Title: Governance_concerns_after_listening_to__all_ProgPo
Category: Magicians

Author: elliot_olds
Date: 2019-03-26T03:15:07.043Z

I recently went back and listened to all the Core Dev calls that I could find in which ProgPow was discussed (call 38, and every call between 45-57 – let me know if I missed any) to understand the process by which we got to this point. These are the governance-related issues that I found most concerning:
1. There was an assumption from the beginning that it was appropriate for the Core Devs to horse trade with the GPU miners
Core devs talked about giving miners ProgPow in exchange for them accepting the issuance reduction from 3 to 2. It seems far from obvious that this sort of thing is appropriate. I’d guess that many in the community believe that GPU miners should not receive compensation from the network to ‘offset’ harms, but that we should instead only offer such compensation when it benefits the network as a whole. At the very least, if the network is to give out compensation like this it’s something that more than just the Core Devs should decide. It’s not a technical issue.
2. There is an assumption that’s almost never stated explicitly that ASIC resistance is a worthy goal to pursue
There is research and theoretical arguments suggesting that ASIC resistance makes the network less secure (see https://youtu.be/N6eDuEEb0Oc?t=458 for instance). Never at any point in my review of the dev calls did I see the Core Devs engage in how this change impacts the cost to attack Ethereum, which IMO is the most important consideration. It is true that the whitepaper is anti-ASIC and ethash was designed to be anti-ASIC, but our understanding of crypto network security has improved since then. Hudson did ask at least once if anyone had any opinions about whether ASICs were really a problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TafZui-DnV0&feature=youtu.be&t=3387, but his question was met with 18 seconds of silence.
3. To make such an impactful change we probably want to get feedback from more than miners
Here’s a very condensed timeline of how the initial tentative consensus was reached, based on my notes. I may have missed some things, and am not aware of anything that might have happened outside of the Core Dev calls:
On call 38 the IfDefElse team joins the call the present ProgPow to the Core Devs.
On call 45 there were several miners giving their opinions on ProgPow in the context of issuance reduction discussions.
On call 47 Hudson says that there’s renewed interest in getting ProgPow into a future hard fork, but it’s not clear from listening to the call where the interest is coming from. I’m guessing miners? Hudson later says that he’s been talking to video card manufacturers about it.
Calls 48, 49, and 50 have technical updates and implementation progress. On call 51 the devs confirm that ProgPow has not been decided yet.
Miss If and Mr. Else (creators of ProgPow) are on call 52, where Hudson makes clear that in the call they’ll talk about “if” they should ship ProgPow, not when. Most devs who speak seem in favor of shipping it, one has concerns about the amount of work required. They discuss for about 45 minutes in total. At the end of this call, Hudson says that they’ll tentatively go ahead with ProgPow unless there’s some major problem found.
I believe it was after call 52 where the first big pushback occurred. It looked like the Core Devs made the decision after after consulting with miners and the IfDefElse team, but I didn’t see much evidence that anyone reached out to the broader community. As noted above, all I listened to were the calls so I may be missing attempts to rope in others.
It’s seems hard for the community to discover such things organically, because discussions about ProgPow were sandwiched between discussion of technical issues that legitimately only required the consensus of the Core Devs, making it hard for non-Core-Devs to find the relevant discussions. Even if the community was following the Core Dev calls and had listened to call 51, there was no indication that the Core Devs were going to make the tentative go-ahead decision by the end of call 52.
4. There doesn’t seem to be enough awareness of conflicts of interest.
As in the Afri situation, conflicts of interest exist and are relevant regardless of whether the parties in question are doing anything wrong.
Given that the situation we’re in now seems to be the result of miners initially pushing for it, it would have been nice to see more skepticism and attempts to reach out to the broader community. There seems to be an assumption in the dev calls that what miners want should be given significant weight. IMO this is pretty controversial and not something for the Core Devs to decide.

Author: lookfirst
Date: 2019-03-26T04:29:58.366Z

elliot_olds:

It is true that the whitepaper is anti-ASIC and ethash was designed to be anti-ASIC, but our understanding of crypto network security has improved since then.


