Ethereum Security Lead Joins Effort to Oust Blockchain's Big Miners

A notable voice is joining the ranks of ethereum developers who are seeking to block powerful ASIC miners from earning an outsized share of the platform's valuable ether cryptocurrency.

In an developer meeting Friday, Martin Holst Swende, security lead at the Ethereum Foundation, said he supports swift action to remove ASIC mining hardware from the ethereum platform.

Joining the non-profit in 2016, Swende now works to ensure code changes do not disrupt or harm operations on the world's second-largest blockchain.

First introduced on ethereum back in April, dissenting developers argue the chips may reduce the number of participants able to profitably maintain the network's ledger.

As detailed by CoinDesk, the software change would render current ethereum ASICs unusable, and potentially prevent the development of such hardware going forward.

Swende also noted after the meeting in email to CoinDesk that unlike other proposals for software upgrades on ethereum that affect smart contract deployment on the platform, ProgPow would "Not touch the EVM or state transition at all."

As of today's meeting, the upgrade is due to activate on ethereum testnet Ropsten on October 9.

Developers also said that a cost optimization upgrade geared toward reducing the cost of privacy on ethereum authored by Antonio Salazar Cardozo could be implemented in a subsequent hard fork along with the ProgPoW software shift.

In response, representatives from the developer group working on ProgPow cited "Misinformation about hardware and how ProgPow actually works."

As a result, Def posits that the design of ProgPow is not to be ASIC resistant but rather "To be friendly or very much tied to a single type of ASIC, which is a GPU," with these having the advantages of being lower cost for miners in the ethereum community to acquire.