Why ASIC BOOST is necessary.

[MingLee]

I haven't heard of ASIC Boost before (mostly since I've been gone for a long, long time) but I guess based off of your post it does appear to have some value as a security measure for the rest of the blockchain. My only question is whether or not it would actually be distributed to the miners in a fair way so that everyone had access to it and there wasn't any of this funny business like what's going on with Jihan or whatever his name is.
It's definitely a unique piece, and I'm not entirely sure how someone came up with this kind of idea, but I like it either way. It's a neat system and I'd like to see more talk about it in the future.

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[dinofelis]

The technical value of this asicboost patent is exactly "chicken scratch". It is only valuable as a legal bargaining chip for cross-licensing and as a propaganda device. This is the same for many other patents in the electronic and computer engineering business.

You do understand that the propaganda was coming from the side that claimed to be a victim, right ?
But I agree with you that such a scheme is hardly going to hold up in court, as I outlined: it is too close, in my opinion, to standard techniques of key schedule re-usage.

[dinofelis]

I haven't heard of ASIC Boost before (mostly since I've been gone for a long, long time) but I guess based off of your post it does appear to have some value as a security measure for the rest of the blockchain.

It is just a somewhat smarter way of organizing the calculations for the "proof of work", by allowing to re-use of some results.  There's actually nothing special about it.  But the thing is that its discoverer, of Core, filed a patent for it (= the calculational scheme) and apparently, the main ASIC miner producer has incorporated it in his chips without asking for a licence, and can, or cannot, activate it with the right firmware.  
Now, people on the Core side accuse the miners using this, and the supplier of the ASICS, to organize, with these chips, an "outright attack on bitcoin" by "cheating" on the proof of work, and present one of the principal mining barons as a big cheater.

My only question is whether or not it would actually be distributed to the miners in a fair way so that everyone had access to it and there wasn't any of this funny business like what's going on with Jihan or whatever his name is.

Well, the only potential problem is that a core guy has a pending patent on it.  

When I tried to explain technically that there was nothing special about ASIC boost to one of the core propagandists here accusing Ji I don't know of being an outright attacker on bitcoin, using an "exploit" that defied all competition, he censored me about that (it was a self-censored thread), meaning that he must have known that his argument didn't hold any water.    He got this thread as an effect.

The main argument was that asic boost was "an exploit" and "cheating" because it allowed to "show more work than one really did".  This is an argument that was also used on reddit, that asic boost was an "exploit" because it rendered the block chain insecure because people (miners) didn't really do the work they showed.  I simply argued that that reasoning didn't hold any water, and it is actually the opposite: it is not the effort by the block-adding miner that secures the chain, but the work NEEDED by the attacker that is the security of the chain.

Whether 20% or so more or less, makes a big difference, is an open question, but in as much as it is considered a terrible act of cheating by the Core defenders, it would also be a terrible loss in security by not using it.  And in as much as it doesn't matter much on one side, it doesn't matter much on the other side.

In other words, I just turned the Core defender logic upside down with the title of this thread: in as much as asic boost means something, by all means, it should be used for security reasons ; and in as much as it is no big deal, well, it is no big deal.

In general, patents on improved economical efficiency of hash calculations are a serious danger to the cryptographic security of bitcoin, because in as much as these patents don't allow all miners to profit from the improvement, they can secure the chain with less proof of work than an attacker (of course not caring about licenses) now has potential technology to overcome it.  

Whether 15-25% efficiency improvement is an actual issue, I leave in the middle.  

[dinofelis]

I think you make some good arguments for it.

What about the difference between overt and covert boosting and what are the detrimental affects on the network by using these techniques?

Would the patents hold up in court?

I doubt that the patent will stand up against ALL "ASIC" based technology.... then many other technologies would never have existed. You can

patent the design, but not the whole technology. In many instances companies will still manufacture the ASIC's but they will have to pay some

kind of royalties to the patent owner. 

As far as I understood, it is the *calculation* that was patented, not an asic design.  A bit like the RSA calculation scheme had a patent on it for years.

[cryp24x]

Current mining profit margins are roughly 1%.

ASICBOOST increases power efficiency 20%.

That increases profit margin to roughly 20%.

That is a two thousand percent increase in profit margin for anyone using an ASICBOOST compatible miner.

That, and that alone, is the only reason anyone would be in favor of it.  It offers a monumental competitive advantage over other miners.

If this is distributed to all miners, it nullify the advantage of other miners.  I also believe asicboost is really necessary because it renders the one who own it cheaper electricity to run the miner.  But if all miners use this then the advantage is nullified since each will add another 20% of hashing power to meet the maximum capacity of their electricity.

The only thing here is that this was kept secret to all miners until someone discovered that it was beeing used covertly.

