The development of the Programmatic Proof-of-Work which is shorted as ProgPow was discussed in the recent Ethereum Core Dev Meeting. Hudson Jameson headed the meeting. Basically the Programmatic Proof-of-work was proposed by the IfDefElse developer team. It is an implementation that seeks to target the reduction of the control of ASIC miners on the Ethereum ETH network. Why a reduction in the control of ASIC miners? Well, the reason is the increasing number of ASIC miners in comparison to the GPU miners. As a result of this, the GPU miners were facing difficulty in getting any or very small gains for their mining activities on the ETH network. Other important topics such as Istanbul Roadmap, eWasm, Pruning, and Ethereum client updates were discussed in the meeting.
These steps are in line with the vision of Eth- hash. ETH Hash is the ongoing ETH algorithm with aims to mainly position the graphics cards more aggressively in the market to earn better success. The Blog- ‘2.miners’ explains the specifications of the ProgPow in a much detailed manner. The first point the blog post pointed at is that ProgPow is correcting the ‘statement of the problem’ in mining activities on a frequent level. The second feature of ProgPow is that it makes sure that all the parts of the graphics cards are utilized to their highest capacities, unlike ASIC mining chips. The ASIC mining chips target on only one function. The team IfDefElse is joining forces with Nvidia and AMD through collaborative projects. The team is guiding the graphics cards producers in order to check, test and implement the ProgPow efficiently.
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As of now, the Ethereum developers team has not decided the schedule for implementation on the ETH network. The process of the implementation is running through audits and various verification process. In the Ethereum Core Dev Meeting, Hudson Jameson elaborated on the two main points of the audit. The first component revolves around the ‘benchmarking.’ The team is currently striving to gather funds for the benchmarking on ProgPow. The second component deals with the time it will involve in order to construct a ProgPow ASIC by the ASIC chip producers. The second component will also compare the performance with the GPU by a factor of 1 time or 10 times. In the meeting, Hudson Jameson further added-
“We can see if it is even going to be worth it to implement or if someone is going to make another ASIC in three months and all our work will be for nothing since the work is not entirely done yet. And, so I feel like this would be a more major factor, whether or not to go forward with ProgPow.”
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Further Hudson Jameson spoke about the performance of miners in terms of implementation. Looking at the reports from EtherChain, the voting results were 57.8 percent of miners casting their votes in favor of going ahead with the implementation.
