A potential flaw in how mining pools automatically adjust share difficulty could leave Bitcoin miners consuming power while failing to submit enough shares for reward calculations after a sudden drop in hashrate, an analysis said. The issue involves variable difficulty controllers that adjust share difficulty per connection, not the Bitcoin network’s overall mining difficulty. The review outlined a possible weakness and ways to test it, without proving widespread losses.

Bitcoin mining hardware maker FutureBit has unveiled an experiment that performs hashing calculations by simulating neural activity from a fruit fly brain. The browser-based test, called HashFly, simulates 2,914 neural pathways from the MaleCNS v1.0 dataset and runs simplified bitcoin hashing. FutureBit said it is working to simulate all neurons for SHA-256 and plans to release results. It said the approach could potentially reach about 1 watt per terahash if expanded to real neurons, but the current test is not competitive with commercial miners.