ProgPoW Audit Delay Issue

How would this proposal disenfranchise developers? Do you mean those that have the opinion it’s not helpful?

I think there are several well-known projects that have vocally opposed ProgPow (i.e. Gnosis, Aragon, SpankChain). If ProgPow gets implemented, obviously these people may feel like Ethereum is moving in a direction that isn’t aligned with their vision of it, and may feel somewhat disenfranchised from the community.

Is there writings from the Gnosis or Aragon teams or well-known members articulating why they are against this proposal? Would be helpful to add for reference. I’ve seen a few Tweets just saying “I’m against ProgPoW” and maybe linking to Phil’s post, but that’s about it.

Here are some direct quotes from twitter (couldn’t find any from Aragaon):



I think you’ll find in this discussion thread and many others that we are all ultimately in agreement on these principles:

  1. Protect against existential threats
  2. Ensure the network is technically stable and adheres to the social contract for all stakeholders
  3. Ensure the future technical roadmap of Ethereum is as easy to implement as possible

However, we seem to disagree on the particulars, and that is where the contention comes from.

  1. A failure to act (letting market forces take over) is an existential threat because it eventually trades a known group of stakeholders (GPU miners) for an unknown one (ASIC manufacturers). We cannot know how this new group of stakeholders will participate in our ecosystem or how it will change the game theory of network operation, but based on what we’ve seen so far I am not optimistic that they will participate in good faith. In this scenario, holding the “status quo” would be actively taking steps to ensure our current set of stakeholders remains profitable, and the balance is maintained.
  2. Transitioning to new hardware will cause instabilities both technically and socially as we adjust to the newer paradigm. There is also the issue of breaking the current social contract with miners (who are stakeholders) as the Yellowpaper states that Ethereum prefers GPU mining, at least until the transition to PoS. Our current miners understand this, perhaps more than most.
  3. As I stated above, the transition to a new set of stakeholders may put our transition to PoS in jeopardy. Our current group of miners understands this risk, but the new group of ASIC manufacturers are private, for-profit companies with much different incentives that are aligned with selling hardware for our ecosystem, and not ensuring our ecosystem thrives long-term. Like it or not, mining is pretty close to a zero-sum game, with large cost overheads from hardware and power, so the only ways to make money is either through economies of scale or speculation on the underlying token. However, GPU economies of scale are very difficult, so token speculation is the primary way Ethereum miners make real profits, which means their interests become aligned with the network. I’m not saying they should get special treatment as investors in our ecosystem or anything, but I feel as they should have just as much of a say as any other investor has. Some of these miners may eventually participate as Validators under PoS, so it’s not like we’re selling the future to pay for the present here.

Yes, this issue is contentious, and some prominent voices disagree, mostly on principles that are difficult to validate in reality. However, Ethereum should not be afraid of contentious change, because if we are it does not bode well for the long-term scalability of our platform. We should find a way to work together and find compromise that improves things for the better. That is what makes us better than other chains.


My compromise: ensure ProgPoW is technically and economically viable, and can be enabled quickly on all major clients. Maybe development other algorithms. Use the threat of an algorithm change as a deterrent to further ASIC development, and find metrics everyone can agree on for when such activity comprises an “existential threat”. Then, act on that threat (as we have done before) to ensure the long-term stability and future of our platform.

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Also, a note on Phase 0 block reward reduction. Check out this thread on the development of the finality gadget, which enables us to make this reduction:

If Phase 0 goes live, it will probably be early 2020 when it does. We will need at least 6 months, if not longer, to validate that the mechanism is working correctly, and develop the technical upgrades necessary to compensate for the issuance reduction and resolve all outstanding issues with issuance in general (rectifying the fact that we have two assets). This means that the earliest we can expect the issuance reduction is late 2020/early 2021. That means there is almost 2 years until such proposals can even be considered as arguments, which is plenty of time to ship new hardware. ProgPoW is still relevant.

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One just needs to look how hard they are fighting to blackball this proposal to get a sense of the tactics that will be used in the coming years to oppose the transition to PoS.

“They” is me? We are the smallest and most insignificant group of all in this game, that’s why we can speak freely.
We are 5 people in Shenzhen, feel free to visit us. The tactics of team ProgPoW are tough, I have sympathy for the significant amount of time you invest in this and that you believe them.
It’s a nice campaign and attack pulled off by ProgPoW, and for sure they will never stop. The moment you hand them a mic, the story is back on.