[dinofelis]

What gmaxwell did with his covert-asic-boost post and BIP was a test balloon smeared with shit. The test was "how many flies can we catch with it" and on this measure it was a great success. It is greatly valuable in discovering who will write about it without having a foggiest understanding of electronic device manufacturing and operation.

So your stance is that 20% more or less efficiency doesn't matter in the electronics industry.  I have my doubts about that.  As I told you already, I think you are confusing the standard deviation on an individual chip, and the fact that the average over a lot of them, shifts.

I would agree with you that if the technique, used to gain 20% more efficiency, would INCREASE the dropout rate by 20% or more, then, yes, this is not a good idea.  But if you get the same per-wafer dropout (even if it is 20%), and your *average* efficiency increases by 20%, that's something that, in most competitive markets, wouldn't be neglected, I'm sure.  If all else equal, there's no reason NOT to profit from 20% more efficiency.

[dinofelis]

Current mining profit margins are roughly 1%.

ASICBOOST increases power efficiency 20%.

That increases profit margin to roughly 20%.

That is a two thousand percent increase in profit margin for anyone using an ASICBOOST compatible miner.

That, and that alone, is the only reason anyone would be in favor of it.  It offers a monumental competitive advantage over other miners.

If this is distributed to all miners, it nullify the advantage of other miners.  I also believe asicboost is really necessary because it renders the one who own it cheaper electricity to run the miner.  But if all miners use this then the advantage is nullified since each will add another 20% of hashing power to meet the maximum capacity of their electricity.

The only thing here is that this was kept secret to all miners until someone discovered that it was beeing used covertly.

That's more or less it.  But it wasn't kept secret, it was published in 2016.  Now, what miners put in their devices, or what their manufacturers put in their devices is their affair, no ?  

That said, I have my doubts that mining is a 1% margin affair   It wouldn't be worth it.  Too few return on investment.  Better go to the stock market instead of buying mining equipment, no ?

[cryp24x]

That said, I have my doubts that mining is a 1% margin affair  It wouldn't be worth it.  Too few return on investment.

I do not believe it either.  They are just making an exaggeration about that 20% boost.  But I wonder why they did not use a 0.01% or lower than that profit margin.  That would really give asicboost a 200,000% increase in profit.  

Better go to the stock market instead of buying mining equipment, no ?

Or just buy Bitcoins, at least we have the finish product and saved from all troubles of setting up and maintenance.

[2112]

You do understand that the propaganda was coming from the side that claimed to be a victim, right ?
But I agree with you that such a scheme is hardly going to hold up in court, as I outlined: it is too close, in my opinion, to standard techniques of key schedule re-usage.

Your mistake here is repeating the thinking about "side"s or even "two sides" or adversaries like in a civil lawsuits.

I'm going to quote recent thread by chopstick quoting me from 2012:

However development priorities are not very unified, as noted by one observer:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=122013.msg1390298#msg1390298

    When I joined this forum I was completely wrong calling the Bitcoin core development team "Bitcoin bunker". Now that I understand the situation better I know that there's no single bunker. There are numerous one-or-two-person cubbyholes that may occasionally form the aliances to shoot at the occupant of another cubbyhole. The situation conforms better to the distributed paradigm inherent in the design of Bitcoin.

I shouldn't have used the word "propaganda", I should've used "marketing" before value. It would not imply less of "taking sides", and more of general "selling".

[X7]

This is simply not true, ASICBOOSt stops us from creating ANYTHING which changes the header - USING Asicboost is a detriment to bitcoin. Get the facts right sir.

[2112]

What gmaxwell did with his covert-asic-boost post and BIP was a test balloon smeared with shit. The test was "how many flies can we catch with it" and on this measure it was a great success. It is greatly valuable in discovering who will write about it without having a foggiest understanding of electronic device manufacturing and operation.

So your stance is that 20% more or less efficiency doesn't matter in the electronics industry.  I have my doubts about that.  As I told you already, I think you are confusing the standard deviation on an individual chip, and the fact that the average over a lot of them, shifts.

I would agree with you that if the technique, used to gain 20% more efficiency, would INCREASE the dropout rate by 20% or more, then, yes, this is not a good idea.  But if you get the same per-wafer dropout (even if it is 20%), and your *average* efficiency increases by 20%, that's something that, in most competitive markets, wouldn't be neglected, I'm sure.  If all else equal, there's no reason NOT to profit from 20% more efficiency.

Look, I'm not Shelby Moore. You've spent too much time trading simplistic arguments with him, I will not be easily bullshitted.

Firstly, don't repeat the propaganda number of "20+%" gain. This is a pure marketing bullshit. Tightly coupling 16 pipelines will greatly reduce the maximum possible clocking rate or lowest possible supply voltage. Additionally the yield of useable chips will be lower. From my general observation of modern semiconductor devices the optimum number of coupled pipelines would be 2,4 or 8, hard to tell. 16 would be past "diminishing returns" and into a "diminishing" territory. I've seen full simulation and analysis made for a different chip (not related to mining) and after doing some substitutions I arrive at the first guess of "-2%", i.e. small loss from synchronous 16-way hashing.

