that's keep data from changing, based on distributed consensus. They don't serve any other purpose, they don't work the way apparently 99% of people think or assume they do, and they are not a magically trustless money printing way to get people to contribute computing power to a distributed computational project. If they were a good idea and contributed meaningfully to distributed computing, BOINC/Folding@home and Gridcoin would be doing much better than they are. Reality sets in a little faster when your computations have actual weight or are supposed to produce real results.
I'm sure you'll get all the reasonable answers about how ASICs work and why they wouldn't work for cracking passwords/hashes in the same way, even if you could make them fast. I'm going to go a slightly different route here and discuss the blockchain/cryptocurrency aspect of this, though only briefly, since most people just assume you know better than to suggest it instead of explain why it doesn't make sense.
There are so many reasons this wouldn't work or even couldn't work that it's difficult to actually pick the largest/most important. Probably the most major is that you can't prove a hash didn't crack but that you did do the work to test it. You also can't crack some hashes, they are simply impossible. Couple those together and you have no way to prove that a miner did anything at all unless they produce verifiable cracks, which the second point very clearly says won't happen every time. Thus, miners could spend forever and be rewarded nothing, forever. Pooling resources and producing a shared payout is also not really possible to verify, since the first point still applies, and a miner could do nothing and just report " not found ". Blockchains only work in specific cases, and they really only do ~1 thing and that's keep data from changing, based on distributed consensus. They don't serve any other purpose, they don't work the way apparently 99% of people think or assume they do, and they are not a magically trustless money printing way to get people to contribute computing power to a distributed computational project. If they were a good idea and contributed meaningfully to distributed computing, BOINC/Folding@home and Gridcoin would be doing much better than they are. Reality sets in a little faster when your computations have actual weight or are supposed to produce real results.