For the record here is what we wrote on January 12th

We are happy with the aging.
After discussions and news in recent months, it’s a given for us now that ProgPoW is a corporate money-making attempt, brought to you by one mega-miner with special deals with Nvidia on the chip side, and Calvin Ayre/nchain on the customer side. GPU miners not part of the collusion between Nvidia and Core Scientific will suffer.

We are not in 2015 when Ethash was designed and audited. Today Ethereum pays out 100 mio USD / month for decentralized PoW security.
The days of “low barrier of entry to mining” are over unless Ethereum dramatically changes the incentives and PoW algorithm (not to ProgPoW, to something that actually does what it says).
The minimum size to be viable is 10 MW today.

Use the threat of an algorithm change as a deterrent to further ASIC development

Our Ethash ASIC development will continue.
We are a chipmaker. We don’t design chips for or against Ethereum, or for or against Ethereum Classic, Zilliqa, Bitcoin Cash, etc. I will happily work on long-form answers to serious questions such as what drives our chip decisions, what is hard and easy in chip design, what is costly and what is cheap, what the customers want, what about prepay, what about risk wafers, etc.
We are also learning, it’s painfully obvious that our time estimate back from the ETC Summit was wrong!

It would be far more interesting to discuss how an Ethash (or ProgPoW) asic could lead to chips that accelerate ETH2. The investment carries over, so even if there is zero market for Ethash or ProgPoW, then the technology will be used to accelerate ETH2.

No. How many ASIC miners are there?

What difference could this choice make to developers? The hash algorithm isn’t part of the developer interface.

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Less than 23% of the hashrate in all likelihood (77% voted yes in ProgPoW miner vote, 23% abstained)

I’ve lost track - are there any EthHash ASICs actually shipping yet?

Shipping? No. Shipped? Yes. I believe there are 2 models of Ethash ASICs (which have been discontinued due to lack of demand), and Linzhi is working on a 3rd. That’s all the public information I think we have.

Much of the information needed to answer that question is private. Logically however, there would be no reason for ASIC hashrate to vote for this proposal, although the abstaining is more likely to be simply not wanting to participate in the vote, so that at least gives us an upper bound.

More than what is advertised as available to public, I would be concerned with what fpga’s are currently capable of and what that means to future ASIC’s.

Anyone with an efficient bitstream or ASIC is incentivized to keep it secret.

I think “the incentives at play” is the part of this that people disagree about the most. Even if people agree with the ProgPow advocates on everything else, disagreement about this can determine where people stand on the issue. It is this that I don’t see ProgPow advocates having any more expertise than opponents on. Does Kristy have a more expert opinion about this than Phil Daian? If so, why?

The other big thing that people disagree about is the governance precedent. A lot of opponents don’t think ProgPow is that big of a deal, but they object to letting a special interest push through a disruptive change and create a ~1 year distraction to benefit themselves.

I came into this discussion because someone claimed that the community was clearly in favor of ProgPow now.

Influencers are relevant because what’s at issue is what the community sentiment is. The other metrics that have been pointed to are more vulnerable to selection effects than the influencer list, as described in my McDonalds example.

That is a means, not an end. Just like decentralization is a means for censorship resistance. What we’re really trying to do is lower the probability and severity of future attacks on Ethereum.

In her Medium article, Kristy focuses a lot on decentralization but doesn’t really engage with the issue of how the cost for an external actor to attack the network is higher with ASICs. She mentions it only in passing before moving on to say that what’s even more important is protecting against attacks from ASIC miners rather than external actors.

This is a big point of disagreement: what are we more worried about, people from outside the ecosystem attacking Ethereum or mining companies attacking it?

Despite my disagreements, Kristy deserves props for engaging with the arguments of ProgPow opponents. This article is the kind of thing we should have been debating before ProgPow got the tentative go-ahead. IMO the next step now is to get feedback on these arguments from ProgPow opponents.

He’s just listing the points in Kristy’s article, but thanks, that is one example of a former ProgPow opponent switching sides. Any other examples?

This is one theory, but it’s not clear that mining companies are a bigger threat than GPU miners. GPU miners are more integrated into the community and can create a more “grass roots” resistance to PoS, which will look more legitimate than opposition coming from a big mining firm. If GPU miners resist PoS they won’t dispute that PoS has always been on the roadmap but they may say “PoS isn’t ready yet – it needs more work and research. We shouldn’t gamble with the network quite yet.”

I don’t see mining companies in general fighting hard against this. Linzhe is fighting but they seem quite small and without much influence, and they make up just a small minority of the opposition I’ve seen. I’ve also been ignoring ProgPow for a few months though, so maybe I’ve missed some stuff.

