Governance concerns after listening to ~all ProgPow discussions on Core Dev calls

[elliot_olds]

The COMMUNITY is campaigning for it. See the signals from the carbon vote, twitter polls and hash rate vote.

IMO the hash rate vote should not factor in too much because assuming that the network is now dominated by GPU miners, it’s asking an incumbent whether they want to disallow competition.

The coin vote also represents a little less than 3% of all coins. It’s definitely more interesting than the hash vote but the low voter turnout should not make it decisive. Specifically note that if ProgPow harmed Ethereum in such a way that a harm was distributed among the entire community but benefits were concentrated in a special interest group, you’d expect coinvotes against it to be underrepresented because the members of the special interest individually have a lot more to lose/gain than an average member of the community, and are therefore more likely to take the time to vote. This is why special interests are able to get laws passed in their favor in democracy: normal citizens don’t have the incentive to get worked up about every little thing that does them a little bit of harm.

The twitter polls I have seen are much more evenly split, but Twitter polls generally suffer from the problem I described above too. The camp that benefits in a more concentrated way will have more incentive to game the poll.

This is the only sybil resistant twitter poll I’ve seen: https://tennagraph.com/eip/1057

In this poll there are 20 “influential” people in ETH. Only 20% of them favor ProgPow, 50% are against it, and 30% neither favor or are against.

The harm is the self interest.

The pro-ASIC arguments acknowledge that miners are self-interested, but denies that this leads to any bad outcome for Ethereum. If you can’t show how self interest would end up harming Ethereum you haven’t addressed the arguments.

On the other hand, GPUs don’t have these self-interest issues.

GPU miners aren’t self-interested? Your argument suggests that ASICs are less evenly/fairly distributed than GPUs. That’s might lead to actual harms, but you haven’t shown how it will.

Lots of other coins have ASICs. Are there any concrete harms you can point to from them? “Miners are centralized on coin X” isn’t a concrete harm. Concrete harms are things like actual 51% attacks or censorship.

[elliot_olds]

When there is an event that happens which makes mining with your ASIC obsolete, your investment becomes a total loss. With GPUs, you can mine other things. That puts intense political pressure on maintaining the status quo.

This cuts both ways. The fact that a PoW change would make ASICs obsolete is the thing that makes attacking with ASICs so costly. An attacker that builds an ASIC farm to attack Ethereum will lose billions of dollars. An attacker who builds a GPU farm to attack Ethereum will lose much less because their mining hardware is still valuable.

Do you disagree that it costs less to attack a GPU mined currency than an ASIC mined one?

That puts intense political pressure on maintaining the status quo.

The crux of the disagreement seems to be about how much political clout ASIC miners actually have. What is your evidence that resistance to ProgPow is coming from people with ASIC mining interests? Linzhe seems to be the only one making any noise about it.

Look at the only Sybil resistant poll that I’m aware of: https://tennagraph.com/eip/1057

What I see are a lot of people with good reputations in the community who don’t have conflicts of interest making principled objections. People like:

Luis Cuende (CEO of Aragon)
Hayden Adams (Creator of Uniswap)
Evan van Ness (runs Week in Ethereum News)
Ameen Soleimani (CEO of Spankchain)
Martin Koppelmann (Founder of Gnosis)
Ryan Sean Adams (Founder of Mythos Capital)
Phil Daian (crypto researcher)
Georgios Konstantopoulos (plasma researcher / Plasma Cash)
Eric Conner (host of Into the Ether podcast)

These are all people who have come out publicly against ProgPow. How do you explain that? I don’t think you can explain that by claiming that ASIC manufacturers are putting political pressure on them or that they are falling victim to (or propagating) “intense FUD”.

See my previous post about why we the hash rate vote is not very meaningful.

[fubuloubu]

@elliot_olds

Do you disagree that it costs less to attack a GPU mined currency than an ASIC mined one?

Yes, the costs are the same. The likelihood is what the argument is. It may be slightly more likely to construct an attack with GPUs, but that effect is basically entirely washed out by the relative market cap of the respect chains. 51% against ETH is way less likely than against Grin or ETC, just due to the difficulty. The strongest chain (with a particular PoW algo) always wins.

