The plan to weaken Ethereum mining machines has been approved again. Who is stirring up this troubled water?

|Author: BlockBeats 0x2

As we all know, the next goal of Ethereum is to switch from PoW consensus to PoS consensus, providing a faster and larger capacity blockchain network. This huge change will make countless mining machines useless, and the interests of countless people will also be affected. So some people proposed to add a transition buffer stage in the process of transformation.

On EtherChain, a website that records Ethereum algorithm transition votes, the ProgPoW algorithm, known as the "mining machine weakening plan," received 100% of the votes in favor. Mainstream mining pools including Sparkpool, Ethermine, Nanopool, and F2pool all participated in the vote, but Huobi, Firepool, Uupool, and Pandapool gave up voting. (*Beijing time March 20 data, votes 5367)

Last week, at the Ethereum developer biweekly meeting, the ProgPoW proposal was passed again. This new algorithm has two main highlights: "optimizing the mining performance of civilian graphics cards" and "anti-ASIC mining machine" algorithm.

Although the specific deployment and activation time has not been determined, it has once again triggered a heated discussion in the Ethereum community, with some celebrities even saying, “Ethereum is over!”

What exactly is the reason that makes this group of people feel that an algorithm update passed by the community will "kill" the world's largest blockchain network? Whose interests are affected by it? Who has been hindering the advancement of this plan?

If there were no mining machines, there wouldn’t be so many things happening.

Before the emergence of mining machines, miners on the Ethereum network relied on graphics cards (GPUs) in their homes or computer rooms to calculate and mine blocks. At that time, there were no so-called super mining machines, and the computing power in people's hands was proportional to the purchase price of the graphics card, and the entire mining ecosystem was relatively fair.

However, in April 2018, Bitmain E3 ASIC miner was released, and its 800-watt power consumption can provide 180 MH/s of computing power. At the same time, a large number of mining machine companies also began to launch similar ASIC miners. From the perspective of data and revenue, the mining performance of ASIC miners is completely superior to that of graphics cards. According to 2miners, the emergence of this super-computing mining machine has completely relegated graphics card mining to the cold palace, and brought three major problems:

1. Graphics card miners’ earnings plummeted

2. Computing power is concentrated in a few mining pools

3. Decentralization is under threat

For miners who bought a large number of graphics cards for mining, the emergence of ASIC mining machines has made it impossible for miners to make back their investment in graphics cards for mining. In addition, the price of coins plummeted, and the cryptocurrency circle said that "mining difficulties" had occurred, and a large number of graphics cards were sold at low prices. P106 mining graphics cards that have been used for many years have appeared on various second-hand platforms. Many unscrupulous merchants have modified the driver so that it can be used like a normal graphics card, but the performance and stability are greatly reduced.

For the entire blockchain, because the computing power is too concentrated, the entire network may be at risk of being controlled. No blockchain community wants to see its project controlled by a few people, which goes against the decentralization of the blockchain.

It is not just Ethereum that is threatened by mining machines. BitcoinZ and Monero have also been threatened by the excessive computing power of mining machines . Many blockchain projects using the PoW algorithm have turned to the Equihash 144.5 algorithm to resist mining machines. BitcoinZ expelled ASIC mining machines from its ecosystem after a hard fork, and the Monero team announced with great fanfare that it was irreconcilable with Monero mining machines and decided to conduct multiple hard forks every year to resist mining machine invasions.

It seems that the ProgPoW algorithm is indeed a good thing. It does not completely drive mining machines out of the ecosystem, but makes them less efficient through the algorithm, so that the performance of ASIC mining machines and GPU mining machines can be on par in terms of computing power . This is good news for graphics card miners. Their graphics cards that were deactivated due to mining machine invasion can now be used again.

ProgPoW makes some people happy and others frustrated.

What is ProgPoW?

ProgPoW, short for Programmatic Proof Of Work, is an extension of the current Ethereum Ethash algorithm. Its main goal is to make GPU mining more competitive and reduce the risk of centralization by making ASIC mining machines inefficient. ProgPoW achieves this goal by regularly modifying the mining algorithm and giving full play to the mining capabilities of graphics cards.

Unlike graphics cards, mining machines are destined to only be able to complete one task in their lifetime, which is to solve mathematical problems, from the moment the mining chip comes off the production line. They will not do any other problems, which is also the origin of the name ASIC (special-purpose integrated circuit chip). Graphics cards are different. Before they were discovered to be able to mine, their main job was to be a "graphics card", used for playing games or doing video rendering, etc.

