Author: bfd at cock.lu 2017-04-06 07:24:03
Published on: 2017-04-06T07:24:03+00:00
Gregory Maxwell, a Bitcoin Core developer, has proposed a new technical solution to prevent covert ASICBOOST mining. He claims the controversial mining technique is already being used by miners and prevents improvements to the Bitcoin protocol. The patent for ASICBOOST is held by Timo Hanke and Sergio Demian Lerner, who have marketed their patent licenses under that trade name, but have not licensed it for free and open use by the public. The mining process repeatedly hashes an 80-byte block header while incrementing a 32-bit nonce which is at the end of this header data. This means that the processing of the header involves two runs of the compression function run one that consumes the first 64 bytes of the header and a second which processes the remaining 16 bytes and padding. By exploiting these differences, miners can create a situation where they save up to 30% of their energy costs.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T23:40:28.688810+00:00