I would argue that the “self-interest” of GPU miners is known, as they are the incumbents, so it’s a sort of “prefer the devil you know to the devil you don’t” conundrum. The “status quo” would allow a relatively unknown actor into the Ethereum community, with a more complex and possibly counter-active set of incentives, which is more likely to be exploited due to the central power of that actor and cause network disruption at key points. We can point to Bitmain as an example of this.

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The parties you mentioned are well-known members of the community, and if that’s all you need to be convinced I suggest you take a closer look at their arguments instead of just relying on their reputations.

To my knowledge, the most interesting and helpful argument that could be construed to be against ProgPoW is from Phil Daian. That post is here:
https://pdaian.com/blog/anti-asic-forks-considered-harmful/

His conclusions are simple: PoW have inherent economies of scale built in, which are impossible to remove. PoS is the only potential mitigation for these faults. Working on “anti-ASIC” PoW algorithms is thus a waste of time for anything but a short-term gain.

I don’t want to put words in Phil’s mouth, as I respect him and his work very much, but I don’t think he would consider himself a hardware expert. His research is primary in code security and smart contract development, although he has a wealth of experience and observations that would be foolish not to take into consideration. At the core of his argument is this point: “anti-ASIC” PoW algo changes are a waste of time as a long-term solution.

ProgPoW is not intended as a long-term solution. It is intended as a 1-2 year stop-gap measure that should even the economies of scale between ASIC manufacturers and GPU miners (who mine with commodity hardware). It is used to help us get to PoS or a Hybrid PoW/PoS option, which will be possible in about 1-2 years when we are confident in the operation of the Phase 0 Beacon chain.

You can make up your own opinion with this information, but I think you know mine. I respect your right to have a different opinion in this regard.

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The rest of the people mentioned, to the best of my knowledge, have one or more of the following arguments:

1. Phil’s point on anti-ASIC algo changes (we discussed this above)
2. “It’s a waste of precious developer time” / “It’s a distraction from ETH 2.0 / PoS schedule” (most work is done)
3. “It’s contentious, therefore we shouldn’t do it” (circular argument)

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but these are the only arguments I have received from these prominent community members.

To address 2) Most of the work is already done. The rest of the work is planned because enough people want to see it happen. The teams involved are largely completely different. The only real distraction is the involvement of this proposal into a scheduled hardfork, which considering this EIP is the most complete of any proposed for Istanbul isn’t really a great argument.

To address 3) This is a circular argument. “Contentious” means people disagree. If they disagreed for technical reasons, we should answer those concerns and resolve them, absolutely. If they disagreed because they have a different viewpoint (such as Phil’s conclusions), then we can debate and come to consensus on which way is best for the network. I am very open to this. If they disagreed because other people disagreed, because other people disagreed, then we are all participating in a circular argument, wasting people’s time, mental health, and “social capital” by continuing to debate this important change.

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Since proponents believe strongly that this makes the network better, and detractors have few if any real arguments against it (besides the fact they don’t like it), I would suggest that the onus is on the detractors to raise technical concerns (to make the proposal as robust as possible, or show an un-fixable flaw), or to help come to consensus on these less fact-based arguments and opinions that are difficult to resolve so we can put this issue to bed. We currently have no forum for doing this sort of discussion, at least none that resolve with any real certainty, so this is a difficult thing to do. But I would argue that if we cannot do this (discuss and resolve contentious issues like ProgPoW) with any sort of final certainty, we will be royally fucked when more complicated proposals come though. This proposal is fairly straightforward, and good opportunity to experiment with solutions for this critical problem. (Hint: no other blockchain project have solved this either)

[lookfirst]

@elliot_olds

Lots of other coins have ASICs.

Dude, you’re officially a troll.

[fubuloubu]

Come on man, leave the name calling to the Twitter threads lol

[lookfirst]

It isn’t name calling. If his whole argument is that ETH should move to ASICs because “Lots of other coins have ASICs.”, then that is straight up trolling.

He keeps asking for all these “concrete proofs”, they keep getting provided and then he asks for 10 more. It is circular discussion that is just a waste of time, also known as trolling.

Finally, creating multiple posts here in Magicians to effectively discuss the same thing? Trolling.

