It will prevent companies from legally selling mining rigs with the improvement, which stems access to the improvement in patented countries. Or miners can export rigs with the improvement from companies that sell it in non-patented countries.
It is not purely a software thing - it is intended to be used by modifying hardware. From the paper: "The performance gain is achieved through a high-level optimization of the Bitcoin mining algorithm which allows for drastic reduction in gate count on the mining chip. AsicBoost is applicable to all types of mining hardware and chip designs." Ultimately though, I think you're right in that Bitcoin's mining and decentralized design combined with an international economy makes patenting mining algorithms effectively pointless. Mustafa On 06/04/16 12:57, Marek Palatinus wrote: > To my understanding it is purely software thing. It cannot be detected > from outside if miner uses this improvement or not. So patenting it is > worthless. > > slush > > On Tue, Apr 5, 2016 at 1:01 AM, Mustafa Al-Bassam via bitcoin-dev > <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org > <mailto:bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org>> wrote: > > Alternatively scenario: it will cause a sudden increase of Bitcoin > mines in countries where the algorithm is not patented, possibly > causing a geographical decentralization of miners from countries > that already have a lot of miners like China (if it is patented in > China). > > On 01/04/16 10:00, Peter Todd via bitcoin-dev wrote: >> On Thu, Mar 31, 2016 at 09:41:40PM -0700, Timo Hanke via bitcoin-dev >> wrote: >>> Hi. >>> >>> I'd like to announce a white paper that describes a very new and >>> significant algorithmic improvement to the Bitcoin mining process which >>> has >>> never been discussed in public before. The white paper can be found >>> here: >>> >>> http://www.math.rwth-aachen.de/~Timo.Hanke/AsicBoostWhitepaperrev5.pdf >>> >>> <http://www.math.rwth-aachen.de/%7ETimo.Hanke/AsicBoostWhitepaperrev5.pdf> >> What steps are you going to take to make sure that this improvement is >> available to all ASIC designers/mfgs on a equal opportunity basis? >> >> The fact that you've chosen to patent this improvement could be a >> centralization concern depending on the licensing model used. For >> example, one >> could imagine a licensing model that gave one manufacture exclusive >> rights. >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> bitcoin-dev mailing list >> bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org >> <mailto:bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> >> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev > > > _______________________________________________ > bitcoin-dev mailing list > bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org > <mailto:bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> > https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev > >
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