I’d love to know what the improved understanding has to do with the anti-ASIC stance.



 elliot_olds:

4. There doesn’t seem to be enough awareness of conflicts of interest.


For those of us following ProgPoW for a long time now, the conflict of interest issues are a dead horse. It is a technical argument now. Does it do what it is claimed and does it pass analysis?
Least Authority’s original ethash analysis predicted the state we are in now…

Author: boris
Date: 2019-03-26T05:31:41.922Z

Thanks for posting this here!
How do you think Core Devs can “test” the contentious-ness of something?
Core Devs have already said they don’t want to take on the responsibility of reaching out to the community. Do you have any suggestions on who should do this and how?
For reference, related threads (which puts pings on those other threads):




My technical take on ProgPow's weakest link EIPs


    First let me say that I’ve worked extensively with the algorithm, and as far as I’m concerned it is sound and meets its objective of evening the mining playing field. As proposed ProgPow creates a new pseudo random sequence of OpenCL or CUDA code every 10 blocks or so. In order to run on the GPUs this code is just-in-time recompiled at run-time with each new ProgPow period. In an ideal world that would be fine, but compilers (specially optimizing compilers) are incredibly complex beasts and are …
  





On the progpow audit Announcements


    Opening this thread as a general purpose place for the community to discuss the upcoming progpow audit being handled by the Ethereum Cat Herders at the request of the All Core Devs. Please post questions or comments and we’ll do our best to make sure that all parties weigh in.
  

And the progpow tag should capture everything related to this.

Author: elliot_olds
Date: 2019-03-26T05:47:42.736Z

I’d love to know what the improved understanding has to do with the anti-ASIC stance.

The video I linked to above is a good start, and I’d be happy to elaborate more but I’d like this thread to focus on the governance issues. Is there another thread existing thread you’d recommend taking this discussion to?

For those of us following ProgPoW for a long time now, the conflict of interest issues are a dead horse. It is a technical argument now. Does it do what it is claimed and does it pass analysis?

Regardless of what has happened since then, on call 52 the Core Devs made a decision to tentatively go ahead with ProgPow after seemingly only talking to miners and the IfDefElse team about it. They may have talked to others too but I’m only going by what’s reported on the calls. The issue is not “have the conflicts of interest for ProgPow been addressed in the ensuing discussion?” but “what policies should we have to detect/deal with changes pushed by those with conflicts of interest in the future?”

Author: elliot_olds
Date: 2019-03-26T06:16:34.298Z

How do you think Core Devs can “test” the contentious-ness of something?

I think in this particular case intuition should have caught it. Changing the proof of work function of a coin has long been considered a pretty major event.
For the general case it seems useful to have a high signal to noise channel announcing when a change is starting to be seriously evaluated by the Core Devs, and when a decision has been made. A Twitter account would probably work well as updates will naturally be retweeted based on community interest.
It need not be an existing Core Dev who does this. Have we tried explicitly soliciting a volunteer from a pool of technical Ethereum enthusiasts for something like this before?

Author: lookfirst
Date: 2019-03-26T06:29:46.218Z

Ok, then let’s get back to governance…



 elliot_olds:

2. There is an assumption that’s almost never stated explicitly that ASIC resistance is a worthy goal to pursue


It is explicitly stated all over the place. Including the Yellow Paper. Are you trying to say it isn’t repeated in every CoreDev discussion and therefore a governance issue?

Author: boris
Date: 2019-03-26T07:26:53.369Z

Thanks. It sounds like “more communication” and “a place to go look / monitor” is what’s wanted.
There is a new #eips:core-eips forum here, and the hardfork process 233 update will have a single page to monitor for updates.

Author: elliot_olds
Date: 2019-03-26T20:29:29.959Z

Yes – the white and yellow papers are both anti-ASIC. They are also both very old and I think the reasoning in the yellow paper is flawed.
I’m registering your point as “ASIC resistance is so clearly established as good that it’s fine that it was never discussed on the Core Dev calls.” I disagree but this doesn’t seem like the place to have that discussion. Curious whether other people here share your view though.

Author: lrettig
Date: 2019-03-27T00:50:01.974Z

elliot_olds:

I think the reasoning in the yellow paper is flawed.


The reasoning in the white paper is sort of flawed too. It talks about resisting ASICs by requiring miners to process lots of arbitrary transactions, an idea that was debunked ages ago and never worked. In other words, it says ASIC resistance is a goal but doesn’t propose a workable solution.

Author: lookfirst
Date: 2019-03-27T03:31:31.869Z

elliot_olds:

I’m registering your point as “ASIC resistance is so clearly established as good that it’s fine that it was never discussed on the Core Dev calls.” I disagree but this doesn’t seem like the place to have that discussion. Curious whether other people here share your view though.