[gcolvin]

@fubuloubu

“It’s a waste of precious developer time” / “It’s a distraction from ETH 2.0 / PoS schedule” (most work is done)

People seem not to know that Eth 2.0 development is largely divorced from Eth 1.0 development. So even if none of the client teams had started coding yet their argument is like thinking that nine women can produce a baby in one month.

@fubuloubu

But I would argue that if we cannot do this (discuss and resolve contentious issues like ProgPoW) with any sort of final certainty, we will be royally fucked when more complicated proposals come though. This proposal is fairly straightforward, and good opportunity to experiment with solutions for this critical problem. (Hint: no other blockchain project have solved this either)

No community at all has resolved the problem of coming to consensus with final certainty. If final certainty is needed you can move from consensus to voting, dictatorship, or the flip of a coin.

Nonetheless, I’d argue that the core devs have done a good job with this issue, with our main problem being that we did clearly state and communicate the consensus we reached back in early January. We do have forums and processes in place for discussing and resolving these issues, and they were extensively used. We need to work with the community to use them better, and provide better forums as needed, but whether that can stop this kind of after-the-fact outcry I don’t know.

And my opinion remains that things like carbon votes and tennagraphs of “influencers” in birdshit-land are indeed “a waste of precious developer time.”

For that matter, there is C++ code I should be working on now

[elliot_olds]

Yes, the costs are the same.

I’m really surprised that you claim this. On the one hand you point out that ASIC manufacturers will completely lose the value of their hardware if a coin switches PoW on them (or if they successfully destroy the only coin that the ASIC can mine on). With GPUs you can attack a coin to death and still have very valuable GPUs. Given this, how can you say that the attack costs are the same?

Do you agree that to the extent that you can rent hashpower to attack a coin, that’s cheaper than building or buying the capacity to attack it?

but that effect is basically entirely washed out by the relative market cap of the respect chains

I’m not sure why talking about market cap is relevant because we’re considering different PoW algorithms for the same chain. The relevant question is: If Ethereum still had a ~15 billion dollar market cap but was entirely ASIC mined and was by far the biggest coin mineable with that algorithm, how would the cost to attack it compare to the cost to attack it today?

with a more complex and possibly counter-active set of incentives, which is more likely to be exploited due to the central power of that actor and cause network disruption at key points. We can point to Bitmain as an example of this.

There is some effect here going in the direction you want: if there are fewer people controlling more hash power, it’s easier for them to coordinate to censor/attack, and easier for governments to pressure them.

There is also an effect going in the other direction: if ASIC miners have more to lose from an attack / censorship than GPU miners do (which it seems like you don’t believe, but hopefully I can convince you), then they will be less likely to ever want to engage in an attack / censorship.

Can you point to any direct harm that Bitmain has caused? As in my discussion with Jon, I’m looking for things like attacks, censorship, etc. “Having a lot of hashpower” might be scary to some but is not a direct harm.

His conclusions are simple: PoW have inherent economies of scale built in, which are impossible to remove. PoS is the only potential mitigation for these faults. Working on “anti-ASIC” PoW algorithms is thus a waste of time for anything but a short-term gain.

Daian also spends a significant portion of the article arguing that ASICs make coins more expensive to attack. This is the same thing I’ve been arguing here, the same thing that Joseph Bonneau argued in his CESC18 talk.

IMO this point is a major crux of the debate, so if you or others here don’t accept it we should focus on that.

You mention that Daian is not a hardware expert, but that’s not relevant to the economic argument about why GPU mined coins are cheaper to attack than ASIC coins.

I agree with you that “it’s contentious because it’s contentious” is a thing that happens in other cryptos (Bitcoin) and we shouldn’t let it happen in Ethereum.

[ajsutton]

@elliot_olds

There is also an effect going in the other direction: if ASIC miners have more to lose from an attack / censorship than GPU miners do (which it seems like you don’t believe, but hopefully I can convince you), then they will be less likely to ever want to engage in an attack / censorship.

The centralisation of hash power makes it much easier for them to attack the chain. It also makes it easier to use coercion to attack the chain since there are fewer people to coerce. It seems to me that it would be better to make it harder to attack (via more decentralised hash power) than to just depend on incentives (especially given the coercion potential).

[elliot_olds]

If his whole argument is that ETH should move to ASICs because “Lots of other coins have ASICs.”

