Mining for Bitcoin may take tremendous amounts of time and computing power these days, but new hardware which uses error finding technology could boost the output of mining operations by as much as 30 percent.
The cryptocurrency Bitcoin has surged in popularity over the past few years. Once upon a time, you could buy hundreds of coins belonging to the virtual currency for a pittance in traditional cash; but now, each BTC is worth over $400 — having reached a peak point of over $1000 per BTC several years ago.
It was once possible to set your PC the task of mining for Bitcoins using algorithms, or joining mining pools with other users to share the computational expense of mining in return for a share of the profits.
Nowadays, for the average PC user, the trade-off between the expense of running PCs systems capable of mining for Bitcoin is no longer worth the reward.
However, a research team from Illinois, led by Rakesh Kumar, has released a study (.PDF) documenting how a new machine dubbed “Approximate” could lessen the time and power required to find elusive Bitcoins.
Within the paper, Kumar and his team say that computers set to the task of Bitcoin mining try to generate hashes with certain values. As noted in an interview with CCN, Bitcoin mining starts by looking at a nonce — a value that results in a double SHA-256 hash — before looking for a value below this target.
Mining seeks hashes which correspond to a large number of nonces, with either a straight success or failure; a system Kumar calls an “embarrassingly parallel application.“
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