So far, ASIC miners and GPU miners have been deployed on the Ethereum network, so the community has been discussing this highly controversial issue.
At the Ethereum Developers Conference this Friday, Ethereum Community Consultant and Ethereum Virtual Machine Core Developer Greg Colvin seemed to be impatient with the community's entanglement, he said:
We're going back to stuff we were tired of talking about months ago. We decided the only issue is whether there are errors in the algorithm or back doors in the algorithm.
Some people believe that implementing a new mining agreement for GPU chip optimization of the Ethereum network will allow more Ethereum users to participate in mining to obtain rewards and promote decentralized mining; while others believe that regardless of Which type of chip is used can meet the required calculation requirements, and the final mining market will still be "ruled" by large mining companies.
Interestingly, the Ethereum developers actually had a preliminary agreement on code upgrades in early January, and that’s why Greg Colvin questioned this Friday’s (March 15) developer conference because he I believe that the proposal has been adopted, and it is time to discuss the timing agenda for implementing the upgrade. Greg Colvin said:
Nobody objected. Many agreed. Nobody blocked it. We had a consensus that we’re moving forward unless there were technical issues.
However, it may be much harder to predict ProgPow's potential "technical issues" as mentioned by Greg Colvin.
At this stage, although the third-party security audit work of the ProgPow code has been initiated, and the ProgPow core developers have agreed to be responsible for executing and reporting the relevant audit results by a working group of Ethereum project managers. However, the community seems to have many differences in the results of this third-party audit delivery, which has led to the delay of this work.
Hudson Jameson, head of community relations at the Ethereum Foundation, said on Friday's developer conference call that the audit of ProgPow did not start because the third-party audit work was delayed, and the initial plan was to do two times on ProgPow. Independent auditing may not be implemented as scheduled, he further explained:
We may not do the benchmarking audit at all, because that is the less important part of the two pieces of the audit.
Hudson Jameson added that although the first audit will not be conducted, the second audit should be implemented as planned, and a constraint analysis of the ProgPow algorithm will be conducted to understand how it will affect the efficiency of the ASIC chip. In addition, the second audit will analyze the impact of the proposed ASIC architecture and ProgPow on the Ethereum protocol economy.
There are still many questions in the community
Ethereum core developer Alexey Akhunov wants to fully audit the ProgPow code, but he acknowledges that the process of incorporating deliverables into the audit is very difficult, He stressed:
What is the goal of ProgPoW? What is the criteria of success? So far, I’ve not been able to extract this from people who are suggesting ProgPoW.
Obviously, ProgPow's auditing problems are difficult to reach a consensus at a meeting, and this debate may continue. However, Ethereum core developers reiterated that ProgPow is already an approved Ethereum improvement proposal and can be included in the next full system upgrade of Ethereum - "Istanbul" or other separate hard forks, Ethereum Users can also choose to upgrade to software that includes the ProgPow algorithm.
However, for those who assess the risks of the new version of Ethereum software, the risks they face are the same regardless of the way they upgrade ProgPow. Martin Holst Swende, Head of Security at the Ethereum Foundation, concludes:
Any Ethereum Improvement Proposal that we accept for hard fork if it later turns out there’s something horrible wrong with it, yes, we’re going to pull it. It’s always going to be conditional acceptance.
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