Author: Anthony Towns 2016-02-10 05:16:56
Published on: 2016-02-10T05:16:56+00:00
Matt Corallo, a Bitcoin developer, has proposed changes to make room for more transaction data in the blockchain. He suggested that ASICs could be passed a mask of nonce bytes, which could be handled prior to passing work to the ASIC. The block already specifies the target difficulty, so it could be used to indicate which bytes of the previous hash must be zero. Corallo’s proposal would give an extra eight bytes of additional nonce to play with at current difficulty levels or three bytes at minimum difficulty. Corallo also mentioned rearranging the block to include version, time, bits, merkleroot, prevblock and nonce. This change would mean that the last 12 bytes of prevblock and the 4 bytes of nonce would be available for manipulation if the first round of sha256 was pre-calculated before being sent to ASICs. However, both of these changes are incompatible with Luke-Jr's soft-hardfork approach to ensure non-upgraded clients/nodes can't be tricked into following a shorter chain. Corallo believes his approach may avoid Gavin's proposed hard fork.He suggests combining these changes with making merge-mining easier and splitting the proof of work between something visible to miners and something only visible to pool operators. Ultimately, this would reduce the number of hard forks visible to lightweight clients.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T23:08:43.294577+00:00