AsicBoost – A Speedup for Bitcoin Mining [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

AsicBoost – A Speedup for Bitcoin Mining [pdf]

arxiv.org

18 pointswslh7 comments

AsicBoost is hypothetically an easy 20% win for any miner to implement, but it's patent encumbered, so there's now an attempt [1] by the core developers to fork Bitcoin in order to nullify its effect.

Why fight it? Not just because it's patented. The bigger fear is that because it's patented, no one in the US will be able (willing?) to implement it, while folks in other countries with lax enforcement of IP laws (read: China) will. Since mining is a competitive race, a 20% boost should ensure only patent infringers will ever mine blocks.

[1] https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2016...

This is an interesting situation. Given that most hashing power is in China, it's against miners interest to accept this hard fork.

Also, how does this kind of patent works, if chips are made in China, is it still illegal to mine with them in the US?

Yes, products that infringe a US patent can be seized by US customs. (Cisco is trying to do this to Arista right now.)

This creates a paradox: why would Chinese miners choose to adopt a fork that would eliminate their competitive advantage?

A greater paradox is how does a decentralized currency, which relies on computational power for preservation, continue to protect itself from algorithmic advancement?

- With patents/copyright, the creators make the work publicly available with the expectation of protection.

- Without patents/copyright, the creators keep it private and can use the advantage to take over the network.

It isn't a paradox it is just bad logic (as usual) by the developers of the 'core' version. These guys are actively working on taking away transaction fees from the miners yet they will always be fighting the fact that the miners ultimately dictate the network.

I don't think they are afraid of Chinese miners adopting this, I think they are afraid of everyone else competing with the Chinese miners and the network becoming more decentralized, which would mean they will have a more difficult time disrupting communication and understanding of the issues at hand. Not to mention it would mean more people they would have to pay to keep from increasing the block size and ultimately using the version from their github repository.

People seem to be assuming that AsicBoost won't be licensed, but I don't see why not. If they're smart the license fee will be around half the speedup so that it's still rational to pay.

There is some precedent in Prof. Tyrell's optimized FPGA miner that charged a 5% license fee. http://www.tricone-mining.com/ (And I don't remember anyone trying to fork him out.)

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