The Unreasonable Fundamental Incertitudes

Behind Bitcoin Mining

Nicolas T. Courtois1 , Marek Grajek2 and Rahul Naik1
1 2
University College London, UK, Independent researcher and writer, Poland

Abstract. Bitcoin is a “crypto currency”, a decentralized electronic

arXiv:1310.7935v3 [cs.CR] 10 Apr 2014

payment scheme based on cryptography. It implements a particular type

of peer-to-peer financial anarchy. It has very recently gained excessive
popularity and attracted a lot of attention in the mainstream press and
media. Scientific research on this topic is less abundant. A paper at Fi-
nancial Cryptography 2012 conference explains that Bitcoin is a system
which uses no fancy cryptography, and is by no means perfect [4].
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.
2. 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 tens of millions of dollars
per year in electricity bills.
Miners who set up mining operations face many economic incertitudes
such as high volatility. In this paper we point out that there are funda-
mental incertitudes which depend very strongly on the bitcoin specifica-
tion and that this is specification is NOT written in stone. The energy
efficiency of bitcoin miners have already been improved by a factor of
about 10,000 since bitcoin have been invented, and we claim that further
improvements are inevitable. Better technology is bound to be invented,
would it be quantum bitcoin miners. More importantly, the specification
of the problem to solve is likely to change. A major change in the Proof
of Work function have been proposed in May 2013 at Bitcoin conference
in San Diego by Dan Kaminsky [47]. However, any sort of change could
be flatly rejected by the community which have heavily invested in ASIC
mining with the current technology.
Another question is the reward halving scheme in bitcoin. The current
bitcoin specification mandates a strong 4-year cyclic property. This cycle
is totally artificial and is simply an artifact of the current specification.
We find this property totally unreasonable and harmful and explain why
and how it needs to be changed.
Keywords: electronic payment, crypto currencies, bitcoin, hash func-
tions, SHA-256, cryptanalysis, CICO problem (Constrained Input Con-
strained Output), bitcoin mining, business cycles.
1 Background: The Emergence Of Bitcoin
Bitcoin is a collaborative virtual currency and a decentralized peer-to-peer pay-
ment system without trusted central authorities. It has been invented in 2008
[51] and launched in 2009. It is based entirely on methods and ideas already
known for more than a decade [29, 26, 3]. The audacity of [51] was to actually
put these ideas into practice and design a system able to function for many
decades to come. However, ever since Bitcoin was launched in 2009, it has been
presented by its technical architects as an experimental rather than mature elec-
tronic currency ecosystem.
In cryptography bitcoin is a practical payment and virtual currency system.
However from the point of view of financial markets, it could be considered as
a play currency, an experiment in the area of electronic payment. This is how it
has started: a self-governing open-source crypto co-operative and a social experi-
ment. Initially it concerned only some enthusiasts of cryptography and computer
programmers who believed in it and supported it. It is not clear whether bit-
coin was actually ever meant to become an equivalent or replacement of our
traditional currencies governed by central banks. However bitcoin is expected to
be a currency or money. Since 2010 a Japanese company Mt. Gox has started
exchanging bitcoins against real currency in a professional way. To this day this
single company accounts for the majority of such transactions worldwide. How-
ever the press and media coverage and the appreciation of bitcoin on the markets
made that bitcoin is no longer a play currency and is taken much more seriously.
Bitcoin is frequently associated with a criticism of the sorry state of the global
financial industry. All bitcoin transactions are descendants of one single initial
transaction which contains a reference to a paper about a government bailout for
banks which have appeared in the British newspaper The Times on 3 January
2009. In contrast bitcoin does not allow any government intervention and it is
claimed to be immune against inflation. In this respect bitcoin is sometimes
compared to gold [30].
1.1 Bitcoin Hits The Sky

Fig. 1. The market price of bitcoin in the last 9 months.

In March/April 2013 bitcoin have attracted a lot of the mainstream press

and media in a very close relation to the aftermath of the bank deposit crisis
in Cyprus [20]. Verbal speculation was accompanied by increased trading and
speculation and the apparent entry of professionals such as hedge funds into
bitcoin trading. In a space of a few weeks, the market price paid for one bitcoin
has more than tripled, attained about 200 dollars, then it fell more than 50
percent in a few hours [20].
This event however cannot be seen as a purely financial event: a major up-
grade of Mt Gox exchange web site took place also at this moment. Likewise
bitcoin was very strongly influenced by its growing popularity and media cover-
age. Interestingly bitcoin did not fall anywhere near its levels from before March
2013. On 13 April 2013 the leading newspaper The Economist explains that bit-
coin is here to stay, that it is a future of payments and calls it digital gold [30].
It is possible to see that the correction which followed an earlier crash (cf. Fig.
1) has finished at this precise moment. Even though the press and media have
actually debated and criticized bitcoin a lot. It is like bitcoin has achieved matu-
rity and become a mainstream financial asset on that very day. At the moment
of writing on 22 October 2013 it has again been tending towards 200 dollars.
2 Bitcoin in Question
Recent popularity makes that many people ask themselves a lot of questions
about bitcoin which challenges our traditional ideas about money and payment.

2.1 Is Bitcoin a Currency?

Some commentators explain that bitcoins function essentially like any other cur-
rency [20]. The Economist calls it a currency, digital money, and compares it to
digital gold [30]. Other authors, such as Paul Krugman, Nobel price in economics,
have many times criticized bitcoin as just one of possible ways to pay electron-
ically [5] which would not have all the desirable characteristics of a modern
currency [5, 49]. According to the Forbes magazine bitcoin is not money because
it does not have a stable intrinsic value [35]. However all these arguments seem
to be rather superficial. There are much more serious questions at stake. Money
has benefited from extremely strong legal protection in most countries for
centuries. This is combined with effective policing of fraud which costs a lot of
money. Major governments with their armies stand behind their money. All this
makes that counterfeit currency rates with coins and paper money are surpris-
ingly low. They are roughly just 1000 times smaller compared to higher rates
of fraud which are systematically seen with modern payment technologies: for
example we have known massive amounts of bank card fraud such as skimming.
In this paper we will present some additional arguments to the effect that
bitcoin cannot (yet) in the current state be called a currency, mainly due to its
inherent built-in instability cf. Section 13.2. These properties however, could be
eventually fixed.

2.2 Some Interesting Good Points About Bitcoin

Not all is bad with bitcoin. Bitcoin has a lot more to offer than prospects to
make or lose a lot of money in yet another high-tech investment scheme, with
interrogations whether it is just another Ponzi scheme. It has some very inter-
esting properties: it allows payments to be sent in a short time. Payments are
irreversible. It offers some degree of public verifiability, and transparency for all
bitcoin transactions without any exception. Bitcoin transactions can to some
extent be traced and connected to each other, see [54]. It could be regulated by
governments like any other financial market.
Bitcoin shows that with modern technology it may radically cheaper than
previously thought to run an electronic payment system. The cooperative and
democratic character of the bitcoin currency should be a model for the financial
industry which has lost a lot in confidence of the public.
More importantly bitcoin has a major built-in feature: an artificially limited
and strictly controlled monetary supply. This built-in deflationary scarcity con-
trasts with the potentially unlimited monetary expansion of major traditional
currencies which have been observed in the recent years. This has been praised
by many commentators and at occasions bitcoin is presented as a miracle rem-
edy against inflation. The Economist have famously compared bitcoin to digital
gold [30].
 Unhappily as we will see in this paper, if we look at the details, we will see
that this mechanism of decreasing returns is designed in a highly problematic
way, cf. Section 13.2. This for no apparent reason. We will also explain how to
fix this problem.

