@fubuloubu
wow your post was so amazing, it motivated me to reply:
She, like many other authors of EIP proposals
The author of EIP 1057 is a close business partner of Calvin Ayre and Craig Wright. Needless to point to her bitcointalk trust page and many other pages, it’s all fitting.
(there are plenty of links in this other thread, I won’t post them again. DYOR)
https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/progpow-audit-delay-issue/3309
talking about the issue on All Core Dev calls
Together with two anonymous people (Mr. Def and Mr. Else). The naivety of the core devs to not even check that, let alone question any of the narratives brought forward, will remain as a lesson how not to do it.
The client developers all decided there was sufficient technical benefits
That says a lot about their understanding of both ASICs and mining economics. The hardware audit will show (actually several independent audits have shown already), that ProgPoW’s promised “asic resistance”, lately framed as “closing the efficiency gap” does not exist.
There was significant benchmarking and testing done over the past year
All of it nice Nvidia marketing material. They didn’t even bother to change their bar charts to make them look more “community like”. It was enough to make the core devs believe, so well done!
and an audit is currently in process, the end result of which will hopefully show the algorithm is technically sound and meets it’s intended goals
Of course not. We can expect the software audit to mostly look at the algorithm as a cryptographic algorithm, as we have seen with the four RandomX audits.
The PoW-part of the algorithm is a hardware assessment. The hardware audit will show that the promised benefits (“1.2x instead of 2x”) do not exist.
The one effect ProgPoW has is from the PoW change itself, that’s very disruptive and benefits the large farm of the EIP 1057 author whose contracts with Nvidia we don’t know. A PoW change is like an ICO, it’s fitting that the people behind ProgPoW have a deep ICO history.
which means no “hijacking” occured.
It was hijacked from the beginning, and persists until today. The motivation behind EIP-1057 is entirely different from what is stated in the EIP text. Welcome to the real world.
ProgPoW seems to have sufficient amount of community support
What was actually measured in these votes - hashrate, distinct human beings, mining pools, capital?
Since the votes came out largely in favor of ProgPoW, what does this mean about centralization? Wouldn’t a large majority, in some cases 100%, say something about the state of centralization?
On the day this proposal was made (2018-05-03), Ethash hashrate was 265.97 TH at a profitability of 6.22 US cents/MH/day. Happy old days!
Today, Ethash hashrate is 178.83 TH at a profitability of 1.51 US cents/MH/day. (numbers from bitinfocharts.com)
There probably were never more than a few TH of ASICs on Ethash, and Ethash ASICs haven’t been on sale for a year. I did math to walk through mining economics in the other thread.
So if ASICs played a small role in Ethash 15 months ago when EIP 1057 was launched, and are not economical to sell since then, why is there continued pressure to switch to ProgPoW urgently?
You cannot think about this hard enough.
Will ProgPoW accelerate centralization?
I would actually be most in favor of a soft fork approach (with a threshold of over 90%), as that allows the community to expressly show it’s final opinion through the number of full node clients who enable this change, which is the most “democratic” option we have available to us in a decentralized system with no identity layer
It would be far healthier for the Ethereum ecosystem to uncover and investigate the background story of ProgPoW:
- Why is the “anti-asic” effect less than promised, if supposedly so many “experts” from Nvidia and AMD were involved. Is it an error in judgment, or is there some other story going on?
- Who are Mr. Def and Mr. Else? If they are Nvidia employees and Nvidia was trying to exclude Bitmain, Samsung and others, what else does Nvidia plan?
- Are Mr. Def and Mr. Else engineers, or marketing people?
- Is it acceptable that fully anonymous people participate in major Ethereum decision making processes?
- If the authors of ProgPoW are anonymous, what does this mean in terms of copyright or patent claims?
- Why is the EIP-1057 author working with Calvin Ayre and Craig Wright, and what does this mean for ProgPoW?
- How many TH Ethash does Squire/Core Scientific control today?
- What are the contracts between Nvidia and the company of the EIP 1057 author, as well as Squire (Calvin Ayre/Craig Wright company)?
- Is it possible that Nvidia sells chips at a discount to the EIP 1057 author in return for excluding competitors?
- Does ProgPoW help with decentralization, or help with centralization?
I think the attack from Nvidia and partners (Core Scientific, Squire) is sophisticated, the largest corporate attack on a coin ever.
The Ethereum Foundation needs support in that they managed to at least put order to the process by bringing in independent auditors for both software and hardware.
Too bad noone can audit the contracts of the company of the EIP 1057 author…
The EIP-1057 author is already trying to discredit the hardware auditor (“I do have some concerns that someone who has not built crossbars for GPUs will be doing a hardware audit on the ability to build a crossbar in an ASIC - but given the lack of choice due to CoI this seems fitting.”), but hey, she is a hard worker.
Looking forward to the audits! Hope Least Authority and Bob Rao crush some of that dark corporate stuff.