EIP: Modify block mining to be ASIC resistant.

[pipermerriam]

Disclaimer: My area of expertise does not lend well to me suggesting how to make things ASIC resistant. I hope there are some informed opinions floating around out there who can help fill in the how.

According to "the internet" there is an ASIC based ethereum miner on the horizon.

this may be the original source of that news

If you believe the analysis in the comments on this reddit thread BitMain may already running these miners.

I believe it is the accepted wisdom that ASIC based mining leads to increases centralization when compared to GPU mining.

This leads us to two questions:

1. Should we hard fork to make ASIC mining harder and to demonstrate a willingness to hard fork any future ASIC based ethereum mining.
2. What specifically changes do we make to implement this increased ASIC resistance.

Should we fork?

I propose that people indicate support/opposition with a simple 👍 / 👎 on this main issue. I would prefer this conversation not devolve into deep discussions around this subjective topic so my request is that people refrain from commenting on that specific question here.

How do we implement improved ASIC resistance

This is the primary issue that I think needs to be addressed, after which we can have an informed discussion about whether we should actually do it.

[Kushiiel]

We have known this is going to come for a while now... I think so long as PoW is still a thing we should commit to making changes to the algo every 4-6 months that will force people working on ASICS to go back to the drawing board... this will force the issue...

I would love to think that PoS will solve this - but If there are more unforeseen delays I don't think that we should be rushing into PoS to solve this, and I don't think we should do nothing encouraging more and more and better asic development.

[krtschmr]

poison the well, written in the whitepaper of Ethereum.

Ethereum has been one of the most profitable coins to mine using GPUs. IceAge laimed this inherently and was removed in the last network update.

Even tho we had ASIC rumors out of china last year, the recent hashrate runup during the last 4 months while the price is constantly declining, makes Ethereum Mining unprofitable. Small home miners , with regular electricity costs of 0.20$ or more, are forced to turnoff their GPUs and mining rigs, as they can't even make a tiny profit.

Screenshots of Gigahash Miners hit the the surface. While many supsect that these are just MXM GPUs on a PCB (which is just a big GPU Rig, not an ASIC) the rumors of Bitmain produced tons of memory for their upcoming F3 Ethereum ASIC are getting stronger and stronger.

ASICs would affect market drastically and could even render GPUs obsolete, due to their comparative ineffectiveness.

We recently saw what happens when Bitmain is attacking a coin/network with ASICs. They can (as beeing a monopoly producer) predict hashrates and control the income of their own pockets with individual pricing., depending on market. They do nothing else then first mine into their own wallets, then simply advertise small (very small) batches which gives first-batch-owners a high yield, but then released 15 fold the amount of miners under the table. The Antminer D3+ became, even with cheap electricity, a doorstopper - or for colder regions of this earth, a room heater. It won't yield any profits anymore and with 0.12$ electricity, you still make a dail loss of a dollar (of course related to the crypto price).

Ethereum contributes too much good value to humanity as we can carelessly watch how ASICs are taking over. Crypto belongs to the people, not into the hands of some (chinese or not) businessman.

Expected behaviour

Hardfork (network upgrade) to make current ASICs obsolete, slightlyt changing the DaggerHashimoto Algorythm

Actual behaviour

ASIC enter the network

Backlog

Ethereum will switch to PoS, however, this is still in the future, meanwhile the ASIC take over.

[7runks]

ETH asics have been running for the past 4 months and bitmain and co will not release it for the public cause they don't want eth asics to be official and eth devs are ignoring that fact which is bad. The problem is how eth devs can implement a fix as they don't have information on how those asics work. And if eth devs create a code to block those asics to work then after a week or so bitmain and co will probably come up with a simple firmware update.

[eolszewski]

@pipermerriam @Arachnid I'm not sure if this is a pool or not (there are no transactions), but I saw this in r/ethereum and figured I'd point to it. https://etherscan.io/address/0x52e44f279f4203dcf680395379e5f9990a69f13c#mine

Naturally, there's no way to really know. And attempting to do anything would be taking shots a something in the dark. But, if the majority of the hashing power is in the hands of ASIC miners in the coming months, it will not be good for any of us trying to push this tech forward...