2.3 Bitcoin Fundamentals

It is not true that bitcoins have no intrinsic value [35]. On the contrary. A lot
value comes from the network effects [19]. The network of bitcoin nodes has
acquired some serious value. The network of bitcoin supporters and users and
their faith in bitcoin adds more value. Its popularity is astounding. The easiness
with which payments can be made within this system is valuable. The security
properties of how hard it is to make bitcoins, steal them, or create new bitcoins,
have some price. All these properties add value to bitcoins. In general the value
of bitcoins comes from distinct sources than that of the traditional financial
instruments, but one cannot possibly deny that bitcoin has some value, which is
considerable if we look at it the current market price.
Moreover this value grows with time as the network grows. It is widely known
that the value of networks grows faster than linearly. Networks are expected to
generate value which is more than the sum of the parts which constitute the
network [19]. The particularity of the bitcoin network is that it has accumulated
an astronomical amount of “cryptographic evidence” which testifies about the
whole bitcoin history in detail, and which it would be very hard and extremely
costly to falsify. In this aspect bitcoin performs all the desired functions of an
electronic notary system which is there to certify its own past history. Such a
system is also valuable.
In this paper we look at bitcoin from the point of view of a curious cryptolo-
gist and an information security expert. Ideally we would like to see if bitcoin is
secure and what kind of attacks are possible against bitcoin, and maybe how it
can be improved, cf. [4]. However we cannot pretend to cover all these questions
in one paper. Instead we concentrate just on the questions of bitcoin mining. We
look at the cryptographic foundations of bitcoin and also consider some poten-
tial broader business and financial consequences of these questions. In particular
we look at various factors which are likely to affect the stability of bitcoin as a
currency in very substantial ways and at additional factors which will affect the
bitcoin market participants and investors.
 Part I

Bitcoin and Bitcoin Mining

3 The Challenge

Each time a certain type of good, medium or technology is widely adopted as

a mean of exchange and payment, and regardless if we would really agree call
it “a currency”, it has certain pre-existing characteristics. These are its (rela-
tive) rarity, security understood as important difficulty to forge this “currency”
and/or to commit fraud. The rules which govern the adoption of cryptographic
technology are not dissimilar. In cryptography, when a certain cryptographic
scheme is massively adopted, it is so because it is hard to break. Money has
somewhat to resist fraud theft and forgery, cryptography has to withstand the
presence of hackers and code breakers. Both emerge through the process of nat-
ural selection in which different types of payment technology or/and different
sorts of cryptography co-exist. With time some solutions emerge as a preferred
choice however a certain bio-diversity always remains.
In this paper we study bitcoin with particular attention paid to the process
of bicoin mining, which is the specialist term given to the process by which
new bitcoins are created. We are going study this question from many different
angles. It is a cryptographic puzzle, but also a disruptive technology in monetary
history. It also is method to make money for miners, a method to own and control
the bitcoin currency, a method to police the bitcoin network and enforce the
compliance with a certain version of the bitcoin specification, etc. Later in Part
II we are going to to study in a lot of detail one particular technical question in
symmetric cryptography to see if there exists an improved method which allows
one to mine bitcoins faster.

4 What Are Bitcoins and Bitcoin Mining

Bitcoins are a type of digital currency which can be stored on a computer, though
it is advisable to store them rather in a more secure way. For example on paper
and in a safe, or on a smart card or another highly secure platform.
Bitcoins use the concept of so called “Proofs or Work” which are solutions
to certain very hard cryptographic puzzles based on hash functions. However
these solutions are NOT bitcoins. The puzzles are rather part of the bitcoin
trust infrastructure. In fact the puzzles are connected together to form a chain
and as the length of this chain grows, so does the security level. Bitcoins are
simply awarded to people who produce these “Proofs or Work” which is a very
difficult task.
Ownership of bitcoins is achieved through digital signatures: the owner of a
certain private key is the owner of a certain quantity of bitcoins. This private
key is the unique way to transfer the bitcoin to another computer or person.
The operation of so called bitcoin mining or creating bitcoins out of the thin
air is not only possible. It is essential, it is encouraged, and it is a crucial and
necessary part of the Bitcoin ecosystem. Cryptographic computations executed
by a peer-to-peer network of a growing network of currently some twenty thou-
sand independent nodes [20] are the heart of the security assurance provided
by this virtual currency system. It would be very difficult and extremely costly
for one entity to corrupt all these independent people. The sum of all this col-
lective computational work provides some sort of solid cryptographic proof and
prevents attacks on this system. This also how the network polices itself: miners
are expected to approve only correctly formed transactions. Bitcoin implements
a specific sort of distributed and decentralized electronic notary system without
a central authority. Well almost. Certain decisions about how the system works,
what exactly the bitcoin software does and how [6], are still pretty centralized.
They are subject to adoption or rejection by the wider community.
In a nutshell, bitcoin miners make money when they find a 32-bit value which,
when hashed together with the data from other transactions with a standard
hash function gives a hash with a certain number of 60 or more zeros. This is an
extremely rare event. It is in general believed that there is no way to produce
these data otherwise than by engaging in very long and costly computations.
This question of feasibility of bitcoin mining and possible improvements is a
central question in this paper and we study it later in more details.

5 Are Bitcoins Secure?

Is Bitcoin a secure distributed system and in what sense it is secure remains

unclear. As far as we can see nobody yet claimed that bitcoin is provably secure
as we understand it in cryptography with a formal definition and a security proof.
On the contrary, bitcoin clearly isn’t a state of the art cryptographic
system, see [4]. It is a practical system with many potential shortcomings. In
this respect it has been a tremendous success and it has no serious competitor
at the present moment.
For the time being we need to assume that the security of bitcoin payments is
based on the shared belief that there is no way to hack the bitcoin system in any
substantial way. Officially bitcoin is experimental, it does not claim to be secure.
In fact the security of the bitcoin protocol and software has already been
broken once. On 15 August 2010 somebody has created an unbelievably high
quantity of 184 billion of bitcoins worth literally trillions of dollars out of nothing
and made the distributed system accept it, see [10]. The protocol system and
software have been patched immediately and bitcoin protocol is now at version
2. All bitcoin adopters worldwide had to agree to discard this strange attribution
of money. The only way to recover from this sort of error is by consensus. There
were also major cyber attacks with concrete exploits against bitcoin software
and systems, see [10]. In just once such incident 17000 BTC were lost (or maybe
stolen) which is worth millions of dollars. These embarrassing incidents are not
very widely publicized.
Moreover there are some non-technical reasons to be very cautious with
bitcoin. Quite interestingly the creator of the system [51] was apparently a
pseudonym and seems to have disappeared. As far as we can see no serious
academic cryptologist has publicly expressed their faith in bitcoins and their
security. On the contrary, the cryptographic community, as well as the software
engineering community, are full of highly capable code breakers able to find new
attacks and exploits on secure systems such as bitcoin every day.
A major reference in this area is a paper published at Financial Cryptography
2012 [4]. This paper clearly explains that hundreds of academic papers have
been published to improve the efficiency and security of e-cash constructions.
At the same time the authors explain that bitcoin is a rather simple system
which uses no fancy cryptography, and is by no means perfect. Then they analyse
the security of the bitcoin system from numerous angles and consider many
interesting attacks, see [4].
In this paper we look mostly at the questions of how bitcoin works and how
exactly bitcoin mining works. We try to see if it is possible to improve this
process to be more efficient. Later we will look at what are the consequences of
what we have learned.

6 The Main Activity of Miners

The goal of the miner is to solve a certain cryptographic puzzle which we will
later call a CISO Hash Problem. The solution will be called a CISO block.
Great majority of miners ignore what exactly they are doing, they are running
either open source software or have purchased some hardware to do mining very
efficiently. However miners must know that the operation is very timely and that
they need to be permanently connected to the network. The solutions to these
puzzles are linked to each other and form a unique chain of solutions. This is
usually called the block chain. The whole block chain is published on the Internet.
The whole of it can for example be consulted at http://blockexplorer.com/.
All new blocks which are found need to be broadcast to all network participants
as soon as possible. The miners need to be very reactive and they do it because
it is in their interest (note: a very recent paper proposes another strategy [31]).
They need to listen to broadcasts in order to receive the data about recent trans-
actions which they are expected to approve. Then they need need to broadcast
any solution (a CISO block) which they have found as soon as they found it,
because their solution is likely to be part of the ”main chain of blocks” only if it
is widely known. Once the solution is known it ”discourages” other miners from
searching for the same block. Instead they can concentrate on searching for the
next block which will confirm the present block and will make the miner be able
to claim hist a reward for producing this CISO block.
Our goal is to clarify how this system works. In the present section we consider
a static computational problem which needs to be solved. In Section 7 we will
further explain the dynamics of bitcoin production in the long run: how this
problem changes with time in a predetermined way.

6.1 Bitcoin Mining vs. Block Cipher Cryptanalysis

The problem of bitcoin mining is very closely related to well known problems
in cryptography. One crucial question is as follows: how does the bitcoin min-
ing differ from traditional questions in cryptanalysis of block ciphers and hash
functions and is there a more efficient way to mine bitcoins.
 First we are going to briefly describe the problem as a static computation
problem about a certain block cipher. Then we are going to look at how the
problem evolves in time and how solutions to the CISO problem are converted
to shares in the bitcoin currency. Finally we are going to study what the possible
solutions and optimizations are.

