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this reminds me of the drama around when Bitcoin forked into BTC and BCH - I recall there was some optimization that allowed miners to land at digests equivalen
by gfody 6y ago
this reminds me of the drama around when Bitcoin forked into BTC and BCH - I recall there was some optimization that allowed miners to land at digests equivalent to some huge hash rate without actually computing that many hashes and since it was baked into ASICs that would be rendered useless after the optimization was nullified they had no choice but hard fork.
- px43 6y agoI think you're talking about ASICBOOST, more importantly the "Covert ASICBOOST" drama, which was almost entirely fabricated as a political ploy to turn the /r/bitcoin community against the mining community. It was used to justify the soft fork inclusion of SegWit (Segregated Witness) but in reality had zero impact on the actual ASICBOOST capability, which was an overly complicated and incredibly mild hashing optimization which no one really actually used. The risk of orphaning blocks was likely higher than and potential profits from the extra advantage.
- gfody 6y agooh nice I couldn't find any details earlier but googling "asicboost" turned up the whole scandal - I had no idea it was all disinformation campaign!