ProgPow 🎰 Ethereum, miners, ASICs - all you need to know

In short: ASIC & GPU meme for ETH is live again - centralization, sir?

Evil rich Chinese mafia running ASICs, and holy GPU miners available to every human being like me and you - that's what the discussion has been around many protocols for years.

The past few days this topic has been increasingly hot as some believe it can lead to a fork of Ethereum. With all the attention ETH PoS and 2.0 have been getting, and some major improvements been made with new ETH clients, for some god-forsaken reason core devs decided to put time into making incrimental changes on the current PoW algo instead of just speeding up the development. In fact, even if you decide to go with ProgPow, it will take months before it's implemented, in which case you are better off just speeding PoS.

Is it worth to deal with it now? Some say yes, because GPU mining will enable people to run nodes as a normal human being. ASICs, meaning existing mining farms, are supposed to be against it. What is actually true here? Well, apart from lack of audits, weird timing, IP concerns, and more - hopefully it won't lead to ETC2.

What is ProwPow?

EIP 1057: ProgPoW, a Programmatic Proof-of-Work. ProgPoW is a proof-of-work algorithm designed to close the efficiency gap available to specialized ASICs. It utilizes almost all parts of commodity hardware (GPUs), and comes pre-tuned for the most common hardware utilized in the Ethereum network.

EIP Website techy: https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-1057

Some interesting throughts and reads

Ameen of Spankchain/MolochDAO against ProgPow - https://twitter.com/ameensol/status/1175430960734715906
Brendan of Dharma against ProgPow - https://twitter.com/brendan_dharma/status/1175260964347711488
Alex van de Sande against ProgPow - https://twitter.com/avsa/status/1175449754467229698

🤔 Are miners just evil people outside of our crypto economy just dumping our ethers - or are they unwanted but required executioners helping the network?