6.2 Constrained Input Small Output (CISO) Hashing Problem

New bitcoins can be created if the miner can hash some data from the bitcoin
network together with a 32-bit random nonce, and obtain a number on 256
bits which starts with a certain number of zeros. We call this problem CISO:
Constrained Input Small Output.
This can be seen as a special case of a problem which is sometimes called
CICO which means Constrained Inputs Constrained Outputs problem. This ter-
minology have been introduced recently in the study of the most recently stan-
dardized U.S. government standard hash function SHA-3 a.k.a. Keccak. SHA-3
is the latest hash function in the SHA family and a successor to SHA-256 used
in bitcoin [2]. It is possible to claim that this means that SHA-256 of Bitcoin
is considered by the United States NIST and a broader cryptographic engineer-
ing community as NOT sufficiently secure for long term security. This sort of
CISO/CICO problems are not new, they are very frequently studied in crypt-
analysis of hash functions since ever, and endless variants of these problems exist
for specific hash functions, some examples can be found in [2, 25, 50].
The exact details of the specific Constrained Input Small Output (CISO)
problem which we have in bitcoin are described below. It can be obtained by
the inspection of the bitcoin source code, see [6, 7]. Both code for bitcode mining
and for the whole bitcoin network is open and therefore the process is relatively
transparent.

6.3 (CISO) Hashing Problem Internals

On Fig. 2 we show the cryptographic computation which is executed many many
times by bitcoin miners. This picture emphasizes the internal structure inside
SHA-256 hash function. The inputs and contraints on these inputs are explained
in details in Section 6.5 below.
SHA-256 is a hash function built from a block cipher following the so called
Davies-Meyer construction. The principle of the Davies-Meyer construction is
that the input value is at the end added to the output and that it transforms an
encryption algorithm into a “hashing” algorithm, a building piece of a standard
hash function. The underlying block cipher has 64 rounds and thus a 2048-bit
expanded internal key (64x32 bits). This key is obtained from the message block
to be compressed, which has 512 bits at the input and is expanded four times
to form this 2048-bit internal key for our block cipher. In one sense on Fig.
2 we convert the problem of bitcoin mining or of solving CISO hash puzzles,
to a specific problem with three distinct applications of the block cipher which
underlies SHA-256 connected together to form certain circuit. More details about
these inner workings of SHA-256 as it is used in Bitcoin mining will be given in
Section 10.
Fig. 2. The Block Hashing Algorithm of bitcoin revisited and seen as a Constrained
Input Small Output (CISO) problem. We see two applications of SHA-256 together with
internal details of the Davies-Meyer construction. We can view it as a triple application
of a specific block cipher. An interesting question is whether there is a more efficient
cryptographic shortcut or inversion attack or some non-trivial optimizations which
allow to save a constant factor. Such optimizations, if they exist, could be worth some
serious money as they would allow to produce bitcoins cheaper.

6.4 The Main Objective of CISO Hashing

The goal of CISO hashing is to produce solutions which are correctly formed
in the sense that they satisfy all the required conditions and constraints, which
we are going to explain in details in Section 6.5. The miner is trying to find a
solution to the CISO problem such that

H2 < target.

Here target is a large integer which is a global variable for the whole bitcoin
system worldwide, and on which all the participants worldwide are expected to
agree. The value of target slowly changes with time and is adjusted approxi-
mately every 2 weeks. More details are given below in Section 7.1.
The job of bitcoin miners is to find these solutions and publish them. They
are rewarded with some bitcoins for their work. In 2013 the reward is 25 BTC (25
bitcoins) per valid solution. How exactly this reward works and how it changes
over time will be explained later.
It is generally believed that there is no other method to achieve success than
trial and error; hashing at random as depicted on Fig. 2 until a result with a
sufficient number of leading zeros is found. However this is unlikely to be true,
there is always a better way, at least slightly, see Section 12.

6.5 The Inputs and Input Constraints In CISO Hashing

A number of data fields are present as inputs to the CISO problem, cf. Fig. 2.
Some data are fixed or change very slowly and these are indicated in green on
Fig. 2. Other data need to be adjusted by the miner in order to obtain a solution
however they still change very slowly. Such data are indicated in yellow on the
main picture. Data which change the most frequently are indicated in red: these
are “hot” data which need to be re-computed each time the nonce changes.
Bitcoin is a live distributed system and the exact conditions required for the
data to be consider valid are essentially fixed and known, however they are likely
to evolve with time in subtle ways. Rules have already been and are likely to be
altered during the operation of the system. They also depend on the consensus
of participants in the system. It is generally admitted in the bitcoin community
that there could be and should be many different versions of the software which
co-exist. This is because if all the software came from one single source, bitcoin
would cease to be a system independent from any central authority and would
develop a serious syndrome of a single point of failure. Therefore bitcoin software
should be diverse. We could even postulate that nobody should be excluded from
making their own software even though we might be worried about Denial of
Service attacks. In practice the reality is different: the original Satoshi software
[6] conserves a prominent position.
In what follows we are going to describe what different inputs are. We need
to pay attention to the degree of freedom which is allowed: to what extend the
miner is able to select different values in order to achieve the desired result. We
have:
1. Version number on 32 bits. This is an integer which represents the
version number of the bitcoin software. It defines the rules which govern the
blocks, which blocks could be accepted as valid. It is essentially a constant,
since the creation of the system in 2009 it has always been equal to 1 then
it became 2. At the time of writing new blocks are typically version 2 and
it has been announced that very soon the community will stop accepting
blocks generated compliant with older version 1 rules.
2. The previous block on 256 bits. Or more precisely a hash on 256 bits
of all the data of the previous CISO block encoded in a specific way. Each
new block is added at the end of the chain of blocks. Ideally there is only
one official chain of blocks.
 The miner has essentially no choice, a new CISO block is created approx-
imately every 10 minutes and it is broadcast in the peer to peer network
(and published on the Internet) as soon as possible. The current block very
quickly becomes obsolete. Either miners will now use it as a previous block,
or they will use another freshly generated solution. The solution is NOT
unique however there is only one winner (in the long run). Each miner who
produces a solution wants this solution to be known by the highest possible
number of other miners and ahead of any competing solution. It is a race
where every microsecond counts.
The process of generating new blocks is a sort of lottery and the probability
that there will be two winners in a very short interval of time is low. It is the
miner’s responsibility to check very frequently if a solution have not already
been found. If this is the case, it is not in his interest to find another one
later on, his chances to succeed decrease quickly with time. On the human
and technical/software side however, network propagation makes that not
all participants have the same view of which solution was the first, and
there is a real possibility to have disputes. Potentially bitcoin could split
into two systems which do not recognize each other and which operate two
independent ever growing blockchains. In theory there is a so called Longest
Chain rule which allows to solve this problem [51]. In practice it is a bit
different. The Longest Chain rule might be hard to enforce. People may
rather trust a well-established website than siome votes which come from
the (more obscure) peer-to-peer network. They could suspect or resist an
attack by a powerful entity. They can simply agree to disagree because they
have spent some substantial money on electricity on one version of the chain.
3. The Merkle root on 256 bits. This is a sort of an aggregated hash of
many recent events in the bitcoin network which certifies that the system
recognizes all of them simultaneously as being valid. Moreover it also has a
self-certifying property. It also hashes and certifies the public key of the
future owner of this freshly created portion of bitcoin currency which this
block is intended to embody, as soon as it is in turn confirmed by few other
CISO blocks.
The current CISO block which the miner is trying to create by solving the
current CISO problem and all subsequent CISO blocks will provide an accu-
mulation of evidence about all these events which will be increasingly secure
and increasingly hard to falsify with time. This security guarantee increases
with time. It is achieved because miners expend a lot of computing power,
the number of miners is increasing, and more recently they use specialized
devices with increasing fixed (equipment) costs. All these things are increas-
ingly hard to imitate.
Interestingly the value of the Merkle root can (and needs to be) influenced
by the miner as explained below. First of all it is clear that miners do have
some discretionary powers and should be able to collude and/or select which
transactions are going to be recognized by the system. However the trans-
action fees which are decided at the moment of making a transfer from one
bitcoin address to another are an incentive to include every single transac-
 tion. Thus the miner is able to collect hundreds of transaction fees for each
block generated.
The Merkle root value is always produced by a hash function which is ex-
pected to behave as a random oracle. This means that the miner can influence
this Merkle root value but only very slightly, basically by trial and error.
4. Timestamp on 32 bits. This is the current time in seconds. The miner can
hardly change it. This would be extremely risky as another solution could
be submitted at any moment. There are only 600 seconds in 10 minutes.
5. Target on 32 bits. More precisely the global variable target is on 256
bits and what is stored here is a compressed version of target which is
frequently called difficulty. We have difficulty ≈ 267, 731, 249 ≈ 228.0
as of 22 October 2013. This difficulty is a real (floating) number which is
at least 1 and which is stored in a 32-bit format. We have difficulty · 232 =
1/probability = 2256 /target.
6. Nonce on 32 bits. This nonce is freely chosen by the miner. Interestingly
the nonce has only 32 bits while the current value of target makes that the
probability of obtaining a suitable H2 by accident is as low as 2−60.00 .
This means that the miner needs to be able to generate different versions of
the puzzle with a different Merkle root (or with other differences)
7. Padding+ Len has 384 bits for H1 and 256 bits for H2. These are
two constants due to the specification of SHA-256 hash function which is
used here twice with data of different sizes: the input hashed has 640 and
256 bits respectively in each application of SHA-256. These two values never
change.
With respect to the input data requirements and constraints above and the
output constraint H2 < target we have:
Definition 6.1 (CISO Problem). We call the CISO Problem the problem
of finding a valid Merkle root and other data as illustrated on Fig. 2 which is
correctly formed and will be accepted by the majority of current bitcoin software.

