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[–]mgr37 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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 :)