What if the "groundbreaking" crypto-cracking was that the NSA discovered you could trick people into cracking "bountied" SHA-256 hashes in a massively parallel operation?
It doesn't work like that. The information being hashed is the hash of the merkle tree root of all the transaction in a block, and a nonce. They are hashing data in a very specific format, not every possible bytes sequence.
Also, the proof-of-work is completed when you find a hash that begins with a specified number of zeros, and not when you reach a specific hash.
NSA could purchase more GPUs, FPGAs and custom designed ASICs than all the world's bitcoin miners combined for a small fraction of its $11 billion annual budget.
NSA could have its own fabs for that kind of budget. Some people believe that they do, or at one time did. My guess is that they'd probably just prefer to book a midnight run on US industry fabs these days.
Never heard of it before, here are the results of my google search for anyone interested:
The Trusted Foundry Program (TFP) was established as a joint effort between Department of Defense and National Security Agency ... in response to Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz’s 2003 Defense Trusted IC Strategy memo
- Program is administered by NSA’s Trusted Access Program Office (TAPO)
- DoD component resides in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, ASD R&E and is managed by Defense Microelectronics Activity (DMEA)
By the end of the program in FY2013, DoD will have invested >$700M to ensure access to microelectronics services and manufacturing for a wide array of devices with feature sizes down to 32nm on 300 mm wafers Program Provides National Security And Defense Programs With Access To Semiconductor Integrated Circuits From Secure Sources
Besides Forte Meade, the NSA recently purchased the Sony chip fabrication plant in San Antonio (94,000-square-foot) and has business connections with many manufacturers including National Semiconductor/Texas Instruments.
So they may have built a plant in 1989 when they were 60,000 ft2 and $85M, unless that was misdirection simply to mess with the Soviets. (Notice the conveniently placed infographic right underneath the article).
Twenty-five years of Moore's law later the price and complexity of an operational chip foundry has doubled similar to transistor count. The former Sony plant is 633,000 ft2, reportedly valued as $72M and being leased at $35/ft2.
I don't see any evidence they're using it for anything other than datacenter and office space.