7 Evolution of The Difficulty of CISO Puzzles With Time

The integer target is system-wide variable which should be the same for all
bitcoin miners at any given moment. From the point of view of the miner it should
be considered as a constant. It changes with time according to pre-determined
rules. It determines how hard it is to solve the CISO problem. It is implements
self-regulation. The target value is adjusted simply in such a way that the total
number of CISO blocks found by all miners on our planet taken together is
constant in a given period of time.

7.1 Moving Target - Regulation Of Speed At Which CISO Blocks

Are Generated
More precisely and according to the rules embedded in current bitcoin software,
on average one block should be generated every 10 minutes. This regulation is
achieved by observation of the speed at which shares have been generated in a
fixed period of time and adjusting the global variable target accordingly. The
exact value target changes roughly every two weeks, or when exactly 2016 new
blocks have been produced. It goes without saying that the actual speed at which
the blocks are generated is not uniform, however it remains close to uniform.
As of 22 October 2013 we have

target ≈ 2256−60.00 .

This current probability of 2−60.00 corresponds to the requirement of having 60

leading zeros, and in fact slightly more or less slightly less than 60, the exact rule
is simply that the equation H2 < target needs to hold. The value of target
changes quite frequently.
This current probability of 2−60.00 is really the success probability for min-
ing by hashing the appropriate data at random with a double application of the
hash function (as required cf. Fig 2). This is already an extremely small figure.
It makes bitcoin mining very difficult. It reflects the fact that many people have
already solved many CISO puzzles and obtained bitcoins as a reward. Tens of
thousands of people worldwide mine bitcoins with increasingly powerful com-
puting devices. Accordingly the difficulty increases which is necessary in order
to keep limited monetary supply in the system. At the moment of writing the
global hash rate in the network was already 3000 TH/s and has increased about
50 times in the previous 6 months.
Remark 1. Typically target decreases with time. However it can also go
slightly up in order to insure that CISO blocks are produced at a uniform speed.
It should and could substantially increase if for some reason the global production
of CISO blocks goes down, for example due to increased electricity prices or
important “real money” capital outflows in the bitcoin market. Such events are
more than likely to happen, see Section 13.1.
Remark 2. Initially in early 2009 the probability was only 2−32.0 . Back then
it was 256 million times easier than today to solve CISO puzzles. Many early
adopters of bitcoin have made a lot of money. One of the well-known problems
of bitcoin is the problem of hoarding: a substantial proportion of bitcoins in
circulation is not used.
Remark 3. It is also widely believed that many bitcoins have been lost be-
cause their owners did not think it would ever be worth some serious money.
Even though all bitcoin data are public there is no way to tell the difference
between bitcoins which are saved (and could be sold or exchanged later), from
those which have been lost. Therefore is it not correct to believe that the mon-
etary supply of bitcoins is fixed. We can only say that it is upper bounded and
limited by the existing production and a cap of 21 million bitcoins to be ever
produced. However there is no way to know how many bitcoins are in active
existence.
 Part II

How To Speed Up The

Bitcoin Mining Process
8 Is There A Better Way?

In this part we look at a pure specialist question which pertains to symmetric

cryptography, of whether there is a cryptographic “shortcut” attack: simply a
method of mining bitcoins faster than brute force, or faster than the trivial
method in which the SHA-256 hash function is a black box. The answer is
trivially yes, such a method trivially exists and most developers of modern bitcoin
miner hardware have already applied various tricks which enhance the speed
or/and decrease the cost. However until now there was no public discussion of
these questions and it was not possible to see how far one can go in this direction.
In this paper we describe a series of more or less non-trivial optimizations of the
bitcoin mining process. These optimizations are quite important as considerable
computing power is already expended on our planet on bitcoin mining [36].
The question is what is the fastest possible method for bitcoin mining, given
the specific structure of Fig. 2 and can we save some of the gates needed for this
task. The answer is yes we can.
In this paper we are the first to develop such techniques openly and publish
them. We have invented these techniques independently from scratch and to the
best of our knowledge they are free of any intellectual property rights. However
we expect that ASIC designers have already done similar optimizations and some
of these techniques could have been patented.
Related Search: One could also try to solve this problem by formal coding
and “a software algebraic attack”, see [24, 45, 52].
9 Bitcoin Mining: Past Present and Future
9.1 Four Generations of Bitcoin Miners
Since 2009 bitcoin mining have gone through four major stages. Speed of bit-
coin operations is measured in GH/s or mega hashes per second, as these op-
erations are essentially about computing the standard hash function SHA-256
many times. No source gives a clear definition of H/s as the speed of SHA-256
is variable and depends on data length. We will go back to this question later.
1. First generation - software mining using CPUs. Initially amateurs
used to do these computations at home with open-source software.
Various modern CPUs allow to achieve roughly between 1 and 5 MH/s per
CPU core. With this technology miners have been expending quantities of
energy to produce one Giga Hash per second. For example we have computed
that with Intel i5 processors we would need some 50 4-core CPUs consuming
4000 Watts. The power consumption is therefore 4000 W per GH/s.
2. Second generation - software mining using GPUs. Graphic card CPUs
have revolutionized bitcoin mininng however they have NOT always achieved
very important savings compared to CPUs. In some cases their electricity
consumption is not much lower than with CPUs. Other solutions are more
efficient and allow one to mine with a power consumption at least 10 times
lower than with CPU mining see [32]. For example with Radeon 7790 we
obtain about 0.33 GH/s with a power consumption of 70 watts. This is
about 210 W per GH/s.
3. Third generation - hardware mining with FPGAs. Then miners have
used FPGAs, not always achieving much higher speeds on devices with com-
parable cost and size, but decreasing the power consumption quite substan-
tially, up to 100 times in comparison to CPU mining. For example ModMiner
Quad based on a 45 nm FPGA requires about 50 W per Gh/s.
4. Fourth generation - hardware mining with ASICs. Finally since mid-
2013 miners are moving towards using ASICs, dedicated hashing chips. This
further decreases the cost of mining and in particular power consumption
many times. These devices can achieve as little as 0.35 W per Gh/s (pre-order
announcement from Bitmine.ch expected to ship in November 2013).
As we can see, the energy efficiency of bitcoin miners have improved by a fac-
tor of nearly 10,000 since 2009. Recent developments have driven amateurs out
of business and require them to invest thousands of dollars and purchase special-
ized hardware. At the same tile new innovative business ventures make money
by selling increasingly sophisticated bitcoin mining devices. At the moment of
writing the key players in this business are the US company Butterfly Labs,
Swedish KNC miner, the Swiss company Bitmine.ch, their Russian competitor
BitFury and few other.

