Ethereum Crypto Community Looks to Outlaw ASIC Mining for Ether (ETH)

The Industry is Working Closely to Block Ethereum ASICs

There are several ethereum miners that seem ready to block specialized mining hardware to operate on the network. In the last months, the community has been discussing about ASIC miners. However, back on Thursday, news broke regarding a new line of specialized mining hardware which could potentially generate six times more profit than the current miner created by Bitmain.

After the news, there were some proponents that started to call for a strike by GPU miners. For example, a GiHub user said that the only plausible way forward for GPU miners is to strike and commit to continuing to mine the existing chain, forcing compromise.

Ethereum and its community have several times rejected the idea to block ASIC miners. Nonetheless, there are some developers that a code change could be implemented as part of a network upgrade. The algorithm that is being debated is known as ProgPoW and is one of the most interesting improvement proposal (EIP) on the network.

The main intention behind this EIP is to reduce the effect of ASIC miners on the Ethereum platform and increase the effectiveness of GPU miners. There are some developers that believe that the upgrade would have to be implemented just after Constantinople.

Holst Swende, security officer for the Ethereum Foundation, commented on the matter:

“The implementation of the algorithm is one aspect,but there are other things that need to be done to ensure a switch goes smoothly, and those things need testing… My opinion is that we should consider a dedicated [proof or work] switching hard fork shortly after Constantinople.”

This situation could eventually be very harmful for Ethereum. If Ethereum does not take a decision in the near future, it might be too late to save the platform since it can follow the wishes of ASIC miners.

There are some individuals that explain that there are some examples of ASICs that completely dominate a specific coin and force the developing team to take important decisions on their behalf.

If this happens in Ethereum, it could make it difficult for the network to properly move towards proof of stake (PoS). Furthermore, users in GitHub say that Ethereum would have to give more things to ASIC miners than what they initially believed.

Emotions Appear In The Community

There are some Ethereum supporters and developers that believe that the situation is not in this way. For example, Alexey Akhunov, mentioned that the chatter on Reddit during the last days has been ‘too emotional’ and in this way it is not possible to create something useful.

Another developer known as Schoeden, said that these changes that are quite important would undermine the security and stability of the network. Moreover, he explained that the ProgPow would not be considered in time for Constantinople.

About it he said:

“We have been working on Constantinople for 11 months now, and the hard fork is final. Any other proposal, however small it is, has to go into the next hard fork.”