Abstract
Bitcoin is a “crypto currency”, a decentralized electronic payment scheme based on cryptography. It implements a particular type of peer-to-peer payment system. Bitcoin depends on well-known cryptographic standards such as SHA-256. In this paper we revisit the cryptographic process which allows one to make money by producing new bitcoins. We reformulate this problem as a specific sort of Constrained Input Small Output (CISO) hashing problem and reduce the problem to a pure block cipher problem, cf. Fig. 1. We estimate the speed of this process and we show that the amortized cost of this process is less than it seems and it depends on a certain cryptographic constant which is estimated to be at most 1.89. These optimizations enable bitcoin miners to save countless millions of dollars per year in electricity bills.
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Courtois, N.T., Grajek, M., Naik, R. (2014). Optimizing SHA256 in Bitcoin Mining. In: Kotulski, Z., Księżopolski, B., Mazur, K. (eds) Cryptography and Security Systems. CSS 2014. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 448. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44893-9_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44893-9_12
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