Aside from patents related to the silicon manufacturing process itself and patents not yet published, yes, the process is unencumbered, and setting the correct precedent (that the community will fight large centralization risks) is important in the first case.

Matt

On May 11, 2016 9:23:21 PM EDT, Russell O'Connor via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

Is the design and manufacturing processes for the most power efficient ASICs otherwise patent unencumbered? If not, why do we care so much about this one patent over all the others that stand on the road between pen and paper computation and thermodynamically ideal computation?

On Wed, May 11, 2016 at 8:02 PM, Gregory Maxwell via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
On Wed, May 11, 2016 at 11:01 PM, Peter Todd via bitcoin-dev
<bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> Secondly, we can probably make the consensus PoW allow blocks to be mined using
> both the existing PoW algorithm, and a very slightly tweaked version where
> implementing AsicBoost gives no advantage. That removes any incentive to
> implement AsicBoost, without making any hardware obsolete

Taking that a step further, the old POW could continue to be accepted
but with a 20% target penalty. (or vice versa, with the new POW having
a 20% target boost.)

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