The Bitcoin mining industry exists in a very close competition; every miner must stay on the cutting edge of the technology, in order to compete and stay profitable.Any potential efficiency gain creates an instant arms race, and is nearly impossible to overlook while remaining in the game.Cryptocurrency experts and Mathematical researchers, Dr. Timo Hanke and Sergio Demián  Lerner, recently announced their new ASIC mining chip technology, called AsicBoost, that claims to improve mining performance and revenues by up to 20 percent.This new technology is  implemented at the ASIC chip manufacturing level, existing both inside the processor hardware, and the software it runs.The result shortcuts particular, unneeded steps of the hashing process, thanks to a new design of the SHA-256 hashing engine.Dr. Hanke explained that “while AsicBoost's gain comes from the chip design, it also has a large software pre-processing component to it.[The] high-level design improvement reduces the number of gates needed to achieve a given hashrate.” The resulting process improves energy efficiency, while at the same time decreases the cost of the silicon manufacturing.

“AsicBoost is a huge architectural leap ahead that was widely expected to be impossible,” Dr. Hanke explained.“We expect [improvements] to be 12.5% for a very simple straight-forward implementation of AsicBoost, and something closer to 20% for a more sophisticated design.” A recent Bitcoin mining design improvement, Approximate Mining, was slated to make impressive efficiency gains earlier this year.AsicBoost is a very different process that is up to four times faster, according Lerners’ estimate of Approximate Mining last year.bitcoin pirate partyThe two processes are “definitely not” related to each other, Hanke told Brave New Coin.ethereum price malaysia“They don't affect each other at all.” AsicBoost, by contrast, is much closer to being deployed than the more theoretical Approximate Mining design, and can be added to existing chipsets without quite as much effort.bitcoin lover's poster

“We believe AsicBoost will find its way into the next generation of chips,” Hanke said, “and from there on become standard in all future Bitcoin mining chips.” The time it will take to see this new technology appear in mining rigs could be less than a year, Hanke explained.“Any chip that is in its design phase can still be modified to adopt AsicBoost,” he told Brave New Coin.“This modification is easy and will only set back the schedule by a few weeks.bitcoin crash april 2011But even at a later phase the transition to AsicBoost is still possible.” Hanke states that the major limiting factor in the rate of deployment will actually be on the investment side.bitcoin golem“Given the slower investment and development cycles that we are seeing in the Bitcoin mining industry now.” Costs to implement AsicBoost will be negligible, with absolutely no cost difference in the hardware.btc bitcoin asic miner

“The cell density on the chip does not change,” Hanke said.“This is because  whether you implement AsicBoost or not, you will always try to pack the gates as dense as possible.And AsicBoost does not affect your ability to do that.” Development cost, however, is another story, depending on which point manufactures are in the fabrication process.“The only price you pay for AsicBoost is time: the development time to implement it.bitcoin gambling open sourceAs consultants we will make sure our clients achieve the best possible improvement to their existing design within all possible constraints that the client may have.” AsicBoost's services don't end with this process alone.end of litecoinAccording to Hanke, his “consulting and services are not limited to AsicBoost, not even to mining,” he explained.bitcoin price drop august 2014

“We have deep experience in blockchain technology and provide that to anyone who wants to build applications based on a distributed ledger.” Lerner is well known throughout the bitcoin world as a core developer, senior security consultant, and an executive developer at Rootstock Labs.He co-created the AsicBoost process with Dr. Hanke in 2013-2014, and the pair applied for a patent “immediately, without much thought,” Lerner recalled.After discussing the technology with developers Gregory Maxwell and Gavin Andresen, they ruled out simply giving the patent to the Bitcoin Foundation, “at that time the foundation was in the middle of a PR storm,” Lerner explained.The team then decided to make the technology available to ASIC manufacturers for a licensing fee, so it does not favor any one miner over another, nor incentivize centralization in any way.The problem of mining centralization has been weighing heavily on many bitcoin developers' minds lately, especially since core developer Peter Todd published an article two weeks ago pointing out a plan to allegedly bribe Bitcoin miners to work against bitcoin's privacy.