I do see lots of GPU miners with conflicts of interest relentlessly trying to push this through against the objections of mostly devs and app developers (like me and those I listed above) who don’t seem to have any conflict of interest that I’ve seen brought to light.

I am skeptical that either GPU miners or ASIC companies have much hope of resisting PoS, and I think it’s unlikely that anything that bad would happen if ProgPow does go through (even though I think it’s worse overall for Ethereum’s security). But I am pretty concerned about the governance precedent of allowing a special interest to push through a contentious change for such a questionable benefit.

I’m also concerned that there seems to have been very little acknowledgment of the conflicts of interest that do exist in this debate. For instance miners coming onto the dev calls to lobby for this and being treated as just normal concerned community members.

@gcolvin @fubuloubu

Only 1 ETH ASIC miner, Bitmain E3, has been shipped and made available to the public. It never caught on because the economics was inferior to GPU’s. ie. 1 E3 rig was equivalent to 6 RX570 GPU.

Innosilicon A10 was announced but never shipped to the general public. Inno commented on Grin-forum that there were issues with the ASIC and therefore being modified and may go into production. IMHO, this is unlikely as it is now 9 month late and inferior to Linzhi at 1/3 the performance.

Linzhi announced but as @Sonia-Chen states on this thread, they may tape-out in August which means October production at best. However, confidence seems low as there have not updated their website yet.

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Epic Henry! (whoever this is today).
For once this is an entire response from you without any disinformation or deception or FUD. Great! We should congratulate each other on FUD-freeness, how about that?

I see everything just described by Epic Henry the way he did. Before we thought a total of 100k Bitmain E3 were made, but now we believe it may only have been 10-20k. 100k would mean < 20 TH of the total hashrate of 160 TH right now, 20k would mean < 4 TH out of 160 TH.

Our Ethash chip, late or not, is not a threat to anyone just considering how small we are.
We will definitely do a tapeout announcement, in line with our open approach since the beginning.

Thanks Henry, I would appreciate if we can continue in an open and honest way going forward.

@greerso

I have 4 pieces of feedback regarding FPGA mining on Ethash. I would like to know what evidence you have to support the claim that there are FPGA miners on ETH?

1. Memory bandwidth limitations on FPGA
FPGA’s are not viable for mining ETH as they are memory interface bandwidth bound. From a high level, Xilinx FPGA’s eg. VU9P/11P/13P chips, U200/250 boards and 1525 boards support DDR4 in up to 256 bits wide (depending on board layout). The DDR4 limitation makes FPGA’s uncompetitive (to low cost GPU’s like the RX580 at $100 street price compared to $3500-$10000+ for 1525 and U250 boards). I can do the bandwidth math if you need it but it’s too early in the morning.

You may be able to get GDDR5 and GDDR6 memory controller IP but I am unable to validate whether such IP exist and whether the business model is viable (ie. licensing fees). Internet searches yield zero hits on Xilinx boards with GDDR5 and GDDR6 memory.

2. Economics of mining on moderately priced FPGA
Most of the commercial FPGA miners are using VU9P or 1525 like boards. The ROI is relative long at $3500+/board for DRR4 or GDDR5 performance if you accept my memory bound assertion. Assume than the board is 50W and equivalent to RX570 at 30MH/s and you get an annual return of $12/month or $120/year which translates to 30 years ROI. Why would you not mine SHA3 or X11 or other Altcoins with higher returns?

3. Secret mining on FPGA
The hardware acquisition cost of VU9P and 1525 boards (now discontinued) are very high relative to ROI period. Why would you secret mine on FPGA when the hardware cost are so high at $3500+ per board?
If someone had a viable FPGA bitstream, they should sell the ETH bitstream and try to monetize the NPV (net present value) of the mining rewards for some portion of it by licensing the bitstream. However, you can NOT make enough money by mining ETH on FPGA’s … but then you will not sell any bitstreams if FPRGA performance levels are similar to GPU’s.

4. Known FPGA ETH miracles
There are 2 known FPGA ETH hardware fairy tales. They are:

A. Ubimust in Montreal with a 1.9GHs hash rate claim
The claim was widely echoed on the internet but the rig based on the 8x1525 boards never shipped and Ubimust does not list this product on their website. It is technicially impossible to get this type of performance on DDR4 memory.

https://ubimust.comh

B. Squirrel Research - Acorn boards
There was a claim by SQRL that ETH performance would be improved by 30% using low end FPGA board to offload Keccak processing from a GPU. Needless to say, this product did not work and the bitstream never shipped. Rumour has it that Kristie-Leigh aka OhGodAGirl of ProgPOW fame was involved in the bitstream development through her Mineority connections with SQRL.