I am specifically responding to your points and asking the hard questions, yet you keep telling me that this isn’t the place.  Hmmm…
I am saying two things:

The original mission of ETH is defined as being ASIC-resistant.
The conversation to change that definition is separate from ProgPoW.

Author: lookfirst
Date: 2019-03-27T03:43:37.181Z

lrettig:

In other words, it says ASIC resistance is a goal but doesn’t propose a workable solution.


Ethash has provided enough ASIC resistance for the last 4 years (which is a whole lifetime in crypto) that there isn’t currently a single manufacturer out there producing one publicly for sale. I’d say that goal has been achieved pretty well.
For better or worse, ETH is the top GPU hashrate coin. If that changes, there are actual and theoretical risks to the security of the network at the current time and in the future during the switch to PoS.
The decision to change from GPUs to ASICs is a far bigger question than to go ProgPoW or not. I cover this in 5,6,7… https://medium.com/altcoin-magazine/13-questions-about-ethereums-movement-to-progpow-e17e0a6d88b8
If Linzhi releases an ethash ASIC, they will be the only manufacturer producing something that is 7x more hash rate than anything else on the market. Another one might come along, but you can’t guarantee that. Bitmain is in huge financial trouble at this point and even their IPO is delayed. Inno is having financial issues as well.

Author: sneg55
Date: 2019-03-27T04:09:31.602Z

boris:

How do you think Core Devs can “test” the contentious-ness of something?


I’ve seen a very a nice chart from EIP0 recently: image1200×1014 108 KB

Author: boris
Date: 2019-03-27T04:35:57.800Z

Yes, by @danfinlay.
What people are asking for is to find out about Discussions and register it as contentious there.
Which is totally doable — but would require paying attention to published Core EIPs.
So the onus is on people to pay attention.
Going forward, perhaps the #eips:core-eips category is good enough.

Author: elliot_olds
Date: 2019-03-27T04:42:30.126Z

The original mission of ETH is defined as being ASIC-resistant.


ASIC resistance is a means to an end. It was desired because it was believed that it lead to decentralization in mining, which lead to better censorship resistance. If we have information that suggests ASIC-resistance is worse for censorship resistance, then I believe the community should abandon ASIC-resistance. Don’t you? Do you think the goal is something other than censorship resistance?


The conversation to change that definition is separate from ProgPoW.


The impact of any change to Ethereum’s censorship resistance is always relevant to the ship decision if that impact may be significant.

Author: sneg55
Date: 2019-03-27T05:05:26.749Z

elliot_olds:

If we have information that suggests ASIC-resistance is worse for censorship resistance, then I believe the community should abandon ASIC-resistance.


Any credible proofs on that?

Author: lookfirst
Date: 2019-03-27T05:25:42.510Z

What @sneg55 said.
Also… why are you going off on censorship resistance? PoW isn’t about censorship, it is about the ability to not trust a third party for transaction confirmations. That is all. Per the Bitcoin whitepaper: Trustless.
The war is over hash rate and who controls it. Putting hash rate into the hands of a few small companies (the ASIC manufacturers, who are well known bad actors), is the most censorship driven thing you could possibly do.

Author: lightuponlight
Date: 2019-03-27T14:18:31.170Z

I can only agree with all the points raised by Elliot here.
The governance considerations here are enormous. This is an EIP designed to give economic benefits of one group at the expense of another, and so whether this is something Ethereum should be doing needs to be discussed at length with the entire community and unless the community comes to consensus about this, it should not go forward.

Author: tvanepps
Date: 2019-03-27T14:47:04.663Z

first, thank you for taking the time to pore over previous All Core Dev calls to map out a coherent timeline. this was clearly missing, and even Hudson lost the plot at one point, and he facilitates them. It’s been a long process and fluid players serve to add confusion at some points.

Author: sneg55
Date: 2019-03-27T16:21:17.309Z

lightuponlight:

This is an EIP designed to give economic benefits of one group at the expense of another


EIP-1789 is also designed with same approach to give benefits of one group at the expense of miners.