In Lerner's opinion, Satoshi Nakamoto's original implementation of SHA-256 cryptography, still in use in Bitcoin today, is a bit of a vulnerable point, although Bitcoin can still work well without replacing it.“The original design had several flaws,” Lerner told Brave New Coin.“None of them fatal.Nowadays we know much more about PoW than when Bitcoin was created.” Lerner says he is currently busy with his work on Rootstock, and will not be taking an active role at AsicBoost.More a point of pride than duty for helping to create the technology, Lerner is helping where he can because he feels that AsicBoost is a “unique, unexpected mining algorithmic improvement that was overlooked by Satoshi and everyone else.”At this point, unless you steal power from the electrical grid in some weird squat or you have your own hydroelectric plant, home bitcoin mining is a sucker’s game.Sure you can make a little and you definitely help out the bitcoin network by processing the hashes that make up bitcoin transactions, but plugging in your own hardware usually means huge electricity bills and a trickle of BTC so slow that you barely make back your investment.

With that in mind, then, I decided to plug in a HexFury 11 gigahash/second USB miner, one of the last powerful USB miners that can actually make you a few dollars a month.First, let’s understand what this thing is.The HexFury is a USB mining rig with six small ASICs made by a company called Bitfury.The ASICs, in this case, are chips that do one thing – mine bitcoin – and they do it very well.Up until the HexFury, most USB miners of this type could run at 2 GH/s per second or slower, enough to mine a few dollars a year.At this point these older ASICs cost about $12 while this model costs $200.Could you mine with the smaller ASICs?Sure, but you’d essentially be burning money in a tiny bonfire.I ran a collection of three 1 GH/s ASICs and got about $1 a month.A unit arrived from Asicrunner and I unwrapped the single chip and checked it out.On one side are the six ASICs and on the other side is a large, passive heatsink.It looks like an overgrown thumb drive with exposed innards, which should give owners of inquisitive cats pause.

The device requires a 5V USB hub (Belkin makes a few good ones) and a separate fan.I used this Arctic USB fan.To mine I used a Raspberry Pi with a USB card onto which I installed Minepeon, a free mining platform that supports multiple types of ASIC miners.It is one of the simplest ways to turn your Raspberry Pi into a real mining rig and is very cool.You can learn how to install it onto an SD card here.To run the chip with Raspberry Pi Minepeon installation I had to install and recompile cgminer 4.3.2, the latest version of a standalone mining app that runs on most platforms.I had to recompile it to work with the current version of Minepeon.Once you’ve put Minepeon on an SD card and booted up your Raspberry Pi, you need to download and compile cgminer for your environment.Here are the commands I used: ssh -l minepeon (password:peon) cd /apps/cgminer/4.3/cgminer-4.3.2.tar.bz2 tar xvf cgminer-4.3.2.tar.bz2 cd /home/minepeon/cgminer-4.3.2 ./configure --enable-icarus --enable-bitfury sudo make sudo make install cd /opt/minepeon/bin mv cgminer cgminer.hold ln -s /home/minepeon/cgminer-4.3.2/cgminer cgminer reboot This should get you the latest version of cgminer.

How does it perform?Well, with the fan pointed directly at it and the hub powered on, I consistently saw 12GH/s.This enough to make about $150 a year at this current difficulty and bitcoin price.This is a screen from Minepeon.You’ll notice that at that speed we would see about 0.018 BTC per month, or about $10.Given the cost of electricity and the constant rise in the bitcoin mining difficulty rate, this will eventually fall until 11 GH/s is a paltry speed.Home mining, at this point, is more about the experience of mining than any real money making.While you can make a little money with this, you’re obviously going to have to connect a few of these together and have free electricity to make any sort of dent into the initial $200 investment.This is a speedy and powerful little chip and a real testament to what kind of power you can stick onto a small PCB.As these things catch up with higher-powered units, it’s only a matter of time before we can all make a few BTC a month with something the size of a stick of gum.