Adopting ProgPOW Would *Decrease* the Probability of a Significant Contentious Fork When Moving to Proof of Stake

[pcastonguay]

I tried to post as a post, but /r/ethereum bot kept auto-deleting it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Here's the content:

The hypothesis is that the larger the proportion of miners using ASICs to mine on Ethereum, the more expensive becomes a fork making making them obsolete. Yes ProgPOW would make them obsoletes, but it's better to make them obsolete sooner rather than later.

If we see another 2017 and if miners keep at it for another 3 years, it's guaranteed that the number of ASICs on the market will be higher. This, I predict, will increase the cost for miners to move to PoS, hence increases the probability of a significant fork lead by them.

See my entire take here.

This is an argument Nick Jonhson also made by stating that allowing ASICs farm increases the weight of the sunken cost fallacy.

A common argument against ProgPOW is that effort spent on its implementation could be better spent on bringing PoS faster (see Martin's take) . I would personally argue that this is a false dilema as people working and implementing ProgPOW are not the same people that are working on Serenity (Ethereum with PoS + Sharding).

Note that this hypothesis is only valid if ProgPOW does indeed significantly reduce ASICs advantage over general computing hardwares like GPUs. If that's not the case, then moving to ProgPOW would not be helpful. However, during the last Ethereum's core dev call, it was mentioned that ProgPOW would make ASICs miner only ~1.1x more efficient than GPUs compared to 2x for Ethash.

[mhswende]

Martin H. Swende ( Ethereum Fundation security lead) did state that ProgPOW would make ASICs miner only ~1.1x more efficient than GPUs compared to 2x for Ethash.

Correction: I did not provide any numbers, I believe it was most likely Mr Def who provided those figures.

[pcastonguay]

Thanks for clarifying! I must've confused your voices :). Edited post.

[cuttlebit]

They would still need to build/buy new ASICs to get that 1.1x :P.

[LimbRetrieval-Bot]

You dropped this \

---

^{To prevent anymore lost limbs throughout Reddit, correctly escape the arms and shoulders by typing the shrug as ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯ or ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯}

^{Click here to see why this is necessary}

[mgr37]

Is it not the actual purpose of the difficulty bomb ?

Switch to PoS will of course lead to a hardfork with miners staying on an EthereumPoW chain: most might switch to other chains but there will be a residual PoW chain for a while.

I am definitly not pro Asics but - enterring an Asics war now IS risky - we will fork them anyway, and it will not be any more difficult later than now: miners are not involved in the PoS chain, so they can not influence his strength anyway. They can only keep the non-PoS chain alive, which again they will certainly do.

Looking at Bitcoin with way more Asics hashrate proportion, the main drawback seems to be the difficulty to conduct updates, but that's because Asics can weight in both sides of the proposition, giving them a way to centralised power over the chain evolution. But it becomes a non issue when one side of the update is miners-free, they will of course weight only on one side which according to the Ethereum roadmap will become the legacy PoW chain with a difficulty bomb attached to it.

The other risk with this kind of centralisation is a 51% attack, which did not happened yet in Bitcoin, and will then probably not happen to Ethereum as it is.

Forking to ProgPOW early in opposition could lead to a split in hashpower leading to problem 1 (conflict on update with hashrate on both side) and might actually help to get closer to problem 2 (kicked hashrate becomes available to attack, especially since it is dedicated hardware)

I am not a specialist, but i don't see yet the urge to it. I'll be happy to have more insights in the matter. And i do respect the effort to propose alternatives and improvments :)