Author: elliot_olds
Date: 2019-03-27T21:58:49.292Z

why are you going off on censorship resistance? PoW isn’t about censorship, it is about the ability to not trust a third party for transaction confirmations

Trust a third party to do what? Bitcoin and ETH were designed so that you don’t have to trust a third party not to censor your funds, or confiscate them. The cryptographic aspects of Ethereum provide most of the resistance against theft (if someone doesn’t have your private keys, they can’t move your funds). The PoW mechanism allows double spending to be solved in a decentralized way, and the purpose of that decentralization is censorship resistance.

Putting hash rate into the hands of a few small companies (the ASIC manufacturers, who are well known bad actors), is the most censorship driven thing you could possibly do.

It’s unclear whether ASIC manufacturers pose much risk.
I’ve decided to create a thread just about the object-level discussion regarding whether ASICs are good or bad for Ethereum, to ensure that this thread stays focused on governance:




Is ASIC-resistance good for Ethereum?


    There has been some discussion in this thread and in the ProgPow-review gitter channel about whether ASIC-resistance is a goal that Ethereum should be striving for. 
I thought it might be good to have a more permanent record of these discussions, in a thread that was exclusively devoted to them. 
The main arguments in favor of ASICs are: 
(1) GPU mined coins are cheaper to attack with rented hashpower 
It’s easier to rent a large amount of GPU power than it is to rent a large amount of ASIC powe…

Author: lrettig
Date: 2019-03-28T02:27:52.057Z

sneg55:

EIP-1789 is also designed with same approach to give benefits of one group at the expense of miners


This isn’t true. EIP-1789 still isn’t finalized but it will include zero rewards to start so no one benefits at anyone else’s expense. There will be a separate EIP to turn on the rewards, and we don’t know yet whether they will come out of mining rewards.

Author: lookfirst
Date: 2019-03-28T03:31:03.246Z

elliot_olds:

Trust a third party to do what ?


Calm down and read what I wrote again. I said: “it is about the ability to not trust a third party for transaction confirmations”



 elliot_olds:

It’s unclear whether ASIC manufacturers pose much risk.


No, it is absolutely clear, well documented and proven. Do your research.



 elliot_olds:

I’ve decided to create a thread


Zero responses because at this point, you’re just trolling.

Author: fubuloubu
Date: 2019-03-28T03:49:38.741Z

lookfirst:

well documented and proven.


To be fair, can you provide a source on this?

Author: lookfirst
Date: 2019-03-28T04:14:40.720Z

fubuloubu:

To be fair, can you provide a source on this?


How about the fact that Linzhi is the only company currently saying that they are creating an ethash ASIC (once again… both Bitmain and Inno are no longer selling an ethash ASIC to the public).
Yet, they are actively campaigning against ProgPoW (of course, it’ll cost them a lot of money!), while at the same time saying that a ProgPoW ASIC will be easy for them to create. All through anonymous accounts and they barely even have a website and a whopping 10 employees.
It seems pretty risky to be betting a $14b market cap on a company like that, no?
Furthermore, I cover the risks of centralization on ASICs in my post.

Author: fubuloubu
Date: 2019-03-28T04:33:08.736Z

I definitely agree with your viewpoint, but I think this is more opinion based on observation than “well-documented and proven”.
We simply have too few data points to demonstrate that as fact, one way or the other.

Author: lookfirst
Date: 2019-03-28T04:57:10.972Z

This isn’t opinion, everything I said is facts.

Name one other manufacturer producing an ethash ASIC.
image982×248 15.5 KB
Who is Sonia Chen? Nobody knows.
image1206×380 80.2 KB

Author: elliot_olds
Date: 2019-03-28T06:30:31.396Z

lookfirst:

How about the fact that Linzhi is the  only company  currently saying that they are creating an ethash ASIC


(edited my response here because I didn’t get your concern at first)
So you’re worried that this 10 person company that you think is sketchy is going to completely take over the Ethereum mining landscape? I suppose it’s an understandable worry, but I don’t think it falls under the category of a well documented and proven risk.

Yet, they are actively campaigning against ProgPoW

And GPU miners are campaigning for it. It’s natural for a business to campaign against a rule that essentially pushes them out of a market. This shows that an ASIC manufacturer is self-interested, but you haven’t shown that risks from ASICs is “well documented and proven.”

while at the same time saying that a ProgPoW ASIC will be easy for them to create

Where specifically is the harm to Ethereum from that statement?
I looked at your post about the risks of ASICs and did not see any well documented and proven risks, except possibly this one:

ASICs are a dead end. When they are unprofitable they become e-waste

Which is a risk to the environment, not a risk to Ethereum.

