Author: Timo Hanke 2016-10-02 22:56:48
Published on: 2016-10-02T22:56:48+00:00
The Bitcoin community is concerned about unnecessary entanglements of consensus code with patents. Sergio Demian Lerner had proposed an extra nonce space BIP and had already applied for the ASICBOOST patent without disclosing it in the BIP nor in the Bitcoin Core pull request. The BIP proposal does not increase or decrease the entanglement of Bitcoin consensus code with any patents and AsicBoost is possible with or without adoption of that BIP proposal. The rationale behind the BIP proposal was to eliminate incentives to mess with the merkle root and, in the extreme case, to mine empty blocks. The concern is that this might be happening again as Lerner proposed a new sidechain BIP. It is great that Lerner has now committed to looking into the Defensive Patent License which seems likely to mitigate some of the patent concerns.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T20:18:12.373554+00:00