Quantum Blockchain files for 'breakthrough' Bitcoin mining patent

Quantum Blockchain Technologies announced on Thursday that, as an initial result of its new Bitcoin mining research and development strategy and following the work of its cryptography expert, it has filed an application for its first patent, the ‘ASIC UltraBoost’.

The AIM-traded firm said the application, made in the UK and then to be extended internationally, represented a “major breakthrough” in Bitcoin mining, as a result of a “very material optimisation” of the mining algorithm.

It said the ASIC UltraBoost could be described as an improvement of the Bitcoin mining process, eliminating redundant computation of a key part of the mining algorithm, resulting in a faster and more efficient mining process.

The optimisation started from the initial consideration that currently, Bitcoin miners attempted to find the winning hash acceptable to the Bitcoin Network by calculating multiple midstates, passing them through further hashing to obtain a final hash value that was less than or equal to the target.

ASIC UltraBoost looked to improve the algorithmic efficiency of mining by proposing three specific variants to the ‘SHA256’ message scheduler for the three instances of SHA256 in Bitcoin mining.

Those optimal variants resulted in faster and more efficient Bitcoin mining, by eliminating the redundant computations within the SHA256 message schedule specific to Bitcoin mining.

As such, the calculation of the midstates alongside the calculation of the message digest was significantly optimised, the company claimed.

It said ASIC UltraBoost reduced the message schedule calculations for the three iterations of SHA256 by about 20%.

The SHA256 function, being a combination of the message schedule and the compression function, when considering the optimisations of ASIC UltraBoost for the entire SHA256 function, the number of operations across the three iterations of SHA256 are reduced by around 7%.

More accurate results, including an overall percentage improvement, would be available when ASIC UltraBoost was implemented in hardware.

Quantum Blockchain, following the research programme of the cryptography expert and other members of its research and development team, was working on other findings that were expected to be patentable in the coming months.

“Filing the ASIC UltraBoost patent application is the first milestone resulting from our research and development programme, achieved in just four months,” said chairman and chief executive officer Francesco Gardin.

“It is the first of many patents the company is working on and plans to file.

“This breakthrough result, which we believe has the potential to be game changing, will be used for the deployment of our proprietary FPGA and ASIC implementations of the Bitcoin mining algorithm.”

Gardin said a nearly 7% efficiency in running the Bitcoin mining algorithm could be used to increase mining speed or save energy.

“On the massive numbers of iterations involved in mining, this level of saving represents, either a 7% increase in the mining probability, or a 7% energy saving at the existing mining probability.

“In both cases, for large mining facilities this optimisation corresponds to significant mining revenues, or saved energy bills, all leading to increased profit.

“We are very optimistic on the future results of our research and development efforts, as this first patent application has shown.”

At 1054 BST, shares in Quantum Blockchain Technologies were up 16.21% at 1.37p.