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Ethereum Core Devs accepts the ProgPoW Fork. What comes next?
January 15, 2019 of Tyson O & Ham
In the last call of Ethereum Core Dev, an EIP was approved to switch from Proof of Work to ProgPoW. The goal of bifurcating to a different PoW algorithm is to prevent the production of ASIC ethash from centralizing mining efforts, but what other implications will it make?
Read also: In view of the updating of Ethereum Constantinople, Community Eyes ProgPoW
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Ethereum ASICs present unacceptable risks
Ethash, despite the marketing around it in the early days of Ethereum, is not resistant to ASIC. Ethereum's ASICs have been on the market for some time, with a duration of 2 to 4 times more efficient than commodity hardware in their first generation.
Their danger to Ethash ecosystems driven by commodity hardware has been widely demonstrated during the attack of 51% of ETC last week. It's just a matter of time before the performance gap becomes large enough to push GPU mining out completely. The proposed ProgPoW algorithm would have solved this problem, at least in the short term.
The new algorithm makes it more difficult to create ASICs because it tries to use all the functions of a GPU, effectively optimizing hashing for GPUs rather than making it harder to create ASICs that do it better.
GPUs are, in effect, ASIC, so it is obvious that this approach could be more effective. We will not know for sure until ProgPoW has been implemented on several large altcoins for a year or two, but the methodology seems solid.
Early side effects
This work-proof fork, however, will have some side effects. One of them is alienating an unknown part of their miners. The other is that Ethereum will be the first cryptocurrency to sell its security mechanism to a mining software company.
To process, ProgPoW was developed by the people of Mineority and OhGodaCompany. These companies make their money by selling custom mining software to large mining hardware companies to increase their margins.
Unlike most other cryptocurrency projects, this means that maintaining the specifications for PoW and the key competencies that surround it will be outside the core development team and the people who exercise that experience have a huge advantage when it comes to to sell custom mining software for that particular PoW. This and other criticisms have been turned to change, but only time will tell if they are substantial.
Say yours. Do the advantages of ProgPoW outweigh the risks?
Images via Pixabay
