Ethereum developers: ProgPoW is more ASIC friendly than current algorithms

According to Trustnodes reported on March 6, Kristy Leigh Minehan, the core developer of Ethereum's ProgPoW algorithm, confirmed that the ProgPoW algorithm she has been promoting is actually not as ASIC-resistant as it seems.

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Minehan says:

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"The auditors of the security audit company Least Authority did not find this; Bob Rao, IfDefElse, who proposed ProgPoW, and even researcher Solardiz did not find it. This is a new method that relies on the ability of BTC to increase the application of nonce. This is a great find, and it is beautiful. "

She continued:

"The Ethash algorithm uses 256 bits as its seed; ProgPoW uses 64 bits (because it compensates for the missing 192 bits elsewhere) … In the results of Kik's research, he found that he could simply Once a memory hard calculation, and then increase the extraNonce to find the block header and nonce. "

The difference between 64-bit and 256-bit may not seem very big, but it is actually decisive because you can force this key anti-ASIC component on a regular laptop and then you can mine with ASIC The rest.

Surprisingly, Minehan said that this "hole" means "the more difficult the mining, the higher the profit."

ProgPoW was suddenly "approved" after being abandoned, but was recently shelved again, and the vulnerability was subsequently exposed.

Therefore, it is unclear whether this is an unintentional loophole or a hidden backdoor for Ethereum centralized mining. Minehan said it's easy to fix this vulnerability, but if so many people ignore it, it's not clear what else they might have overlooked.

Minehan himself is an expert in mining. She works at Core Scientific, a large cryptocurrency mine in the United States that has a large number of Bitcoin ASIC miners and Ethereum GPU miners. Minehan is able to hack GPU miners to some extent and turn them into FPGA miners that are slightly better than ordinary GPU miners.

Therefore, it is not surprising to discover this vulnerability after shelving ProgPoW, as cryptocurrency mining is a very professional field and few people can participate in any peer review.

Developers believe that any new code has the possibility of a vulnerability, and they lack data on how many ASIC miners (if any) are currently on Ethereum, which is one of the reasons many people oppose ProgPoW.

There is currently no evidence that ASIC mining machines are mining on the Ethereum blockchain. Although some people claim that such mining machines are being developed, it is unclear how much more efficient ASIC mining machines are compared to GPU mining machines.

Ethereum's algorithm is designed to be ASIC-resistant, so efficiency may be improved by 2-4 times, but it is not 50 times higher than Bitcoin.

However, if ProgPoW is passed, it seems to remove the part of the memory that makes the algorithm resistant to ASICs, leaving only the original calculated bits and the ASIC part.

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