9.2 Electricity Consumption of Bitcoin Mining Operations

There is abundant publicly available data about bitcoin mining. In April 2013 it
was estimated that bitcoin miners already used about 982 Megawatt hours every
day, enough to power about 30,000 U.S. homes or an equivalent of 150,000 USD
per day in electricity bills. Still they would be able to make some 0.7 Millions
of dollars in daily profits [36]. At that time the hash rate was about 60 Tera
Hashes/s.
At the moment of writing (22 October 2013) the hash rate has attained 3000
Tera Hashes/s due to a massive switch from GPU and FPGA mining to ASIC
mining. However the power consumption have probably decreased due to the
fact that recent mining devices are more efficient, see Section 12.
Bitcoin mining is known to be a highly profitable business. Some online tools
for bitcoin profitability calculations based on the price of electricity are available,
cf. [1].

9.3 Towards a Fifth Generation of Miners

We contend that there will be further improvements in the basic technology. In
science, not everything can be improved. Interestingly in business, we are accus-
tomed to see that more or less every technology which has some economic impact
can be systematically improved every year. This is for example is reflected in
the famous Moore’s law. We see no reason why it should be otherwise with ba-
sic algorithmic technology behind bitcoin mining, this independently from the
question of efficient hardware implementation of this technology. Such improve-
ments are inevitable. In the long run, we believe that sooner or later there will be
substantially better technology for bitcoin mining, would this be with quantum
computers, software algebraic attacks [24, 45, 52], or a fundamentally different
methodology than currently known. In order to fix the ideas we call this claim
a super optimistic assumption.
The interesting aspect is that researchers who are able to generate such
improvements will be able to make a lot of money by mining bitcoins and selling
them at their market price, or by licencing their algorithmic improvements to
miners. Moreover even a tiny energy efficiency improvement of 1 % could be
profitable as it will generate already thousands of dollars of tangible savings on
electricity bills. In this paper we show that such improvements are possible, see
Section 12. However we do not claim that we are getting anywhere near the
fifth generation of bitcoin miners. We have been only moderately successful in
this task and therefore our result are like generation 4.1. of bitcoin miners, a
small improvement. We offer our improvements free of charge and do not plan
to patent them.
10 Description of the Problem
In this section we re-visit and expand our technical explanation of the internals
behind bitcoin mining fom Section 6.3. We recall that we can see the problem
of bitcoin mining as a specific problem in symmetric cryptography which we
called “CISO hash puzzle”. It involves three applications of a block cipher. We
have already outlined this approach on Fig. 2 and now we explain it in all due
details. Our analysis follows the NIST specification of SHA-256 [33] and the
inspection of the Bitcoin source code [6]. We use vere similar notations and
graphical conventions as the leading experts of SHA-256 in the cryptographic
literature, see for example [44, 50]. We start by recalling how the SHA-256 has
function is constructed and then we show how exactly it is used in bitcoin mining.
SHA-256 is a hash function built from a block cipher following the well-known
Davies-Meyer construction in which the input is at the end added to the output.
This construction is one of the known methods to transform a block cipher into
a compression function. A compression function is a building block of a hash
function with a fixed input size. It is typically equal to twice the output size. In
our case we have a compression function from 512 to 256 bits, cf. Fig. 3.

Fig. 3. One compression function in SHA-256. It comprises a 256-bit block cipher with
64 rounds, a key expansion mechanism from 512 to 2048 bits, and a final set of eight
32-bit additions.

The block size in this block cipher is 256 bits, the key size is 512 bits which
is expanded to 64 subkeys on 32 bits each for each of 64 rounds of the cipher.
The first 16 subkeys for the first 16 rounds are identical to the message and are
copied in the same order cf. [33] and later Fig. 12.
 In addition in order to hash a full message, SHA-256 applies a Merkle-
Damgard padding and length extension which makes it a secure hash function
for messages of variable length. In the pre-processing stage, we must append one
binary 1 and many zeros to the message in such a way that the resulting length
is equal to 448 modulo 512, cf. [33]. Then we append the length of the message
in bits as a 64-bit big-endian integer.

Fig. 4. The internals of SHA-256 when hashing a 640-bit message as used in the first
application of SHA-256 in bitcoin mining.

An interesting peculiarity in Bitcoin specification and source code is that

hashing with full SHA-256 is applied twice. This may seem as excessive: one
“secure” hash function should be sufficient. It also makes our job of optimizing
bitcoin mining substantially more difficult. In the first application of SHA-256
in Bitcoin mining the message has a fixed length of 640 bits which requires
two applications of the compression function as shown on Fig. 4. In the second
application SHA-256 is applied to 256 bits. Overall “in theory” we need three
applications of the compression function as already shown on Fig. 2 which we
also show on a smaller-scale Fig. 5 below for convenience.
It may therefore seem that a bitcoin miner needs to compute the compression
function 3.0 times for each nonce and for each Merkle hash. In the following
sections we are going to work on reducing this figure down to about 1.89 on
average. Further details about inner mechanisms of SHA-256 will be provided
later when we need them cf. for example Section 11.4.
10.1 Short Description of the CISO Hashing Problem
We recall from Section 6.2 that new bitcoins can be created when the miner
succeeds to hash some data from the bitcoin network together with a 32-bit
random nonce and is able to obtain a number on 256 bits which starts with a
certain number of 60 or more zeros.
We call it Constrained Input Small Output problem or shortly the CISO
problem. On Fig. 5 we recall the key steps in this process. The process needs
to be iterated with different values of MerkleRoot and different 32-bit nonces
until a suitable “CISO configuration” is found in which the output satisfies
H2 < target as explained in Section 6.4.

Fig. 5. Our CISO problem seen as three applications of the underlying block cipher as
in bitcoin mining.
11 Our Optimizations
11.1 Improvement 1: Remove First Compression Function
We can reduce the cost factor from 3.0 to 2.0 almost instantly by making the
following observation. In the process of bitcoin mining the first compression
function does not depend on the random nonce on 32 bits. Therefore we can
compute it once every 232 nonces. On average we need
1
2.0 +
232
compression functions. The added factor is the amortized cost of the first hash
and can be neglected.
Important Remark. In more advanced bitcoin mining algorithms the miner
does not have to compute the output for every nonce. He can do it only for
some well chosen nonces. They may be chosen in such a way as in order to
obtain specific values which make the computation easier. Moreover, some well
chosen nonces could be generated in some specific order in order to enable incre-
mental computations. In an incremental computation some computations could
made easier by reusing all the (known) internal values in one or several previ-
ous computations. There is a lot of highly non-trivial optimizations which can
be developed. One simple example of incremental computation will be given in
Section 11.4, another in Section 11.11.

11.2 Improvement 2: Save 3 Rounds at the End

We look at the computation of H2 on Fig. 5, (the second computation of the
hash function and the third compression function). A close examination reveals
that in last rounds of the underlying block cipher the two words on 32 bits in
which we we want to have at least 60 zeros, after addition of a suitable constant,
are created at rounds 60 and 61 if we number from 0. We basically want to force
values created at rounds t = 60 and 61 to two fixed constants which come from
the SHA-256 IV constants, and which would produce zeros at the output. For
this most of the time we just need to compute the first 61 rounds out of 64
and we can early reject most cases. Only in 1/232 of cases we need to compute
62 rounds in the third compression function. Then only in some 1/260 of cases
where we have actually obtained at least 60 zeros, we would need compute the
full 64 rounds.
Thus overall one only needs to compute the whole compression function an
equivalent of very roughly 1 + 61/64 ≈ 1.95 times on average. Most of the time
one only needs to compute H1 and 61 rounds of H2 to early reject the 32-bit
value obtained which must be equal to the IV constant.
Remark 1. This figure is not exact and in fact it is slightly less. This is
because we can in fact save a higher fraction of about 3/48 of the message
expansion process when we stop our computation at 61 rounds. This is due to
the fact that message expansion is only computed in the last 48 rounds, in the
first 16 rounds the message is copied cf. [33] and later Fig. 12. For the sake of
simplicity we ignore the message expansion in our calculations.
 Fig. 6. An example showing the last 5 Rounds of a SHA-256 computation.

Remark 2. We have carefully checked the ordering of words by inspection

of bitcoin source code [6] and by computer experiments. An interesting question
is what would happen if the bitcoin designers have formatted the output of the
hash function in the reversed order. If they required that 60 bits are at 0 at the
opposite end compared to the current formatting, then it is possible to see that
the miner would need to do more work: 63 out of 64 rounds in the last application
of the compression function. This would make mining more expensive and would
cancel a good proportion of our savings.

