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Oh dear. I think the OP might need to tighten his tin foil hat a bit...

I gave his arguments a fair shake, though. Using it as a brute force tool seems... Like it wouldn't work with how it's set up right now, right? As in, yeah, it's solving RSA (or whatever, I can't remember) -- but only for the particular configuration the Bitcoins protocol uses. And only one specific key length, etc. Am I on the right track here? If so, then the entire thesis is invalid.

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Mining even does not have anything to do with asymmetric cryptography (which is in case of bitcoin ECDSA).

In all, mining is quite orthogonal to how the whole protocol works, it is just some computation that satisfies that it could be somehow tied to block contents, it's difficulty can be tuned and it's result can be quickly verified.

Yes. The hash you have to crack is padded with 0s at the start. I'm hazy on how hash difficulty actually adjusts, but that's the idea. For more, see https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty

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