Stanford researchers implement photonic mining chip in conjunction with new hash algorithm.
If mining centralization becomes problematic (unlikely), photonic mining could mitigate.
DoD (AFOSR) funded 👀
https://opg.optica.org/optica/fulltext.cfm?uri=optica-10-5-552&id=530125
“…photonic hardware used in hash protocols can also be used for other applications, i.e., the hardware is not necessarily an application-specific device.”
The more I think about it, the more it seems this quote is an extreme security risk… not a desirable feature like it seems.
The inability to reuse ASICs for anything other than mining raises the cost of attacking the network, because the attacker will be left with a bunch of near-useless paper weights (the ASICs).
Rather than the attack being left with functional hardware they can resell or use for other purposes after the attack…
Rather than the attacker* being left with functional hardware they can resell or use for other purposes after the attack…
I’d prefer a photonic ASIC machine if it were possible, to get the best of both worlds.
Yes. I'd have to review the specific portion of that paper since that would be a flaw. Non-ASIC is *not* an acceptable option at all and there would never be a hard fork that would tolerate that.
The people who came up with HeavyHash pointed out that it was not general purposes chips, but that the *type* of matrix multiplication was similar to what is done in machine learning, which lowers the cost at the fab/engineering level and is inherently more competitive (vs what we see now for instance with Intel dropping their bitcoin chip efforts).
The photonic chips can run competitively on ~100nm silicon, lowering upfront fab costs an order of magnitude, and eliminating the centralization point that is ASML, the world's only EUV lithography manufacturer that you need if you want tiny transistors for maximally efficient non-photonic chips.
There are also other factors that lead to divergent design approaches regardless e.g. for machine learning, you want VLSI, whereas mining you want small individual chips spread out for ease of thermal management and maximum efficiency.
