On Friday, September 25, the patent on the elliptic-curve operation acceleration technology known as the GLV endomorphism expired. Now it can be activated in the popular Bitcoin Core client to improve the speed and efficiency of signature verification. BTC Times reports this.
Hal Finney, the recipient of the first Bitcoin transaction from Satoshi Nakamoto, studied the prospects for using GLV endomorphism technology.
Genesis Archives: Hal Finney – the man without whom there would be no Bitcoin
On February 8, 2011, in a Bitcointalk forum post Finney announced that he had begun experimenting with the technology after reviewing the works of the patent authors.
He noted that the initial test results were promising—the signature verification speed rose by about 25%.
“Hal Finney was the first to notice this performance-boost method for Bitcoin. Though he is no longer with us, his contribution is still felt,” said Adam Back, CEO of Blockstream.
The feature was subsequently implemented in Bitcoin Core. However, activation was not possible due to the patent, registered on December 23, 1999.
“The implementation of this feature was one of the original motivations in developing the libsecp256k1 library, which later replaced all cryptographic use of OpenSSL in Bitcoin Core. But it was not enabled by default to avoid patent problems and was never activated in Bitcoin Core,” explained Andrew Poelstra, a Blockstream developer.
The expiration of the patent will open to Bitcoin developers the possibility of speeding up the activation of the solution in Bitcoin Core. The feature has been actively tested during the development of libsecp256k1, which means it can be deployed quickly.
According to Peter Velle of Chaincode Labs, after the solution is activated node operators will notice a reduction in CPU load.
Support for GLV endomorphism could be added in the next release of the Bitcoin Core client.
In August was released version 0.20.1 of the Bitcoin Core client. Its code downgraded the status of nodes broadcasting invalid blocks to the network, and fixed minor bugs.
In January 2020, Bitcoin Core developer Peter Velle formally submitted proposals to improve Bitcoin’s scalability and user privacy with the Schnorr/Taproot soft fork.
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