You are not understanding my argument. Pointing out that lots of other coins have ASICs was meant to highlight your inability so far to point to any concrete instance of harm (an attack, censorship) by ASIC manufacturers or miners.

He keeps asking for all these “concrete proofs”, they keep getting provided and then he asks for 10 more

I have not seen you provide any. If you think you have, then I don’t think you understand what I mean by concrete harm. Our conversation reminds me of this:

Bob: “We gotta pass a law to keep people from carrying concealed weapons – someone could get hurt with all these guns everywhere!”
Carl: “Maybe, although some people claim allowing concealed weapons actually increases safety. Is there an example you can cite where someone with a concealed weapon shot someone?”
Bob: “Yeah – Alice definitely has a gun and I’m pretty sure she was walking around the park with it yesterday!”
Carl: “No, I mean an actual harm – is there an instance where someone got shot?”
Bob: “For sure! I heard that Eve actually has three guns, and she’s planning on buying two more guns. Can you believe that? We gotta do something!”
Carl: “You keep pointing to things that you think will lead to harm, but you haven’t pointed to harm yet. What’s an example where someone got shot?”
…
etc.

Since you keep insulting me and since it seems our subthread here isn’t very productive, I don’t plan to respond to you further unless I see some large benefit to the rest of the thread.

[elliot_olds]

The centralisation of hash power makes it much easier for them to attack the chain. It also makes it easier to use coercion to attack the chain since there are fewer people to coerce.

I basically agree with this framing, I would sharpen it with the following distinction:

Centralization of hash power makes it easier for existing miners or those who can influence existing miners to attack the chain if they want to. But if the chain is secured by ASICs then it makes existing miners want to attack the chain less, because by doing so they lose more.

However if the attack is coming from someone other than the existing miners (or from an entity that can control the existing miners), then this attack will be cheaper for GPU mined coins vs. ASIC mined coins.

So people who are more worried about state attacks or other big external attackers should definitely prefer ASIC mining. People who are more worried about a coin’s own miners “going rogue” should on the surface prefer GPU mining.

I say “on the surface” because the thing about ASIC mining is that the community can switch from ASICs → GPUs if ASIC miners ever start acting up. But switching from GPUs → ASICs if a government starts attacking you is much tougher.

So the downside of guessing wrong about which attack you should be worrying about is very different. ASIC mining gives you the option to defend at least pretty well against either attack.

[ajsutton]

@elliot_olds

However if the attack is coming from someone other than the existing miners (or from an entity that can control the existing miners), then this attack will be cheaper for GPU mined coins vs. ASIC mined coins.

This is the exact opposite conclusion to what I argued. Given we agree ASICs lead to centralisation of hash power then it is far easier for an external actor to compromise by coercing the miners because there are fewer of them. Hence, the centralisation of hash power that ASICs lead to is a problem we want to avoid.

[lookfirst]

@elliot_olds

But if the chain is secured by ASICs then it makes existing miners want to attack the chain less, because by doing so they lose more.

It is secured by ASICs. Everything is an ASIC. Move forward with that, it doesn’t matter if it is ASIC or GPU or even CPU, in this statement because no one would want to attack the network.

Remember, that ProgPoW doesn’t get rid of ASICs, it removes the economic incentive to build an ASIC by making GPUs the most efficient ASIC out there.

@elliot_olds

I say “on the surface” because the thing about ASIC mining is that the community can switch from ASICs –> GPUs if ASIC miners ever start acting up.

No, you can’t just go back, without changing the PoW and that would be contentious.

[lookfirst]

@elliot_olds

I have not seen you provide any.

I and others have provided you with an endless stream of concrete in multiple forums and you keep just claiming none of it is valid. It makes it very hard to have a conversation with you.

[lookfirst]

[fubuloubu]

@elliot_olds

Given this, how can you say that the attack costs are the same?

The cost to 51% attack is the cost of purchasing the majority of the hashrate. Electricity costs being the majority of what PoW actually “costs” means that for the sake of argument, the value of the devices can largely be ignored. This is reinforced by the fact that markets largely seem not to care about the effects (e.g. valuation) of such an attack, so I would argue yes indeed, it does not matter if you’re renting or buying.

