Last, but certainly not least, is blockchain technology. This is the underlying cryptographic technology that powers cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. This is, of course, a very new field, which was first described by Bitcoin's mysterious creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, in a white paper published in 2008. GPUs were applied to this field almost immediately after its invention—generating a unit of currency comes down to brute-force cracking a cryptographic puzzle, and a GPU can attempt to brute-force crack more combinations in parallel than any other piece of hardware available to the general public today. This process is known as mining.