@Sonia-Chen, I love you too. Shall we get married at Dappcon.io in Berlin on Aug. 21 for the entire Ethereum community to witness? Hudson @souptacular can be my best man and Kristy-Leigh @OhGodAGirl, can be your Maid of Honor. We can merge our 2 companies to build an Ethereum ASIC to collectively mine ETHash, SHA3, ProgPOW and POS algorithms. :joy::rofl::upside_down_face:

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Yes, because she (and many of the miners advocating) has direct experience working in the industry, including experience with the supply chain aspects of mining, hardware design, and has spent time with some of the hardware manufacturers in the industry. Everyone has been calling it “conflict of interest”, but expertise and CoI are two sides of the same coin. Phil has expertise in software security and compilers and many other things, but there is something to be said for practical experience with hardware vendors, running a mining operation, etc. As I said before, I respect both people’s opinions on the matter.

This is the unfortunate side effect of the fact that not doing anything is also favoring a special interest, and sets a governance precedent that we are incapable of making tough decisions and thus can successfully be controlled into inaction by that special interest in the name of “not picking sides”. At some point, you gotta make decisions.

ASICs have higher efficiency than GPUs, so really what you are getting is an increased hashrate for about the same marginal cost and energy expenditure. Therefore, ASICs do not have a higher cost than GPUs in that regard, it takes the same amount of money to purchase 51% of the hashrate no matter what hardware is used. The amount of cost expended is directly related to the amount offered by mining rewards, which is why we call it the “security budget”. ASICs don’t change that math.

What does change is the number of people operating that hardware, and the number of people you have to convince politically to do an attack. People talk about “rental attacks” with GPU hardware and reference the ETC 51% attack. In that scenario, you would need a large number of GPU miners to feel apathic about Ethereum mining and list their hashpower up for rent. As long as we remain the largest and most profitable use of GPU hashpower, this really shouldn’t be possible.

Using Bitcoin for example, the number of political entities you need to convince is less. When CZ wanted to reorg the Bitcoin chain and steal back Binance’s money, he didn’t try to assemble a large and political diverse group of ASIC miners through hashrate rental, he talked to the mining pool operators that he knew and most notably Bitmain, who has a large portion of the Bitcoin mining hardware market (and operate a large amount of machines themselves). Ultimately, he relented because of community sentiment against the idea, but he definitely could’ve made it happen, and a less benevolent actor acting in the dark with the right incentive might not react that way. This is the kind of attack scenario I worry about.

I’m one, and I think Martin Swende changed his mind over the course of the last few ACD to be for the proposal. I believe a majority of “core developers” are for this proposal, and not because of a “conflict of interest”, unless simply talking to a person is enough to get you painted as having a CoI.

This is a fair point. Any grassroots campaign (even one paid for by mining hardware manufacturers) is likely to have this sort of effect. At some point we’ll have to make tough decisions to do things like reduce the mining reward. If we’re incapable of making tough decisions now, it does not bode well for when we reach that point.

I have a confession to make: I earned $40 worth of ETH from mining with my desktop in 2017. That was my first experience with Ethereum. It took me a month to do it though, so I figured I’d be better off earning money from working on core infrastructure for Ethereum and being an application developer. But I understand that $40 I earned 2 years ago and the fact I support this proposal is enough to paint me with the dreaded CoI scarlet letters.

Seriously, why can’t people just evaluate things for themselves instead of painting CoI on everything they disagree with? It makes for piss-poor discussions.

Everyone has a Conflict of Interest in a network where everyone has their own self interests or the interests of their companies at stake. If we cannot understand that and take it into account in the decision-making process, instead of sticking our fingers in our ears whenever we see those CoI scarlet letters, how are we ever supposed to make contentious decisions? I’m sorry for getting worked up over this, but CoI is my least favorite term and it’s how we’ve forced other important community members out before. Good decision makers can take these things into account without relying on it as the crux of their argument.

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Here’s a link to Martin’s post (from March) with his reasoning for supporting ProgPoW:
https://twitter.com/mhswende/status/1111218029835272192

As I said before, I have seen several who were against or abstaining from support for ProgPoW switch to being in support over the past year. I’ve seen exactly zero switch in the other direction.

Support for ProgPoW seems directly proportional to the amount of time spent analyzing the arguments. As a point to that, Phil’s blog post was written over a year ago, and I don’t think he has revisited the topic since.

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