Quote from: hathmill on November 10, 2013, 06:10:14 PM

Why spend energy on crunching tx at all. Just crunch the ones with high fee and ignore free tx and free up time to render block. Sure its bad for the golden goose, but what does it matter... the ASIC can only be used for a small time anyway. Selfish thinking only about the moneym ie a free market. Im not sure it will work out in the end. Enter an altcoin or a patch?

ASICS are used to find a nonce which gives the block the proper hash. You do this once per block which may contain an arbitrary (well currently capped at ~4000) number of transactions. The actual block header creation is computationally "cheap". A single CPU core can validate about 15,000 tps.