If we’re talking about renting, it is largely impossible to rent anywhere close to the amount of capacity required to perform this attack on the highest difficulty chain that makes use of any given algorithm/device. Since we are the highest difficulty chain for GPU devices period, that means your concerns are simply not valid. You could say “wait, what if another higher market cap chain came along for GPUs?”, I would respond that this is all the more incentive for developers to execute and ship Eth1.x and Eth2.0 roadmaps.

Any line of questioning about how much easier it is to get one or the other, that’s my line of reasoning. The likelihood of coordinating an attack or disruption is what matters.

[fubuloubu]

@elliot_olds

Can you point to any direct harm that Bitmain has caused?

Bitmain forked Bcash from Bitcoin. I think we all agree on this. They tried to use their power to force the narrative of Bcash into the Bitcoin community. They also largely failed (because miners are not the network, full nodes run by the community are). But to say this did not cause a significant disruption would be will fully ignorant. This is what we can expect from a centralized entity: if they have a reason to attack or disrupt a chain, they are very well-organized to do so.

GPU mining farms are very disparate and georgraphically diverse. Because GPU mining is permissionless, it’s very hard to predict exactly where they’ll be, although places with cheaper power tend to win the economies of scale. To amass 51% of the hashrate, you would need to talk to something like 50-100 separate farms. That’s a lot of coordination, and attack would be seen coming from a mile away. (Hell Bcash fork was known for a month). Giving time to the community to prepare is what counts and allows us to survive such an attack through a social majority running nodes.

Now you might say “Hey, what about mining pools? Those are centralized!” Mining pools have some of the lowest overhead costs of any business I have every seen. They take in all your mining rewards, hold them until you’ve reached some payout threshold, and then redistribute after taking a couple percent cut for the cost of their “coordination” (really their social reputation among the mining community). If they aren’t working on what’s involved to do a PoS Validator pool, they’re really missing out, because that’s largely the same business.

All of that is to say, mining pools have very little incentive to disrupt the chain moving to PoS because they have very little overhead costs invested besides running a node with very high uptime, and some sort of automated database to keep track of who contributed what. That incentive might be slightly higher for Hybrid PoS/PoW but… Basically the same argument works there.

[fubuloubu]

@elliot_olds

switching from GPUs –> ASICs if a government starts attacking

I refuse to engage with the “well funded state actor” arguments because their involvement would entirely change the game, and unlike Bitcoin, our “target” is traditional tech companies and banks, not sovereign government’s most valuable tool (fiat currencies).

[lightuponlight]

Why are you calling it “BCash”?

That choice of language puts you into alignment with the censorious and bitterly hostile to Ethereum Bitcoin Core community.

Bitmain did not create Bitcoin Cash. Bitcoin Cash was created when large blockers decided they needed an insurance policy in case the S2F agreement unraveled. Which, of course, it did, because Bitcoin Core never had any intention of allowing any other groups to share their power to control Bitcoin’s future. They reached out to Jihan Wu for help, because he is also a large-block proponent and has significant hash power.

The failure of Bitcoin Cash in the market, which you correctly noted, is the death-knell of the relevancy of Bitcoin to the future of crypto.

I don’t think it’s fair to lay the Bitcoin civil war at the feet of Bitmain and Jihan Wu.

[fubuloubu]

I may have vastly oversimplified that discussion (and Bcash is just a shorthand definition to me, I don’t really care about it either way). I am using it as a historical example, I have no intention of drawing boundary lines with Bitcoin because they aim to do largely different things than us. If I mention Bitcoin at all, it’s as a rich source of historical precedent to draw from, and I am making no value judgements on the community itself. I think trying to make such value judgements of the Bitcoin community is largely a distraction to this discussion.

@lightuponlight

They reached out to Jihan Wu for help, because he is also a large-block proponent and has significant hash power.

This was my main point. The fact that he could be reached to organize a support for the new chain, and for that to have largely worked, is entirely my point. That would not be nearly as easy to do with our current GPU mining community.

@lightuponlight

I don’t think it’s fair to lay the Bitcoin civil war at the feet of Bitmain and Jihan Wu.

He is definitely not fully to blame, but played a large part in helping it succeed, and it continues being a distraction to the Bitcoin community to the present day. We should avoid creating central power figures like this.

The number of ASIC manufacturers will always be strictly less than the number of mining farms due to the economies of scale at play.