11.3 Improvement 3: Reduce the Number of Rounds at the

Beginning
Now we look at the second computation of the hash function in the second com-
pression function, the computation of H1 on Fig. 5. Here we use the observation
that in SHA-256 the key for the first 16 rounds are exactly the 16 message blocks
in the same order, cf. [33] and Fig. 12. It is possible that in the second com-
pression function on Fig. 5 the nonce enters at round 3 (numbered from 0) and
therefore in most cases we just need to compute the last 61 out of 64 rounds of
the block cipher. The first three rounds are the same for every nonce and their
(amortized) cost is nearly zero.
Putting together Improvement 2 and Improvement 3, overall one only needs
to compute the whole compression function slightly less than an equivalent of
about 2 × 61/64 = 1.90 times.

11.4 Improvement 4: Incremental Calculations in Round 3

This improvement requires us to delve more deeply into the structure of the
block cipher inside SHA-256. We recall that the state of the cipher after round 2
is constant and does not yet depend on the value od the nonce. The 32-bit nonce
will be precisely copied to become the session key for the round 3 of encryption.
On Fig. 7 we show the circuit for one round of encryption where at round 3
the nonce enters as W3 = nonce as shown on later Fig. 9. Here
denotes one
addition on 32 bits.
 Fig. 7. One round of the block cipher inside SHA-256

Here Wt is the key derived from the message and Kt is a certain constant
[33]. For t = 3 we have W3 = nonce. Now it is obvious that the whole round 3
can be computed essentially for free in the incremental way. We just need two
32-bit increments instead of one whole round which is about 7 additions and 4
other 32-bit operations. Each time we increment the nonce we simply need to
increment two values (in columns A and E) at the output of round 3, which is
shown on Fig. 8 below.

Fig. 8. Example of incremental direct computation of the state after round 3.

Thus we have saved one more round in each of our computations.

11.5 Improvement 5: Exploiting Zeros and Constants in the Key
The next improvement comes from the fact that the key in the first 16 rounds
of the block cipher is an exact copy of the message. Many parts of this key are
constants. Many are actually always equal to zero. This allows one to save a lot
of additions in the computation of SHA-256.

Fig. 9. Key in the first 16 rounds out of 64 in each computation and their provenance.

Let KWt = Kt
Wt . Overall we see that we can save 18 additions: 16

additions have a constant equal equal to zero, and KWt = Kt and we have 2
more additions with 0x80000000 which can be replaced by flipping one bit, the
cost of which is very small (in hardware).
11.6 Improvement 6: Saving Two More Additions with Hard
Coding
It is easy to see that 2 more additions can be saved. Looking at Fig 9 we should
not count the three first constants on the left in yellow which are identical for
all the 232 different nonces. This is because this saving was already done in
Section 11.3. However we have two additional constants in the last line in green.
Then in these two last rounds, one in each computation, and because the Kt are
constants and do not depend on the message being hashed, we can pre-compute
the constants KWt = Kt
Wt on 32 bits which saves us 2 additions such as in
the upper right corner of Fig. 7.
Remark: In Section 11.5 above and here in Section 11.6 we saved 18+2
additions. Moreover the output of these two additions is a constant in 18+2
cases saving not one but first two additions in the upper right corner of Fig. 7.
However these savings are illusory, because we can save many more additions
by another method. For example later on Fig. 11 we are going to show that one
only needs essentially 2 additions in order to implement the whole round function
of SHA256, this instead of 6+1 full adders as on Fig. 7.

11.7 Known Results About SHA256 in Hardware/ASIC

The goal of this paper is NOT to describe the best possible ASIC implementation
of SHA256 and what is the best compromise between the circuit area/propagation
time, see [21, 27, 28, 34, 37, 40–43, 48, 55, 56]. We work on a slightly different prob-
lem: we show that the problem goes beyond any state of the art SHA256 circuit,
and has its own specificity. The novelty in our paper is adaptation to mining
specifically, such as most hashed message blocks are constants, and 6 block ci-
pher rounds do NOT need to be computed at all, incremental techniques etc.
11.8 Improvement X - Saving LOTS More Additions With Delayed
Carry Propagation
We are going to use Carry Save Adders (CSA) in order to delay the propagation
of carries and save a lot of circuit area.1 The main idea which is attributed to
John von Neumann. is to propagate the carries only locally delaying a complete
propagation to the very end. This allows a dramatic reduction in the cost of
implementing multiple additions: three or more additions cost do NOT cost
much more than one single addition.
More precisely Carry Save Adders (CSA) allow to add n numbers for any
n ≥ 3 and to form two numbers which need to be added to obtain the final result.
This is obtained by a successive transformation of 3 numbers into 2 numbers with
a Carry Save Adder (CSA) which has a very low cost and a final addition of 2
numbers.
Definition 11.1 (Carry Save Adder (CSA)). A Carry Save Adder takes 3
integers a, b, c on k bits written in binary and outputs two numbers ps (partial
sum) and sc (shift-carry) as follows:
psi = ai ⊕ bi ⊕ ci

sci+1 = ai bi ∨ ai ci ∨ bi ci

Fig. 10. How to replace two adders by one adder

In the case of addition modulo 2k there is a slight simplification as the most

significant digits can be discarded but the result remains essentially the same.
Overall the application of Carry Save Adders (CSA) allows us to implement
each round of SHA256 with only two additions :

1
We call it Improvement X and we do not give it a number in this paper as this
improvement also concerns full SHA256 implementations in ASIC and has already
been applied by most ASIC designers. In this paper we focus on the difference
between fully functional general-purpose ASIC and a specific solution for bitcoin
mining.
 Fig. 11. How to compute one round of SHA-256 with just two full adders

Now we are also going to look beyond the 64 rounds of SHA256 seen as a
block cipher. What remains is the key expansion which expands the message to
be hashed into the 64x32 bit keys Wt .

11.9 Short Description of Message Expansion in SHA-256

Before we can propose additional optimizations, we need to explain how the
message expansion works in the NIST specification of SHA-256 [33]. We refer to
[33] for definitions of σ0 and σ1 .

Fig. 12. The message scheduler expanding a 512 message block into a 2048-bit key for
the SHA-256 block cipher.
11.10 Improvement 7: Saving Two More Additions
We consider the computation of H1. It is possible to see that the first two non-
trivial keys W16 and W17 are also constants and do not yet depend on the nonce.
This is because following Fig. 12 we have:

W16 = σ1 (W14 )
W9
σ0 (W1 )
W0

and

W17 = σ1 (W15 )
W10
σ0 (W2 )
W1

We see that these two values depend only on values which are constants on
Fig. 9. Therefore they can be pre-computed and as in Improvement 6 we can
replace the traditional hard-coded constants Kt by new hard-coded constants
KWt = Wt
Kt for the whole range of 232 nonces. Thus we save two more
additions.

11.11 Improvement 8: One More Additions Saved by Incremental

Computation
Now still in the case of H1 we have:

W19 = σ1 (W17 )
W11
σ0 (W4 )
W3 .

Here W3 is the nonce which is incremented by 1. Other elements do not
depend on the nonce and change at a much slower rate. We can thus save one
more addition and simply increment W19 directly for each consecutive nonce.
Remark: We also have:

W18 = σ1 (W16 )
W11
σ0 (W3 )
W2

Here the incremental computation is also possible though less efficient. For
the sake of simplicity we ignore these additional savings.

