New Ethereum ASIC Fuels Discord Among Ethereum Community
Canaan has launched its ambitious product series on September 26 at the New Era Mining Summit in China. This amazing product is called Ethereum ASIC or Ethash ASIC.
It is claimed to be much more powerful than the existing Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) with tremendous capacity and efficiency. As per Canaan, it is five times more competent than their current counterparts. However, a growing discontent has been observed among the miners about this newly launched application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) designed especially for Ethereum transactions.
What’s so special about Ethash ASIC?
The Ethash ASIC’ series came under limelight since last year. The Company has been publicizing about this series right from February 2018. Its first batch in April 2018 has been sold out instantly despite many limits and restrictions imposed on shipping in China and Taiwan.
Ethereum community oppose
However, the Ethereum community has been resisting this giant product for certain reasons:
- Some of them believe that it will cause centralization.
- Another threat under discussion is that it will prevent fair competition within the mining network.
- Some want to switch to other cryptocurrencies leaving the Ethereum network as it would reward them less.
- Several miners believe in building a bigger network of small miners that can prevent centralization and can enhance the security of the network.
- Some are even advocating a code “ProgPow” that would prevent domination of the ASICs within the network.
The doubts and speculations have surfaced after the announcement of proposed upgradation of the Ethereum software planned in October. The upgradation called as Constantinople via hark fork is coded in such a way that it will reportedly reduce the payment to the miners from 3 ETH/block to 2ETH/block.
However, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and the developers of new ASICs are adamant that ASIC’s doesn’t pose a threat. As per the latest developments, Kristy-Leigh Minehan, the author of ProgPoW, has resigned as CTO of Core Scientific.
Today, I announce that I have stepped down as CTO of Core Scientific. I believe that ProgPoW is of such importance to ETH's transition to ETH 2.0 that I felt removing any potential conflict or professional associations was important.
— Kristy-Leigh Minehan (@OhGodAGirl) September 24, 2019
Kristy-Leigh Minehan is the primary developer and supporter of the current GPUs. Another round of debate had been fueled up about the Ethereum upgradation “ProgPoW.” This upgradation of the current network could reduce the dominance of ASICs. It also favors more decentralized and cheaper GPU miners.
