Speed up PoW verification hashing
In a microbenchmark, this method of reversing hex bytes is an order of magnitude faster. (100 nanoseconds vs. 1 microsecond for 10 bytes on an Intel Core i7-5600U)
There's Utils.reverseBytes() in bitcoinj. Can get rid of the member function altogether.
Utils.reverseBytes is just for byte[], actually not sure why it exists since there's Arrays.reverse that is used later in calcHash. This method could also be modified to build up a byte[] instead of first building a String and then decoding it (I'm happy to do that if its your preference).
The use of String is mainly due to reading in from JSON and then logging for debug purposes. Better to keep them around for now.
That was my thinking too.