Vitalik Buterin opposes community boycott of ASIC mining machines: Ethereum is not Bitcoin, miners have no say here

The Ethereum community has submitted a proposal to change the mining algorithm, with the ultimate goal of making Ethash ASIC miners incompatible with the network. Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has publicly expressed his opposition to the proposal.

EIP 958 (Ethereum Improvement Protocol) was submitted by Ethereum developer Piper Merriam to deprecate the upcoming Bitmain Ethereum ASIC miners by modifying the Ethash mining algorithm.

The proposals put forward by EIP 958 were discussed during the Ethereum core developers meeting last Friday.

The proposal is currently very popular in the Ethereum community, with 1,082 supporters on Github, compared to only 46 opponents.

However, ethereum core developers said in a meeting that they are still hesitant to adopt this important and potentially disruptive improvement, especially given the fact that ethereum’s long-term roadmap has already been set - the cryptocurrency’s consensus algorithm will move from proof of work to proof of stake.

According to official specifications, Bitmain’s Antminer E3, the first Ethash ASIC miner, is 250% more efficient than traditional GPU miners. Vitalik Buterin said that the complications caused by declaring war on ASICs are not justified at the moment.

Asking everyone to upgrade would likely create chaos and take us away from our focus, so my personal preference for doing nothing is to do so at this point.

Buterin added:

The worst case scenario would basically be that Bitmain controls a majority of the Ethereum network for a period of time. Ethereum is not Bitcoin, right? Miners don't have the final say here. If one day Bitmain really controls the majority of computing power and has malicious uses, then this will only accelerate the development of Casper.

The developers attending the meeting said that if the community still insists on boycotting ASIC miners, they will still take action. However, given that several core developers have already stated their positions, it remains to be seen whether the community's attitude will change.