Intel granted Bitcoin mining system patent, just as people are abandoning Bitcoin mining

Intel has a patent granted for a system it conceived back in 2016…

A patent application first submitted by Intel over two years ago was granted at the end of last week. But it may have arrived just a little too late.

The technology giant had submitted a patent entitled “Optimized SHA-256 datapath for energy-efficient high-performance Bitcoin mining” way back in the summer of 2016.

The extensive document describes the project thus:

A processing system comprising: a processor to construct an input message comprising a nonce and a plurality of padding bits; and a hardware accelerator, communicatively coupled to the processor, the hardware accelerator comprising: a first plurality of circuits to compute a stage-1 secure hash algorithm (SHA) hash of the input message, a first data path coupled between a first reference node and a first input node of the first plurality of circuits to feed a first padding bit of the plurality of padding bits to the first input node,…