Published on: 2016-10-02T23:27:20+00:00
In an email dated October 2, 2016, Bitcoin developer Matt Corallo expressed concerns about the Bitcoin Foundation's potential disregard for Bitcoin's future centralization. He criticized the idea of asking the foundation to pay a license fee to avoid holding the rest of the Bitcoin mining community hostage. Corallo also mentioned the lack of transparent licensing and transparency in public discussions after the patent had been filed. However, he acknowledged that they cannot change the past and instead suggested focusing on collaboration for the future.The Bitcoin Foundation's lack of transparency regarding licensing has come under fire after they failed to license a patent from Sergio Lerner. In 2013, Lerner reached out to the foundation asking if they would license his patent on fair terms. The foundation declined, stating that it did not believe the proprietary patent would be significant. The lack of transparent licensing has raised concerns about centralization pressure and the potential harm it could cause Bitcoin in the long-term. Matt Corallo has criticized the foundation for its handling of the situation, suggesting that their disregard for future centralization is worrying.In a message to the bitcoin-dev mailing list, Matt Corallo criticized anonymous miner "Satoshi Nakamoto" for not showing concern towards centralization pressure and its potential long-term harm to Bitcoin. However, it was revealed that Sergio had privately expressed concerns about centralization pressure and reached out to the BCF in 2013 to license his patent which would make its user(s) 30% more effective than others under "fair" terms. The BCF responded by encouraging him to seek the patent as they didn't think it would be a big deal.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.In an email thread on the Bitcoin-dev mailing list, Sergio Demian Lerner asked Peter Todd to explain his views on a patent for hardware design for ASICs. Lerner notes that there are at least three similar patents filed by major Bitcoin ASIC manufacturers in three different countries. Todd responds that the comparison is misleading and he is not aware of any other patents on Bitcoin-specific ASIC technology which are practically enforceable or which the owners have indicated they wish to enforce. Of the two patents which Lerner pointed out which were filed on essentially the same optimization that ASICBoost covers, Todd says that Lerner's predates both of them, invalidating both the Spondoolies one and the AntMiner one. Todd claims that only Lerner's patent is practical and likely to be enforced in the vast majority of the world. Todd believes that optimizations to the hashing algorithm are not themselves "attacks" on Bitcoin. But only when they are used in a rent-seeking fashion to push for more centralization and lower miner revenue do they become so. One of the biggest advantages of SHA256 in the context of mining is exactly that it is a relatively simple algorithm, allowing for fewer large algorithmic optimizations. This opens the doors to more competition in the ASIC market than if only few people had the knowledge (or a patent) to build efficient ASICs. Todd claims that while the high-end ASIC-manufacturing industry is highly-centralized, making it worse by limiting those who can build Bitcoin ASICs from anyone with access to such a fab to only those who can, additionally, negotiate for patent rights and navigate the modern patent system, is far from ideal. Todd criticizes Lerner's proposal for a hard fork, with the only argument given as to why it should happen being that he thought there was an attack, but couldn't yet "really tell if they could affect Bitcoin". Instead of following up with more information, as he indicated he would, he went and patented the optimizations and has gone on rent-seeking behavior since. Todd concludes that if Lerner had acted in a way which indicated even the slightest regard for centralization pressure and the harm it can do to Bitcoin in the long-term, then he doesn't think many would be blaming him.The context is a discussion about the implementation of ASICBoost in Bitcoin, which was proposed as a way to improve mining efficiency.
Updated on: 2023-08-01T19:08:07.114785+00:00