Author: lookfirst
Date: 2019-03-28T06:49:54.920Z

elliot_olds:

So you’re worried that this 10 person company that you think is sketchy is going to completely take over the Ethereum mining landscape?


If Linzhi can produce an ASIC that is 7x more efficient than a GPU, yes. It means others can as well and they will likely not do it in public. This has happened on other smaller coins already, Monero is one.



 elliot_olds:

And GPU miners are campaigning for it.


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



 elliot_olds:

This shows that an ASIC manufacturer is self-interested, but you haven’t shown that harm from ASICs is “well documented and proven.”


The harm is the self interest. For example, Bitmain mines with equipment before shipping it out. Linzhi will only sell to select customers. When you get into an ecosystem where self-interest drives things, that is centralization that we are trying to avoid. On the other hand, GPUs don’t have these self-interest issues.



 elliot_olds:

Where specifically is the harm to Ethereum from that statement?


The creation of FUD that is specifically designed to delay or stop ProgPoW from happening so that they can build and release their ethash ASIC which is claimed to be 7x more efficient than GPUs.

Author: lookfirst
Date: 2019-03-28T06:58:01.361Z

elliot_olds:

And GPU miners are campaigning for it.


Ask yourself WHY the miners are campaigning for ProgPoW.
It is because it levels the playing field. A level playing field is a good thing for the eco-system.
ASICs and their manufacturers harm the eco-system by selectively selling equipment to the highest bidder at whatever price the market will bear.
Remember, they could just build and mine themselves (and they do by competing against their own customers), but it is WAY more profitable to sell them.
GPUs can be bought on an open market by any one.

Author: fubuloubu
Date: 2019-03-28T11:56:22.679Z

elliot_olds:


ASICs are a dead end. When they are unprofitable they become e-waste

Which is a risk to the environment, not a risk to Ethereum.


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. We’re already seeing it here, and it will only be worse when they are more prevalent.
The migration to PoS is one such event that is planned. Hybrid PoS/PoW is another. There is intense FUD being spread to keep the status quo, and that’s even before there is significant enough of the hashrate controlled by ASIC interests. Remember 77% of the hashrate voted yes to ProgPoW, which pegs the total at most 23% (probably more like 5%).

Author: elliot_olds
Date: 2019-03-28T22:09:10.107Z

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.

Author: elliot_olds
Date: 2019-03-28T22:37:32.892Z

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.

Author: fubuloubu
Date: 2019-03-29T00:44:07.424Z

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.

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.

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

Phil’s point on anti-ASIC algo changes (we discussed this above)
“It’s a waste of precious developer time” / “It’s a distraction from ETH 2.0 / PoS schedule” (most work is done)
“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.

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)

Author: lookfirst
Date: 2019-03-29T02:33:27.336Z

elliot_olds:

Lots of other coins have ASICs.


Dude, you’re officially a troll.

Author: fubuloubu
Date: 2019-03-29T02:41:59.620Z

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

Author: lookfirst
Date: 2019-03-29T03:17:48.375Z

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.

Author: gcolvin
Date: 2019-03-29T05:19:09.852Z

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

Author: elliot_olds
Date: 2019-03-29T06:26:14.918Z

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.

Author: ajsutton
Date: 2019-03-29T06:33:41.766Z

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).

Author: elliot_olds
Date: 2019-03-29T06:47:11.596Z

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.

Author: elliot_olds
Date: 2019-03-29T07:12:39.781Z

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.

Author: ajsutton
Date: 2019-03-29T08:00:58.864Z

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.

Author: lookfirst
Date: 2019-03-29T08:05:48.441Z

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.

Author: lookfirst
Date: 2019-03-29T08:08:59.554Z

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.

Author: lookfirst
Date: 2019-03-29T08:10:05.324Z

image700×615 117 KB
image700×630 106 KB
image700×644 135 KB
image700×656 84.4 KB

Author: fubuloubu
Date: 2019-03-29T12:55:35.324Z

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.

Author: fubuloubu
Date: 2019-03-29T13:08:23.824Z

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.

Author: fubuloubu
Date: 2019-03-29T13:12:24.038Z

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).

Author: lightuponlight
Date: 2019-03-29T13:58:13.869Z

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.

Author: fubuloubu
Date: 2019-03-29T14:24:44.388Z

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.

Author: sneg55
Date: 2019-03-29T16:04:45.712Z

fubuloubu:

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.