Secondly, by the very fact of using "standard deviation" in you argument you show the depth of your misunderstanding. It is hard for me to guess what you don't understand. My two best guesses are:

1) you may be thinking in terms of some unimodal distributions, where in reality they are always bimodal or multi-modal.

2) you continue to use simplistic textbook statistical models in your estimates. "In statistics, a trial is a single performance of well-defined experiment (Papoulis 1984, p. 25), such as the flipping of a coin,..." This maybe a good approximation of one hashing pipeline pass, where one trial block header is processed in microseconds at the cost of probably nano-dollars. Yet you seem to use it completely exchangeably with chip manufacturing workflow that takes months and costs kilo-dollars or mega-dollars.

Please upgrade your arguments to something more professional. Thanks in advance.

[dinofelis]

Firstly, don't repeat the propaganda number of "20+%" gain. This is a pure marketing bullshit.

I thought that was more or less established, so I took that for granted.  But as I said, my argument was not so much for asic boost by itself (I only looked at the theoretical calculation scheme without imagining that its hardware implementation would be seriously different from the standard way of doing so, as I said, i took that for granted), my argument was this:

"IF you consider asic boost such a phenomenal gain in efficiency that one could call it "an exploit" or "cheating" or whatever, THEN it is entirely wrong to stop miners from using it, because its mere existence lowers PoW security"

Note that the "if ... then ..." is also correct when applied to "if false, then false".

This thread was nothing else but a reaction to my argument being censored by people claiming that asic boost is an exploit and should not be used by miners, as it "lowered proof of work".  In as much as technically, asic boost is not doing anything, then it is not an exploit, and in as much as it does, then it should be used.  

As I said, I took for granted that the gain was of the order of 20%, because that's the amount of raw calculations that one has to do less. I didn't consider that there were technical problems in realizing this, but that doesn't alter the argument that or it is insignificant (and then there's no reason to accuse those trying to implement it to cheat or to exploit) OR it is significant (and then my argument is that it should be used by all means).

Tightly coupling 16 pipelines will greatly reduce the maximum possible clocking rate or lowest possible supply voltage. Additionally the yield of useable chips will be lower. From my general observation of modern semiconductor devices the optimum number of coupled pipelines would be 2,4 or 8, hard to tell. 16 would be past "diminishing returns" and into a "diminishing" territory. I've seen full simulation and analysis made for a different chip (not related to mining) and after doing some substitutions I arrive at the first guess of "-2%", i.e. small loss from synchronous 16-way hashing.

Your argument probably makes sense - as I said, I took the 20% gain for granted and established.

Secondly, by the very fact of using "standard deviation" in you argument you show the depth of your misunderstanding. It is hard for me to guess what you don't understand. My two best guesses are:

1) you may be thinking in terms of some unimodal distributions, where in reality they are always bimodal or multi-modal.

2) you continue to use simplistic textbook statistical models in your estimates. "In statistics, a trial is a single performance of well-defined experiment (Papoulis 1984, p. 25), such as the flipping of a coin,..." This maybe a good approximation of one hashing pipeline pass, where one trial block header is processed in microseconds at the cost of probably nano-dollars. Yet you seem to use it completely exchangeably with chip manufacturing workflow that takes months and costs kilo-dollars or mega-dollars.

I initially thought that your argument was that for two different chip designs with *identical drop out*, as I considered the two designs of comparable difficulty (which, as you line out, may not be the case), it is not because their dropout percentages are higher than the difference in performance, that this difference in performance is negligible.   But this was apparently not the argument you were making, so my "rebuttal" was targetting a mis-understood point (I misunderstood your initial argument).

I didn't realize that the design of an asic boost circuit was more difficult than a design of the normal system, as people were shouting about accusations of a (established, in my mind) 20% increase in efficiency.

The point is that this entire technical hardware discussion doesn't matter for the point I was making: *in as much as* asic boost is any kind of significant boost, it should be used.  In as much as it isn't, it is also not "an exploit" "a cheat" or whatever other accusations it took.

[dinofelis]

I'm going to quote recent thread by chopstick quoting me from 2012:

However development priorities are not very unified, as noted by one observer:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=122013.msg1390298#msg1390298

    When I joined this forum I was completely wrong calling the Bitcoin core development team "Bitcoin bunker". Now that I understand the situation better I know that there's no single bunker. There are numerous one-or-two-person cubbyholes that may occasionally form the aliances to shoot at the occupant of another cubbyhole. The situation conforms better to the distributed paradigm inherent in the design of Bitcoin.

