ProgPoW ASIC resistance algorithm

Mining Algorithm

ProgPoW (Programmatic Proof of Work) is a proof-of-work algorithm designed to close the efficiency gap available to specialized ASICs.

Mining algorithm claims to be ASIC resistance generally uses extra parametres or mixing different algorithms to make the ASIC more complicated to be developed. However, ASIC manufacture can eventually develop their workaround with enough economic incentives like the popularity and the price rise of a coin.

Ethash has showed the strongest ASIC resistance (least efficiency gain) even Antminer E3 ASIC is released by Bitmain recently. Among ASIC resistant algorithm that has been “cracked” by ASICs like Equihash, CryptoNight, X11 which shows 50-1000x efficiency gain from ASICs, Ethash ASIC actually gains less than 2x efficiency over GPU making it a lot less favorable investment switching from GPU rigs to ASICs with higher risk and not much profit. Even Vitalik did not think the E3 ASIC is a big threat to Ethereum.

ProgPoW follows the same general structure of Ethash by having a large size of the DAG file that have to be loaded into the memory during computation, so the mining performance is limited by the memory size and speed which can hardly improve efficiency on as both GPU and ASIC are using memory on same technology level limiting any advantage.

ProgPoW improves upon Ethash by making the algorithm fits the hardware design of a GPU natively and efficiently use all the parts in a GPU to limit the efficiency gain of ASIC to maximum 1.1-1.2x. Therefore, the interest of developing an ASIC miner should decrease and GPU miners can still be profitable even there are ASICs in the market. ProgPoW is a programmable algorithm which can be tuned (even periodically) to fight ASIC by tweaking the parameters through a soft fork without a hard fork for algorithm change.

Dev Team

OhGodACompany is the team created the OhGodAnETHlargementPill which is a plugin that successfully boost the performance of GTX1080ti and GTX1080 GPU by 50% mining Ethash. The team has shown strong background in developing and optimizing mining algorithm/software for GPU.

Why ASIC Resistance?

ASIC Resistance does not just help decentralisation and prevent the monopoly of miner manufactures, it also attract more interest and build the community to grow the project. One of the reason that Ethereum became such popular is the growth of the mining community who can participate in the network and get rewarded with just their home computer or even laptops. CPU and GPU mining are more accessible to the masses and bring them to experience cryptocurrency and blockchain before investing with serious money or even understand the technology behind.

ProgPoW can be easily implement into Ethash based coins and some other coin community also show strong interest in it. EIP-1057 has been proposed to implement ProgPoW into Ethereum and UIP-1 is proposed for Ubiq. The Ethereum community is not likely to pass the proposal at the moment while the Ubiq community has voted actively and the algorithm change will be implement into the mainnet soon. If Ethereum migration towards PoS does not go well or get delayed, ProgPoW might also be a good option to continue decentralisation before further changes.

References

https://github.com/ifdefelse/ProgPOW
https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-1057.md
https://github.com/ubiq/UIPs/blob/master/UIPs/uip-1.md
https://steemit.com/mining/@gainer/ubiq-proposes-switch-to-progpow-to-dissuade-mining
https://cryptoslate.com/vitalik-buterin-ethash-asics-ethereum