It is our pleasure to announce that we have acquired a license to use AsicBoost by joining the Blockchain Defensive Patent License, and that the DragonMint Bitcoin miner is the world’s first miner to use “version-rolling” AsicBoost, a fully transparent and non-disruptive form of AsicBoost visible on the blockchain. Unlike covert forms of merkle grinding, it has no incentives to create smaller blocks, nor does it interfere with upgrades to the Bitcoin protocol.

After Little Dragon Technology LLC acquired the patent from the original inventors, we negotiated a license to use AsicBoost in our miners on the understanding that AsicBoost would be opened up to everyone to use, under some form of defensive patent license, in the hopes it can help protect decentralization of Bitcoin mining. Whilst this was being arranged, we were unable to announce our intended use of AsicBoost technology until the patent holder fully opened the patent for all to use under defensive licensing terms which occurred on 1st March 2018. This explains our strict embargo on releasing machines into the wild.

It’s been a long road, but we believe overt version-rolling can create the right incentives for other patent holders in the industry to join the BDPL and create a strong, defensive pool of patents in exchange for access to the technology for energy efficient optimization of the Bitcoin mining process. The more widely deployed version-rolling is used, the stronger the incentives will become since version-rolling is the most efficient form of AsicBoost and will deliver efficiency gains in addition to any hardware optimizations or silicon process node.

We have produced and will continue to produce a significant amount of version-rolling AsicBoost enabled miners, enough to incentivize other manufacturers to follow suit, which they are now freely able to do if they join the blockchain defensive patent initiative to help protect the industry from patent aggression. We would like to encourage all our friends and competitors in the industry to also join the Blockchain DPL.

DragonMint miners currently use the “version-rolling” Stratum extension. Details can be found at stratumprotocol.org.

Slushpool is the first pool to fully support the new Stratum extension live on their pool today. Additionally ckpool and Bitcoin India have since enabled support.

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