The security of Ethereum joins the effort to destroy the great miners of Blockchain



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A remarkable voice joins the ranks of the ethereum developers who are trying to block the powerful ASIC miners from gaining an excessive share of the precious cryptocurrency of the platform ether.

At a developer meeting on Friday, Martin Holst Swende, head of security at the Ethereum Foundation, said he was supporting rapid action to remove ASIC extraction hardware from the ethereum platform. Entered in the no-profit in 2016, Swende now works to ensure that code changes do not interrupt or damage operations on the largest blockchain in the world.

With the observations, Swende is alignment with other important technologists who work on the platform's base code and think that developers have to introduce the code to block the chips. Introduced for the first time on ethereum in April, dissenting developers argue that the chips could reduce the number of participants able to keep the network register profitably.

In the meeting, Swende noted that a software modification called ProgPoW should be implemented "in parallel" with a larger and imminent update, "if the technical bases are present".

As explained by CoinDesk, software change would render current ethereum ASICs useless and potentially prevent the development of such hardware in the future.

He said:

"I think it's a great change and I'll include it as soon as possible."

Swende also noted after the e-mail meeting at CoinDesk that unlike other proposals of software updates on ethereum that affect the heart of the distribution of the smart contract on the platform called etherum virtual machine (EVM), ProgPow "will not touch the EVM or the state transition to everyone. "

As such, Swende noted that testing for the proposal could be implemented on "a completely separate test bed" in parallel to the normal test process currently at a bottleneck due to the preparation for the next hard fork of ethereum or for the system update.

The update also known as Constantinople has been going on for months, with the convening and reconfiguration of developers on the priority issues of ethereum that need to be addressed.

Starting from today's meeting, the update is due to the activation on ethereum testnet Ropsten on October 9, estimated at a total of 4.2 million.

Speaking in a forum before today's meeting, Swende proposed to implement software change in a separate "hard fork that is separate from Constantinople".

"If we eventually decide to set both [upgrades] at the same [block] number, so fine, but it's not a necessity, "wrote the developer.

The developers also said that an upgrade of cost-oriented cost reduction on ethereum, created by Antonio Salazar Cardozo, could be implemented in a subsequent hard fork together with the change of ProgPoW software.

The concerns remain

However, speaking at the meeting, the main developers Pawel Bylica and Alexey Akhunov said that the proposal needs further work to explain "why exactly", as Akhunov says, can get his statements.

In response, ProgPow representatives on today's call cited "incorrect information on hardware and how ProgPow really works".

Responding to the confusion, the co-creator of ProgPow "Def" stressed that a "deep dive" could be done to better validate the objectives of the proposal.

In essence, however, Def highlighted that:

"The goal of the algorithm is not exactly to be resistant to the ASIC."

This is because, in a sense, all the general processing units if used for the explicit purpose of mining can be thought of as an ASIC machine that is actually used to extract the ether, the main form of currency on the blockchain ethereum.

Accordingly, Def states that ProgPow's design does not have to be resistant ASIC, but rather "friendly or very linked to a single type of ASIC, which is a GPU", and these with the advantages of being less costly for miners in the community ethereum to be acquired.

Def's counterpart, Kristy-Leigh Minehan, who was present at the call, acknowledged that "as creators of the algorithm" the spread of misinformation was their duty to prevent and move forward would ensure "we are educating" whole community and team development on how [ProgPow] works."

Minehan also stressed that the importance of continuous support for developers that progresses in the implementation of ProgPow is crucial, emphasizing that it is not worth "wasting hours or money" on their side for "a project that much it would probably be ignored. "

Image of Ethereum through Shutterstock


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