Will Ethereum enforce ASIC resistance?

A storm is brewing inside the mining community of Ethereum. ASIC miners (purpose-built mining facilities) have been tolerated so far, however, recent developments have put a lot of strain on those using traditional GPUs.

Shiny New Tech

ASIC miners who cause kerfuffle are released from hardware manufacturing, Linzhi. These devices were announced at the Ethereum Classic Summit. A look at the following chart shows how far a leap forward they represent compared to the current ASIC ETH device.

Despite the announcement was made at the beginning of this week, customers can expect to receive these new units at the # 39; beginning of the second trimester 2019.

Yay or Nay?

Miners make money. They provide decentralization, security and legs to make things work. Those who maintain a more ideological stance towards cryptocurrency coins usually avoid ASIC miners. Those who are simply interested in financial gains like them.

With the announcement of these new ETH ASIC devices, the ETH community is divided. Many miners who currently contribute to the network feel rejected. This is due to the fact that they invested huge sums of money in their GPU bases for data mining platforms, basically constituting the base of the network in past years. With the introduction of high-end ASIC devices, they will simply have to change their hardware and extract a different currency, essentially allowing those with ASIC devices to profit from the protocol they have initiated during the difficult years of cryptography.

For those who favor financial gain above all else, these miners are a positive development. At the expected rate of return for these new devices, users can expect a draw within 4 months of ownership.

To fight those in favor of ASIC miners, many in the community have proposed an update of the code to the ETH protocol. This would mean the implementation of the ASIC resistant code towards the end of 2018.

I was there. Done.

The Ethereum community is not the first to conduct this battle. In a well-documented situation in mid-2018, the privacy-focused favorite, "Monero", implemented a major obstacle to maintaining ASIC resistance.

Monero has always maintained that mining should be as decentralized as possible, which means that the more individual miners who contribute to the hash rate of the network, the better. As soon as the ASIC miners enter the situation, most believe that centralization begins to occur.

Undergoing this obstacle, the Monero community was divided. With many different beliefs on the best line of action, Monero has seen different variants of himself appear.

To date, the overwhelming majority of Monero users turn to XMR rather than to one of the forked coin variants. Meanwhile, developers have been able to maintain ASIC resistance.

A Growing Trend

Although these two situations are the best known to date, there will certainly be other similar situations in the future. While the industry is still relatively young and the network hash-rates are relatively small, large companies will try to take advantage of it. There will never be a better time to make money through the use of ASIC miners than now.