11.12 Improvement X2: More Additions Saved By Delayed Carry

Propagation
We see in the two above sections that three values Wt require zero additions and
cost essentially nothing. There remains 48-3 values Wt to be computed. If we
use again Carry Save Adders (CSA) we see that in each of the 45 cases we need
just one full adder instead of 3 full adders.
12 Our Overall Result on the Speed of Hashing
We have obtained the following result:
Fact 12.1 (Hash Speed). The amortized average cost of trying one output H2
to see if it is likely to have 60 or more leading zeros is at most about 1.89 compu-
tations of the compression function of SHA-256 instead of 3.0, which represents
an improvement by 39%. This is an additional improvement relative to already
optimized ASIC implementations of full SHA256 and we do NOT count substan-
tial additional savings which are obtained from Carry Save Adders, pipelining
and other well-known techniques.
Justification: We have saved about 7 rounds and many additions. However known
ASIC implementations also save many additions and actually the designs which
achieve the lowest possible area are not necessarily the fastest. Therefore we
are just going to estimate the RELATIVE savings w.r.t. best standard ASIC
implementations of full SHA256 such as in [21, 27, 28, 34, 37, 40–43, 48, 55, 56].
Thus overall cost minus savings are equivalent to a total of
64 + 64 7 7
− =2− ≈ 1.89 compression functions
64 64 64
This 1.89 compression functions is equivalent to saving of 37% compared to
the initial cost of 3.0 compression functions as per Fig. 5. It also shows how
much can be gained in bitcoin mining compared to using an optimized SHA256
ASIC implementation three times.
Remark 1. Fact 12.1 might seem a bit trivial. In fact it allows miners to
save up to about 50 Megawatt hours every day, or some 75,000 USD per
day in electricity bills, if we assume the reported daily consumption of bitcoin
mining in April 2013 [36]. This would be some 28 million dollars per year in
savings.
Remark 2. However at the moment of writing (22 Oct 2013) things are
expected to be different. The aggregated hash rate in the network has increased
to 3000 Tera hash, roughly a 50 times increase from April 2013. However we
don’t expect to consume as much as 1 GWh per day consumed announced in [36]
because it appears that the power consumption has decreased and not increased
in the recent months, this due to more efficient ASIC miners and to progressive
phasing out of inefficient miners which are no longer profitable. If we assume that
the average power consumption today is 3.2 W per Terahash as with ButterFly
Labs devices [18], it gives 9.6 Mega Watts of estimated consumption for miners
or some 230 Megawatt hours per day. this is about 4 times less than in [36]. If
these estimations are correct then the savings as of today would be only roughly
a quarter of 75,000 daily saving of April 2013. This will nevertheless amount to
some 7 millions of dollars saved each year.
Remark 3. We ignore if recent mining devices already use Fact 12.1 which
developers could have discovered independently. We have noticed that the Swedish
company KNCminer have explained in some Internet forums that they do indeed
use some optimizations [39] which allow them to save about 30 % of the cost of
mining.
 Remark 4. Any further improvement in this 1.89 factor is going to allow
bitcoin miners to save tens of thousands of dollars per day on electricity. It is
also likely to influence the market price of bitcoins in the future.
Remark 5. Our problem is essentially the same as a brute force attack on
a block cipher. The same computation is done a very large number of times, yet
cheaper, maybe just a small factor cheaper. It is not correct to believe that block
ciphers are well understood in cryptography. On the contrary, it appears that
for more or less any block cipher there may exist an attack which will be just
slightly faster than brute force, see [46]. An efficient low-data software algebraic
attack could also be a solution to this problem, cf. [24, 45, 52]. We expect that
the future will bring many new developments in this space.
 Part III

The Unreasonable
Long-Term Property
13 The Unreasonable Artificial 4 Year Cycle

Is there anything wrong with bitcoin at all? In the following sections we are
going to argue that bitcoin has at least one property which is truly unreason-
able and which needs to be changed in the near future. In fact we are going to
discuss something which has not yet been observed. A predicted cycle of 4 years
in bitcoin markets and data. However bitcoin has been in existence for just over
4 years and market data have been heavily distorted and blurred by tremendous
growth of the number of bitcoins in circulation and large capital inflows. Un-
der these circumstances our obscure 4-year property has not attracted a lot of
attention. It is however an undeniable fundamental and built-in feature of the
current bitcoin virtual currency system and it cannot possibly be ignored.

13.1 The Artificial 4 Year Reward Cycle

We recall the mechanism known as Block Reward Halving which exists in all
current bitcoin software [6, 7]. Every 4 years the amount of bitcoins awarded to
a successul miner will be divided by 2. It is 25 BTC as of 2013.
The origins of this property are obscure. It was NOT proposed in the original
paper of 2008 cf. [51] which simply says that any needed rules and incentives
can be enforced. It simply is a fact hard coded in the current software,
cf. [6, 7]. This mechanism is very closely related to the fact that the monetary
supply of bitcoins is fixed to 21 million. In fact this is how the 21 million cap is
implemented. The reward halving and 21 million cap are two faces of the same
property. In this paper we describe it only briefly, we refer to [8, 9] for a more
detailed explanation and discussions concerning the reasons why this peculiar
property is as it is. It may seem that this property is a sort of software bug,
however contrary a the software bug this property is very frequently applauded
and praised. It appears that we are the first to seriously criticize this property.
To summarize we have a 4 year reward cycle in the bitcoin digital currency
as we know it. Here is how exactly this mechanism works. Initially prior to
November 2012 all new CISO hashes were rewarded with 50 BTC. Currently
it is at 25 BTC for all blocks starting at 210,000 This reward price is going to
stay stable until roughly end of 2016, and then it will drop to 12.5 BTC for
another period of 4 approximately years. Then in each period of 210,000 blocks
the reward is going to be halved again.
More precisely every 210,000 blocks at every block which is an exact multi-
ple of 210,000 the reward is halved for the next 210,000 blocks. It is a sudden
abrupt change which takes place approximately every 4 years (but not exactly)
depending on the actual speed with which the block have been generated. We
should note that 210,000 is exactly 1 % of the 21 million and we have an infinite
geometric progression with a finite sum. Our mechanism can be described by the
following formula. Let t = 210000 ∗ f , the reward for any period of time t ≥ 0 is:

rewardt∈[210000·f ...210000·f +209999] = 50 · 2−f BTC for any f ≥ 0.

 Then it is easy to see that this mechanism is precisely how the cap of 21
million of bitcoins to be ever generated is enforced. More precisely if we count
all the bitcoins ever produced with the current mechanism we obtain:
∞
X
210, 000 · 50 · 2−f = 210, 000 · 50 · (1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + . . .) = 21, 000, 000
f =0

Summary. The key point is that with the current mechanism, at fixed mo-
ments in time it suddenly becomes twice more costly to mine bitcoins. These
sudden jumps occur every 4 years and are bound to have very serious financial
consequences. It suddenly makes miners stop mining and switch their devices
off. Overnight. This must lead to serious perturbations in the market.
The fact that this depreciation of the work of miners happens by sudden
jumps every 4 years is very surprising. It is bound to have some serious conse-
quences in all bitcoin-related markets.

13.2 Artificial Cycle and Instability By Design

With current bitcoin software [6, 7], at certain moments in time the reward for
mining is divided by two in one single step. This is NOT compensated by the fact
the the difficulty of mining increases all the time. It just adds sudden adjustments
every 4 years to a difficulty curve which typically goes systematically up due to a
steady increase in the production of new hashes. We predict that in the future the
difficulty curve will have a discontinuity at the moment of the 4-year halving.
Until now it has not happened because apparently only very small percentage
of active mining devices were switched off on 29 November 2012.
Inevitably, on one day many devices will stop being profitable and many
people may lose their interest in bitcoin. We are talking about the human factor.
Investors may decide that they are no longer going to give lots of money to a
high-tech industry which has just decreased production of hashes per second and
is binning many mining machines at a massive scale due to a strange rule which
has no justification and could easily be modified. They might move their money
elsewhere and invest in another cryptocurrency. Overall we expect that a sudden
slump in profitability of mining is likely to provoke some sort of a much larger
ripple in the bitcoin markets, potentially lasting up to 4 full years.
To summarize we claim that the current bitcoin reward rule has important
consequences. It creates an artificial economical cycle for the whole the industry
of bitcoin mining, for investors, and for traders who trade bitcoins. There will
be large capital inflows and outflows, there will be privileged moments to invest
money and make profits. Likewise it is extremely likely that there will be peri-
ods of time of excessive production of SHA-256 hashes which will no longer be
profitable. Depending on the market price offered for bitcoin an over-production
might force the miner of less profitable devices to switch them off earlier than
at the boundary privileged moment where the reward is halved.
13.3 The Inextricable Dilemma of Reforming How Bitcoin Works
Interestingly this cyclical property is easy to fix, bitcoin technical authorities
and developers and stake holders can agree to patch the bitcoin protocol, and
to smooth the thresholds of delivery of new bitcoins to bitcoin miners.
However they will hesitate a lot and will be faced with a certain dilemma:
1. Either we will be criticized by the financial press and media that bitcoin
is not exactly as stable as government-issued currencies and that it
has some truly unreasonable cyclic properties.
2. Or we will fix this problem. Technically it is extremely easy. It just requires
a majority of people to agree. Then suddenly bitcoin could become more
stable and therefore more like a currency.
Now if we change the way in which bitcoins are awarded, any decision made
will have very serious consequences and it would be extremely difficult to change
again.

