Intel Files Patent For Energy-Efficient Bitcoin Mining Hardware (crn.com)

Intel is exploring the creation of specialty hardware for mining the popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin, according to a U.S. patent application released Thursday. From a report: The patent, filed on Sept. 23, 2016, describes a Bitcoin mining hardware accelerator that may include a processor core with a hardware accelerator coupled with it. Bitcoin mining is the process of using powerful computer processors to record Bitcoin transactions on a public ledger, which is done by attempting to solve cryptographic puzzles. If the miner becomes the first to solve the puzzle and record the next transaction, it is rewarded with newly released Bitcoin. The high energy and equipment costs associated with mining have brought into question whether the activity can be profitable, especially as the price of Bitcoin has nose-dived in the past few months, as noted by Forbes. But that hasn't stopped people from hoarding equipment -- one report from Coherent Market Insights pegged the cryptocurrency mining market at $610 million in 2016 and expects it to grow to $38 billion by 2025. The current issues faced by miners also has propelled companies and individuals to find new technologies and methods for making mining more efficient.

Comments

Another broad patent of the obvious...

[kbonin]

Patent claims an SOC with a hash engine that includes a message scheduler, which is what anyone skilled in the art would come up with when asked to design a mining SOC.

appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.html&r=1&p=1&f=G&l=50&d=PG01&S1=20180089642.PGNR.&OS=dn/20180089642&RS=DN/20180089642

Re:Another broad patent of the obvious...

[bill_mcgonigle]

which is what anyone skilled in the art would come up with when asked to design a mining SOC

Yeah, here's the researcher. He looks like a legit chip guy. Probably some lawyers went looking for Bitcoin patents when the fiat value started to rise so this happened.

That said, nobody is going to be making SoC miners as ASIC miners are always going to be more profitable. Probably Intel could improve the power efficiency of Bitmain's ASIC chips, but patent-locked SoC chips that can do SHA256 aren't really going to cause people to worry. They may be useful for testing work on new blockchains with low difficulty, but that's dubious and extremely niche.

Re:Another broad patent of the obvious...

[DigiShaman]

It's first to file, not first to invent. Apparently prior art doesn't come in play

Re:Another broad patent of the obvious...

[Lonewolf666]

Prior art is supposed to come in play if it was published before the filing date.

Of course, a sufficiently thorough search by the patent office is far from guaranteed. And probably only possible if the prior art is published on the net and find-able with a search engine.

failing to understand the problem

[c6gunner]

The miners are competing. If you make the hardware cheaper and more energy efficient, they'll just buy more of it.

Good businnes for Intel; does nothing to lower energy or other resource usage.

Re:failing to understand the problem

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Good businnes for Intel; does nothing to lower energy or other resource usage.

Intel: "With our rig, you can waste more energy faster!"

Will it make any difference?

[quantaman]

Mining cryptocurrency isn't like mining gold, double the number of gold miners in the world and you double* the amount of gold, but if you double the number of crypto miners the amount of cryptocurrency is exactly the same.

If you make bitcoin mining twice as energy efficient, people will buy twice as many** mining rigs, and the total energy usage will be about the same.

* Not really double, but you get the point.
** Again not quite, equipment cost factors into it.

Re:Will it make any difference?

[ctilsie242]

There are only a certain amount of coins that are coming out per unit time. If fewer people are mining, coins become less difficult to mine. If more people are mining at the same time, the difficulty goes up.

One may be better off mining another cryptocurrency and trading for BTC if you absolute just have to have that currency. Other currencies give more bang for buck and have other advantages.

Ultimately, a Bitcoin 2.0 currency is going to show up. Bitcoin has a number of shortcomings, especially how expensive transactions are, coupled with the need to go through 160 gigs of blockchain to check if you are not double-spent (of course, you can trust some exchange... but we know how reliable exchanges can be.) It is only a matter of time before another currency becomes the de facto flagbearer.

Re:Will it make any difference?

[nateman1352]

In Economics, this problem is often referred to as the tragedy of the commons. The fact that only a fixed amount of bitcoin is released regardless of the amount of work done creates this problem by design. It is one of the fundamental problems with the design of cryptocurrencies.

First you increase the hardware

[Sla$hPot]

Then you increase the diffuculty. And so on and so forth.

In every gold rush...

[mccrew]

In every gold rush, the ones who are guaranteed to make any money are those who sell the picks and shovels. Looks like that's Intel's strategy.

Re:In every gold rush...

[PPH]

Don't forget the blackjack and hookers.

Re:In every gold rush...

[Bing Tsher E]

The 'California Gold Rush' occurred immediately after President Polk won the war against Mexico that caused them to cede the west coast to the United States.

