Author: Matt Corallo 2016-02-09 22:00:44
Published on: 2016-02-09T22:00:44+00:00
The email thread discusses potential changes to Bitcoin mining hardware to reduce required logic and make it easier to produce competitive hardware. One suggestion is to allow the first four bytes of the previous block hash field to contain any value, which could potentially lead to optimization through brute forcing the SHA256 midstate. However, this may prevent strong incentives to use the version field as nonce space. Instead, they suggest setting the minimum difficulty higher to add more than 4 nonce-bytes. Another suggestion is to use leading non-zero bytes of the prevhash as additional nonce, which could give a little more than 255**(N-1) possible values to scale automatically with difficulty and seems easy enough to make use of in an ASIC. The author concludes by stating that someone needs to take a closer look at the midstate optimization stuff to determine what is reasonably required.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T23:09:06.264060+00:00