I shouldn't have used the word "propaganda", I should've used "marketing" before value. It would not imply less of "taking sides", and more of general "selling".

What I highlighted in your post from back then is a fundamental observation on your part I think.  But it would normally also lead to sufficient distributed antagonism so that no important changes can ever happen to the protocol.   The fact that there is now this immense pressure for segwit and LN means that this got centralized, no ? (in other words, that a non-immutable colluding consensus over change has been found, and obviously under the "leadership" of one or a few colluding entities pushing for it).
 

[pinkflower]

That depends on how you see it. Some might see Bitcoin Unlimited as an attack to BTC itself. They presume that some of the miners are acting together on their own self interest by rallying behind the hard fork. Bitmain also made their intentions clear of using their power to kill the original chain.

Well, of course, in a permissionless, trustless system, all parties are supposed to act out of self interest.  So what is "an attack on bitcoin" ?
It can mean two things, that touch upon the immutability of bitcoin:
- its protocol
- its transaction history

I was essentially talking about the transaction history, because the *cryptographic protection by PoW* only protects that, of course.  Miners pushing BU don't do this, I think, in order to modify the transaction history.  

So the only thing left, as an "attack" is the desire to modify the protocol.  But then, anyone wanting to modify the protocol, in the first place, Core with its segwit, is an attacker of bitcoin.  As I think that BU was only a way to keep segwit away, because small blocs and high fees are a benefit to miners, you could then even say that BU backing to keep off segwit, was in fact, protecting the current protocol of bitcoin from Core's Segwit attack, that wants to modify it.  
If you see "modifying the protocol" as an attack, then anything else but the current bitcoin protocol (including 1 MB blocks) is an attack.  And if you are considering that protocol modifications are to be envisioned, then increasing the block size is just as well a possible protocol modification than introducing segwit, so if one is an attack, the other is one too.

I said it depends how you see it. Some sees BU not only as a modification on the protocol but a move to get power away from the current developers. Theres nothing wrong with it but it should be seen for what it really is.

[dinofelis]

I said it depends how you see it. Some sees BU not only as a modification on the protocol but a move to get power away from the current developers. Theres nothing wrong with it but it should be seen for what it really is.

This is how I see BU too.  The problem is that if you run core software, you automatically vote for changes (at least, I think there's no option you can switch on or off for changes like segwit - I may be wrong on that), so you need to run "something else" if you don't want to signal for segwit.

[anonymoustroll420]

This is how I see BU too.  The problem is that if you run core software, you automatically vote for changes (at least, I think there's no option you can switch on or off for changes like segwit - I may be wrong on that), so you need to run "something else" if you don't want to signal for segwit.

Core doesn't signal for segwit by default....

[dinofelis]

This is how I see BU too.  The problem is that if you run core software, you automatically vote for changes (at least, I think there's no option you can switch on or off for changes like segwit - I may be wrong on that), so you need to run "something else" if you don't want to signal for segwit.

Core doesn't signal for segwit by default....

I didn't mean "miner signalling".  I meant, in the "node count" that "support segwit" for unofficial "measurement of support by users".  I was of the opinion that if you had a sufficiently recent core version of the code (from 0.13.1 onward I think) you were automatically counted as a "segwit supporter user", or am I mistaken here ?  Is there an option somewhere to say, I run core software, but as a non-mining node, I don't support segwit ?

[anonymoustroll420]

I didn't mean "miner signalling".  I meant, in the "node count" that "support segwit" for unofficial "measurement of support by users".  I was of the opinion that if you had a sufficiently recent core version of the code (from 0.13.1 onward I think) you were automatically counted as a "segwit supporter user", or am I mistaken here ?  Is there an option somewhere to say, I run core software, but as a non-mining node, I don't support segwit ?

Node counts are pointless.

No non-mining node "support segwit". Segwit doesn't need any node support at all, it's a softfork. Node counting websites just assume all recent versions of Core "support segwit".

You can change the useragent of your Core node to match Bitcoin Unlimited if you want it to be counted as a BU node.

[dinofelis]

Node counts are pointless.

I agree with you, but then what are these UASF, these "all users want segwit" and all the rest ?

Node counting websites just assume all recent versions of Core "support segwit".

You can change the useragent of your Core node to match Bitcoin Unlimited if you want it to be counted as a BU node.

That was my point.  If you desperately don't want to signal for segwit on these web sites, you need to run "something else".
And yes, you can just cheat on the name

[anonymoustroll420]

I agree with you, but then what are these UASF, these "all users want segwit" and all the rest ?

UASF works by nodes enforcing the new rules themselves on a given date. The number of nodes is irrelevant, it is the amount of the economy running UASF that matters.

That was my point.  If you desperately don't want to signal for segwit on these web sites, you need to run "something else".

No you don't, just change your uacomment. That is what every BU node that is currently online is doing (the real ones are all down).