Dagger-Hashimoto
Dagger-Hashimoto was the original research implementation and specification for Ethereum's mining algorithm. Dagger-Hashimoto was superseded by Ethash. Mining was switched off completely at The Merge on 15th September 2022. Since then, Ethereum has been secured using a proof-of-stake mechanism instead. This page is for historical interest - the information here is no longer relevant for post-Merge Ethereum.
Prerequisites
To better understand this page, we recommend you first read up on proof-of-work consensus, mining, and mining algorithms.
Dagger-Hashimoto
Dagger-Hashimoto aims to satisfy two goals:
- ASIC-resistance: the benefit from creating specialized hardware for the algorithm should be as small as possible
- Light client verifiability: a block should be efficiently verifiable by a light client.
With an additional modification, we also specify how to fulfill a third goal if desired, but at the cost of additional complexity:
Full chain storage: mining should require storage of the complete blockchain state (due to the irregular structure of the Ethereum state trie, we anticipate that some pruning will be possible, particularly of some often-used contracts, but we want to minimize this).
DAG Generation
The code for the algorithm will be defined in Python below. First, we give encode_int
for marshaling unsigned ints of specified precision to strings. Its inverse is also given:
1NUM_BITS = 51223def encode_int(x):4 "Encode an integer x as a string of 64 characters using a big-endian scheme"5 o = ''6 for _ in range(NUM_BITS / 8):7 o = chr(x % 256) + o8 x //= 2569 return o1011def decode_int(s):12 "Unencode an integer x from a string using a big-endian scheme"13 x = 014 for c in s:15 x *= 25616 x += ord(c)17 return x18Visa alla