The ProgPoW algorithm was developed by a team called IfDefElse. The team has three members and their confidentiality measures are very good. Currently, only two men and one woman are known to be involved.

BlockBeats will not go into the technical details of ProgPoW in this article. All you need to remember is that the mining efficiency of graphics cards is improved, and the performance of mining machines is reduced by 2.6 times.

At the biweekly meeting of Ethereum's main developers last Friday, the ProgPoW proposal was passed again. ProgPoW will be activated in the future as part of the Ethereum network consensus protocol.

However, such a proposal that can solve the centralization risk problem was approved and then rejected, and now it is approved again. The entire community is very controversial about this, and the Ethereum community even argues endlessly over the ProgPoW algorithm proposal.

Whose interests have been harmed?

At last week’s biweekly meeting, core developer Greg Colvin admitted that there was indeed controversy over whether to activate the ProgPoW algorithm. The reason why it was passed this time was because:

“We are now going back to discuss what happened a few months ago. We believe that the only problem is not whether there is a problem in the algorithm, not whether there is a backdoor in the algorithm, and not the dispute between the mining machine party and the graphics card party. If it is not resolved, they will bring it up at any time in the future.”

Ultimately, bugs are not important. The most important thing is to have the courage to reform.

In fact, before the meeting last week, the Ethereum community had agreed to activate the algorithm. In January of this year, the proposal for ProgPoW deployment was approved; at the end of January, the deployment of ProgPoW was postponed because developers discovered a vulnerability.

The GPU mining machine is about to regain its status

Faced with this transition measure from PoW to PoS, the entire community has raised a lot of controversy about the adoption of ProgPoW, mainly focusing on the following aspects:

1. Does promoting graphics cards have anything to do with the interests of Nvidia and AMD?

2. Why not go straight to the PoS consensus in one step, but have to take a moderate and conciliatory approach?

3. Potential fork risks of mining pools and potential fork risks of the community.

The first one is that some opinion leaders are trying to guide public opinion and get miners to buy more graphics cards for mining . This speculation is not unreasonable, because the sharp drop in the prices of Bitcoin and Ethereum and the mining accidents have caused graphics card manufacturers to be unable to sell mining cards, and the stock prices of mining graphics card chip manufacturers Nvidia and AMD have also plummeted. Maybe the Ethereum algorithm update can be used to boost graphics card sales.

Second, some people think that since it has been decided to switch to PoS consensus, why not do it all at once and leave opportunities for mining farms? What’s wrong with making Ethereum completely decentralized? This view actually goes against economic common sense. If the mining machines are made ineffective in a one-size-fits-all manner, the computing power of the entire network will plummet, and blockchain security may be at risk.

The third risk is that there have been many disagreements and forks in the entire Ethereum community. The fact that Ethereum can persist to this day is actually closely related to its decentralization, which is also inseparable from the persistence of developers who are just and fair in the community.

Among them, the biggest losses are the mining pools that rely on consuming energy and purchasing mining machines to accumulate computing power. As the mining pools are weakened by the ProgPoW algorithm, their income may fall, and according to the PoS plan of the Ethereum roadmap, these ASIC mining machines are likely to be scrapped in the future. However, the transition to PoS is also the hope of the entire community for the future of Ethereum.

If Ethereum does well in the long term, everyone will benefit, except for those who try to profit from the chaos in the short term.

Who is stirring up trouble in the decentralized community again?

The biggest reason why decentralized organizations can advance something is that even if someone tries to disrupt the normal order, as long as someone has good intentions and pursues justice and fairness, things can be pushed forward on the right track.

Of course, there are also people who like to muddy the waters, distract the community, and slow down the progress of the entire community. A similar thing happened in the Bitcoin community not long ago.

In February this year, during the Bitcoin "Satoshi Nakamoto Roundtable", a developer proposed "changing the upper limit of 21 million Bitcoins and stopping the halving of production". However, this news gradually became "Bitcoin core developers suggested changing the upper limit of Bitcoin" in the Weibo of some big Vs in China. Taking advantage of the public's information gap and trust in big Vs, this rumor was created in the market, causing chaos in the market.

Bai Shuo, former chief engineer of the Shanghai Stock Exchange, said that the total amount of Bitcoin can be modified as long as a consensus is reached. However, this consensus cannot be reached through rumors and irrelevant people, unless the person who created the rumor has other purposes.

Soon, the misleading news of "Bitcoin issuance" was clarified every few days. BlockBeats does not know what the big V is thinking, but it is certain that it is profitable to cover everyone's eyes.

"Ethereum is finished", at least that's what people in the Pow ecosystem think, what do you think?