We needed Americans out there immediately, pronto. The gold rush was a way to transfer a lot of young ambitious people onto the new territory.

Re:I suppose this helps

[bill_mcgonigle]

but this is an awful lot of effort and electricity being put into what is essentially a vehicle for money laundering. I don't even see this helping blockchaining, since isn't mining separate from blockchain tech?

Yeah, I know that's not popular to say,

Dude, you seriously don't understand anything about blockchain technology. That's why your opinions are unpopular.

Proof-of-work mining is what solves the Byzantine Consensus Problem and all the work on Bitcoin Cash 0-conf solves your other problems for half a cent per transaction.

You could just buy a whole bunch of Electricity

[dryriver]

and then sell it to some country that wants to buy it. That country could give you a digital certificate in return, and you'd roughly have something like Bitcoin. Except of course that the electricity would probably be used for something useful that, too, aids in the creation of wealth. Precisely what does cryptocurrency do with the electricity? It just burns it on solving meaningless cryptopuzzles.

Re:You could just buy a whole bunch of Electricity

[110010001000]

They should use the energy to build something useful, like laptops with two seperate systems onboard. That way, if one system gets hacked, the other one stays safe.

I'm still waiting for the self powerd QPU model

[hAckz0r]

I'm still holding out for the Quantum Processing Unit (QPU) model, with the integrated solar panel, charge controller, and a Stirling engine to turn some of that hash engine wasted heat back into even more inefficiently waste-able electricity. What fun is it if I can't even waste the same electricity more than once? With the Quantum Processor your electric bill can be in a superposition of both wasted and not wasted all at the same time. That's a 50% savings! Right?

In the mean time I'll get my latest QPU with NanoTech Enabled Maxwell's Daemon Quantum Spin ThermoElectric Generator patented , but that's taking a little longer to get it through the Patent Office than I had hoped. Before you know it QPU-NTE-MD-QS-TEG will be a standard household appliance, and everyone will talking about it. Take that Intel!

My job is done here. Now where did I part that flying car?

Bitcoin is a self uncorrecting system

[Khashishi]

The more you try to fix it, the more broken it will be.

Intel trying to corner the market

[phazmatis]

I'm not surprised by this.

Intel owns FPGA maker Altera. FPGAs are essentially reconfigurable ASICs.

Newer currencies like Monero are trying to stop ASIC mining by changing their algorithm every 6 months or so.

FPGAs can get around this, since you can just reprogram them, but reprogramming them isn't simple.

That's where the embedded CPU comes in. The embedded CPU can go online, look up the new algorithm, and reprogram the FPGA automatically.

Intel wants to corner that market.

Won't last long

[smooth wombat]

The con artist will have some monolithic government agency poke its nose into private industry and demand they stop its energy efficient operations.

Care to elaborate

[rsilvergun]

for one who clearly knows so little? I don't understand the benefit to proof of mining. As far as I know it's just there to add artificial scarcity to the system in order to control the crypto-currency equivalent of inflation. Are these calculations being used to solve some other math problem (like Folding at Home does or the SETI stuff)?

You allude to Bitcoin Cash 0-conf solving my other problems. I think you mean transaction delays and fees. As far as I can tell it still means going through a processor, who is going to charge fees that are probably equivalent to a debit network. If I'm wrong can you explain it to me in layman's terms? What little I found on google seemed to be complex Proof of Concept stuff, not anything practical.

Re:Care to elaborate

[allaunjsilverfox2]

for one who clearly knows so little? I don't understand the benefit to proof of mining. As far as I know it's just there to add artificial scarcity to the system in order to control the crypto-currency equivalent of inflation. Are these calculations being used to solve some other math problem (like Folding at Home does or the SETI stuff)? .

There is a PoS coin that solves that issue. Gridcoin for example.

Cryptocurrency for habitable planets.

[wolfheart111]

How about that. Is there not a way to make this mining actually do somthing other than generate useless numbers. How about coordinates for potential habitable planets, used as a cryptocurrency. This would actually have some benefit with the resources that are used. I always hoped someone would put a large number of satellites up. and not only use them as an internet gateway but for netizens to be able to peer into the star with them and search for planets themselves. A number of internet satellites with a mini hubble telescope on each one. Now that would be sweet. :)

Re:Please if only...

[Luckyo]

Bitmain, the dominant maker of bitcoin mining ASICs was recently reported by analysts to have completed a prototype for Etherium mining. It's what took a good chunk off Nvidia and AMD stock value a few days ago.

Tentative release date was Q2 2018. Give it a few months after that to proliferate and increased hash rate of the network will render GPU mining a waste of time and energy.

Too late?

[manu0601]

Given that bitcoin mining is designed to get harder and harder, the only relevant question is: is it too late or not for this kind of device to be profitable?