This is a widespread misconception. Mining pool it’s a for-profit business at least for pools with top-10 hashrate. Why should mining pool attack chain and ruin own business?
You can’t slap shit together and deploy new pool and gain top hashrate overnight. Development, cost of running, marketing costs - I would say it’s more than expected profit from 51% attack.
Top-10 pools are usually multi-coins pools, with more than one coin available for mining. Attacking just one of the coins would cost mining pool a reputation.

Author: fubuloubu
Date: 2019-03-29T16:29:42.270Z

My argument was a little sloppy. They’ve built a business overtime based on reputation, marketing, and running some solid infrastructure. I meant their capital cost overhead of investing in hardware is really low. They don’t have a strong incentive to combat a change to the mining algorithm or consensus algorithm because of this. The fact that the do multiple coins just makes this even more true. They’re truly just service providers.

Author: sneg55
Date: 2019-03-29T22:12:36.199Z

fubuloubu:

They’re truly just service providers.


Right, you could figure out economy of multi-coin mining pool with open stats here: https://2miners.com/open

Author: elliot_olds
Date: 2019-03-30T07:37:35.949Z

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.

I specifically said my statement applied “if the attack is coming from someone other than existing miners (or an entity that can control the existing miners).” Your argument was about the situation where the existing miners can be controlled by an entity who is behind the attack. That is not the only situation to be concerned about.
@fubuloubu writes:

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.

I strongly disagree that rounding hardware costs to $0 can lead to a remotely plausible analysis of a build/buy attack.
Even if the majority of the cost of hashing is electricity in some cases, this is only true when the hardware cost is amortized over an extremely long period of time.
I’d really like to see you to provide some detailed back of the envelope calculations to support your claims.
Here’s my back of envelope calculations:
I searched around to find a tier 1 GPU for ethash, and it looks like the NVIDIA GTX 1660 Ti 6GB is pretty good. 29.5 MH/s at 90w. If you use the default electricity cost of $0.12 per KWh on cryptocompare you’ll see that it will take about 3 years until the electricity cost overtakes the cost of this thing on Amazon. Let’s say you’re a big GPU farm and you can get a good deal on these cards. It’ll still be years before the electricity price is higher than hardware price. And this is using an electricity price that is higher than what I just happen to get in Seattle, so I’m sure pro miners are paying less for electricity.
If the ETH hashrate is 150,000 GH/s you need about ~5 million of these cards to overpower the existing network. Let’s say you get a good deal and can get them for $200 each. That’s still a billion dollars for only the cards. Even assuming that your facilities/land/cooling costs are zero, this will dwarf your electricity costs even if you’re attacking Ethereum for many months continuously.
Suppose your electricity costs are what crypto51.app reports for the ETH hash rate rental cost. Then we scale the reported hashrate to 150 TH/s which we used above, and round up to $100k per hour. So $2.4 million per day, $72 million per month. You could 51% attack ETH for 13.8 months continuously before your electricity cost would overtake your hardware cost. And this is with very generous hardware/infrastructure cost assumptions, and generous assumptions about the existing miners continuing to mine for zero revenue for those 13.8 months (otherwise the attacker could scale back their electricity expenditure).

Author: elliot_olds
Date: 2019-03-30T07:44:58.261Z

fubuloubu:

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).


I’m very curious to what extent others in the Ethereum community believe that Ethereum should not have a goal of being resistant to state-level attackers (aka the goal should not be be “sovereign grade censorship resistance”).

Author: fubuloubu
Date: 2019-03-30T12:24:30.840Z

elliot_olds:

if the attack is coming from someone other than existing miners (or an entity that can control the existing miners).


This is largely considered not possible if you are the largest destination of hashrate for whatever algorithm/hardware you optimize for. So we just have to continue being that!

Author: sneg55
Date: 2019-03-30T16:27:48.632Z

elliot_olds:

Suppose your electricity costs are what crypto51.app reports for the ETH hash rate rental cost.


Rental cost on crypto51.app it is Network hashrate * 1Th/h price from Nicehash marketplace: https://www.crypto51.app/coins/ETH.html

Author: ahmedcoe
Date: 2020-02-27T06:29:26.427Z

Most of the GPU hash is in the hands of big farms not independent small minners. It is foolish to remove the smaller hash power of ASICs just to give it to GPU farms. This is centralization and will in essence cause an easier resistance to the transition to Eth2