13.4 Can The Reward Halving Cycle Be Compensated By Fees?

In the current bitcoin system there is no obligation whatsoever to include any fees
in transactions. A transaction fee will be decided by the sender of money decided
at the moment of making a transfer from one bitcoin address to another and it
will be an incentive for the miner to include the current transaction, and the
miner is able to collect hundreds of transaction fees for each block generated with
no effort. In practice current bitcoin software applies fees to most transactions
however the users are also able to override this behavior and sent transactions
without fees knowing that they will take longer to be confirmed.
It is unthinkable that fees would increase in a very substantial way overnight.
Therefore the income from fees is probably not going to compensate the cyclic
property we have described. However at the very moment when the profitability
of mining goes down, miners used to a certain level of income will try to increase
their income from fees. This can for example by done by innovating in some way.
For instance miners might promote some method to achieve greater anonymity
on the bitcoin network which will split the usual transactions into many smaller
transactions and use large number of freshly generated addresses. An increased
number of transactions processed in each block would allow to claim more fees,
and bitcoin users are likely to accept to spend more on fees as a price to pay for
better anonymity. Overall we believe that yes, the sudden slump in the reward is
going to increase the income from fess, but this is not going to happen overnight.
On the contrary, it is one of these economic mechanisms which will extend a
predicted sudden slump at the boundaries of the cycle to a much larger and
much “slower moving” economic cycle lasting up to the full 4 years.

13.5 A Proposed Fix

We propose that the block reward should be decremented with a substantially
higher frequency than after a whole very long period of 210000 blocks. We are
quite conservative and propose to leave sufficient time for all bitcoin software
worldwide to be upgraded and re-programmed. We propose to start in a very
gradual way and make the change only at the next reward halving which is at
420000 blocks, which is expected to occur at the end of year 2016. We also want
the new mechanism to share many features of the old system and we do not
propose any revolution, rather an evolution which keeps all that main premises
of the old mechanism. The only thing we want to achieve is to smooth the reward
thresholds to become more continuous and less abrupt.
It is not obvious to see how to design such a mechanism. We could for example
propose to decrease the block reward to be decremented after every 2016 blocks
(roughly every two weeks), when the difficulty changes in the current bitcoin
software. This would make it relatively easy to manage for miners. However the
problem is that 210,000 is not a multiple of 2016 and we would like to be able
to compare the new scheme to the old scheme with abrupt changes at every
210,000 blocks. Therefore we propose to decrement it every 336 blocks. We have
GCD(210000, 2016) = 336, 336 = 3 · 24 · 7 and 2016 = 6 · 336. This creates a
cycle which is still possible to manage for miners and which will always happen
at exact boundaries of two other cycles of 2016 and 210,000 blocks. Interestingly
we have 210, 000 = 336 · 54 and the change will happen exactly three times per
week as 3 · 336 · 10 minutes is exactly 7 days. This will make our solution quite
elegant and we obtain one nice closed formula (cf. Fig. 13 below).
Our new mechanism is designed in order to satisfy the following requirements:
1. The block reward should be decremented every 336 blocks, starting at block
420,336 where it should already be slightly smaller than 25 BTC.
2. We want to maintain the exact cap of 21 million BTC ever produced.
3. This means that at the beginning the reward will be bigger than before.
Then eventually later it will be smaller than before.
4. We want to have one single continuous curve starting from block 420,000 and
one single closed formula. This turns out to be possible and we can solve our
problem with one single mathematical formula.
5. Currently the reward is halved at each 210,000 blocks. For blocks up to
209,999 we had 10,5 millions bitcoins produced.
6. For all blocks up to block 419,999 we will have 10.5 + 5.25 = 15.75 millions
of bitcoins produced.
7. It remains 5.25 million of bitcoins to be produced. We need to be able to
maintain this exact number with a new reward formula for the period be-
tween 420,000 and infinity.
Thus we postulate that the following modified reward mechanism should be
introduced at and after block 420000:
 1. At next reward halving block 420,000, the reward is NOT going to change to 12.5
bitcoins. Instead it will decrease slowly.
2. It will change for each period of 663 blocks with small decrements.
3. For any block number 0 ≤ t < 210, 000 the reward was 50 BTC.
4. For any block number 210, 000 ≤ t < 420, 000 the reward remains 25 BTC.
5. For any block number t ≥ 420, 000 the reward is going to be decreased following
a geometric progression and it should be decremented at each 663 blocks. More
precisely the reward for mining block number t = 336 · k should be:
625 1250−k
rewardt∈[336·k...336·k+335] = 25.0 · ( ) BTC for any k ≥ 1250.
624
6. The actual reward will be rounded to the nearest Satoshi, the smallest unit in the
currency, equal to 1/100,000,000 BTC.

Fig. 13. Our proposal for smoothing the miner reward mechanism

Remark. Yes this means that for the first half on the 4-year period the
reward will be first bigger than before, and only eventually later it will be smaller.
This is inevitable if want to maintain the same production of 21 millions of
bitcoins in the long run and have one single closed formula to use.
Correctness. We give here a calculation sheet in Maple which proves the
correctness of our reward scheme. For comparison we do it also the previous
(original Satoshi) reward scheme.
>#Satoshi
>15.75+sum(210000*12.5/2^(f-2),’f’=2..infinity)/10^6;
21.00000000
>#New formula
>15.75+sum(336*25.0*(625/624)^((1250-k)),’k’=1250..infinity)/10^6;
21.00000000
Examples. We give here below some concrete examples of rewards with the
old formula and the new formula. We see that with the new scheme for a long
time the miner reward is higher than before. We contend that this property is
probably impossible to avoid if we want to maintain a geometric progression in
one single closed formula, the 21 million cap and continuity at block 420,000.

block 105, 000 210, 000 420, 000 420, 336 525, 000 630, 000 840, 000 1050, 000
date 01/2011 11/2012 11/2016 11/2016 11/2018 11/2020 11/2024 11/2028
old formula 50.0 25.0 12.5 12.5 12.5 6.25 3.125 1.5625
new formula 50.0 25.0 25.0 24.97 15.16 9.18 3.378 1.2417

Fig. 14. Examples of reward with the old and the new system
14 Summary and Conclusion
In this paper we explain how bitcoin electronic currency works and show that
the profitability of bitcoin mining depends on a certain cryptographic constant
which we showed to be at most 1.89. Normally very few people care about this
sort of fine cryptographic engineering details. However here it is different. This
observation alone allows bitcoin miners to save many millions of dollars each
year. The biggest incertitudes however do not come from cryptography.

14.1 The Unreasonable Incertitudes

In this paper we argument that investors who build, buy, or run bitcoin miners
are exposed to a number of incertitudes and risks which strongly depend on the
current bitcoin specification and its future updates. We contend that the lack
of stability of bitcoin goes far beyond the relatively small size of the market
compared to traditional finance. It can be and to some extent it is an inherent
built-in feature. In particular we found the bitcoin 4-year reward halving system
very disturbing. We see absolutely no reason and no benefit of any kind to
have this sort of mechanism built in a crypto currency. On the contrary,
we claim that this mechanism is unnecessary and harmful. It somewhat
discredits bitcoin as a stable currency which could be a reliable store of value.
At the very least it can seriously limit a wider adoption of bitcoin. Therefore we
propose to change it as soon as possible and propose a modified reward formula.
Bitcoin obeys the rules of a new technology venture business with a strong
business cycle and strong incentives for innovation. Each new generation of bit-
coin miners drives the previous generation out of business each time the pro-
duction method is changed. In this paper we have shown that one can improve
bitcoin miners also on the algorithmic side and we have achieved a 38 % improve-
ment. This is not a lot compared to the fact that mass production of specialized
ASIC circuits have allowed many more substantial improvements simply due to
higher density and highly specialized production. Will there ever be a fifth gen-
eration of miners which brings a more radical change? We contend that better
technology is bound to be invented, would it be quantum bitcoin miners.
More importantly, the specification of the problem to solve is likely to change.
The idea to modify the Proof of Work function in bitcoin have been proposed in
May 2013 at Bitcoin conference in San Diego by Dan Kaminsky [47]. However
this type of change could be flatly rejected by the community which have heavily
invested in ASIC mining with the current technology.
In fact there is a profound reason why such a change is proposed. According
to Dan Kaminsky the production of new bitcoins is now in the hands of too
few people [47]. Bitcoin has lost its widely distributed and democratic character.
In particular the companies which manufacture ASIC miners [15, 39, 13] are in
the privileged position. They can decide to whom they sell their hardware or
delay their shipping for no reason and it is profitable for them to do so. Poten-
tially more competition and wider promotion of honesty, good reputation and
trustworthiness in this business could solve this problem, as there is no public
authority which would regulate the bitcoin mining market.
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