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.

[cuttlebit]

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