Timo Hanke
2016 · arXiv
AsicBoost is a method to speed up Bitcoin mining by a factor of approximately 20%. The performance gain is achieved through a high-level optimization of the Bitcoin mining algorithm which allows for drastic reduction in gate count on the mining chip. AsicBoost is applicable to all types of mining hardware and chip designs. This paper presents the idea behind the method and describes the information flow in implementations of AsicBoost.
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I'm looking forward to seeing similar work on SHA-256. It would be fascinating if AI could discover previously unknown weaknesses in reduced-round variants. It would also be interesting whether AI could discover new algorithmic optimizations for SHA-256 similar in spirit to AsicBoost[1]. [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.00575
I must note that this in fact happened in the past (AsicBoost). Currently, I don't think there is AsicBoost-like secret information, but you can't be sure. https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.00575
> it's basically two rounds of SHA-256. There's a bit more to this; there's clever optimisations you can do (based on the Merkle–Damgård structure of SHA256 and the format/semantics of the data being hashed): http://www.mit.edu/~jlrubin/public/pdfs/Asicboost.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.00575.pdf
It seems there are intersections with the history of PoW mining (CPU => GPUs => FPGAs => ASICs) since we don't need the full power of GPUs for training or inference. For example, ASICBoost [1][2][3] was/is a technique to improve PoW by ~20%. [1] https://bitcoinops.org/en/topics/asicboost/ [2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.00575 [3] https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2017/04/06/bitcoins-new-con...
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