Will that approach work? Honestly I have absolutely no idea, but it would be a fascinating and extremely ambitious research project.
-Can we get people to fund it? Yeah I do. there's a lot of buzz about RISC-V, and a lot of buzz can be created about a libre 3D GPU. If that same GPU happens to be good at doing crypto-currency mining there will be a LOT more attention paid, particularly given that people have noticed that relying on proprietary GPUs and CPUs to manage billions of dollars worth of crypto-currency, when the NSA is *known* to have blackmailed intel into putting a spying back-door co-processor in to x86, and that it miiight not be a good idea to trust proprietary hardware
+Can we get people to fund it? Yeah I do. there's a lot of buzz about RISC-V, and a lot of buzz can be created about a libre 3D GPU. If that same GPU happens to be good at doing crypto-currency mining there will be a LOT more attention paid, particularly given that people have noticed that relying on proprietary GPUs and CPUs to manage billions of dollars worth of crypto-currency, when the NSA is *known* to have blackmailed intel into putting a spying back-door co-processor in to x86, and that it miiight not be a good idea to trust proprietary hardware:
<http://libreboot.org/faq#intelme>