[krtschmr]

@eolszewski shocking to see that. literally every pool with just a decent hashrate is visible and everybody knows about it. some anonymous player crushing blocks like this is shocking. i spotted genesis mining recently on nanopool, so i doubt that they run own pools

[crazydart]

That is a Chinese mining pool. While it still could be asics, they do look to allow anyone to mine on the pool.

https://eth.bw.com/pool/i

[thetimedrifter]

Forgive me for being mostly uneducated to the intricacies of mining (only started my rig roughly a month ago) but this move by Bitmain to create the ASIC miners for Ethereum comes off to me as an active attempt to corner the market. A centralized cryptocurrency (like what will happen if Bitmain succeeds) seems to me like the polar opposite of the reason cryptocurriencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum came into existence for in the first place. If a hard fork can prevent them from doing so, at least until POS becomes reality, then my vote is in favor of the hard fork. Brick'em.

[crazydart]

@thetimedrifter Yes and no. This thread is more about keeping asics out on the premise that ethereum was always asic resistant. IMHO, asics are unfair and centralized because it is exclusive and once they are developed it will be impossible for normal people to complete. Ironically, I think PoS has the exact same problem... who ever has the most money could literally buy a controlling share of the PoS, cutting out or under pricing everyone else. Billionaires do this all the time when they want to kill a competitor... undercut them until they give up.

[flanker8]

We should consider hardforking Eth if anyone is caught using ASIC to mine Eth. The day ASIC mines eth, it will destroy eth through centralisation of the processing power. In turn that opens up possibility for whoever dominates the processing power to alter the public ledger. At this moment, i feel that some people have been mining with ASICs secretly. Now it is up to the Ethereum developer community to find ways to detect any ASICs in the Ethereum network. In the case of Monero, the developer did not know if Bitmain had been mining monero secretly with their ASICs until Bitmain decided to sell the Monero ASIC miners to their customers.

[Arachnid]

I'm going to start deleting content-free comments like "protect ETH from asic because great good", in order to try and keep this discussion coherent. If all you want to do is lend support to a position, there are reactions for that.

[nav1d]

network should force miners to spend a defined minimum amount of time. (proof of work + proof of time).

[flanker8]

We all know that GPU is good at processing uniform data right? To prevent ASIC from mining eth, perhaps we can add a synchronised side chain that must be run on CPU from either Intel or AMD to confirm that the miners are using GPUs attached to a normal pc. The additional side chain can also address the scalability issues too.

[naure]

@pipermerriam: What algorithms should we explore.

The following is a simple solution to disrupt the current (suspected) generation of ASIC, and anyhow start to close the performance gap between GPUs and specialized hardware.

There is an algorithm that provides cryptographic strengths, is unrelated to Keccak, uses operations available on GPUs, and is easy to implement in Ethereum clients: it's elliptic curve exponentiation.

It is a kind of hash function, in fact it is used as such for the next generation of ZCash. Every Ethereum client already has an implementation of it (for signatures), so the upgrade effort is minimal. Meanwhile, it takes quite a bit of silicon to design and manufacture on ASIC.

Building on the idea from X16R mentionned above, the two available algorithms (Keccak and EC exponentiation), are chained multiple times in a pseudo-random order - again easy in software, more silicon in hardware.

It should be added in parallel to the existing memory-hard algorithm. The memory-hard part should remain the bottleneck, because it is proven to be rather effective still.

That should do the trick for now. From there, it’d be best to collaborate with the ZCash and Monero efforts to design the next generation of ASIC-resistant PoW.

[lrettig]

The most compelling ASIC-resistant algorithm I've heard of is the "adaptive proof of work" that @vbuterin describes in A Prehistory of the Ethereum Protocol:

here, the proof of work would involve executing randomly selected Ethereum contracts, and there is a clever reason why this is expected to be ASIC-resistant: if an ASIC was developed, competing miners would have the incentive to create and publish many contracts that that ASIC was not good at executing. There is no such thing as an ASIC for general computation, the story goes, as that is just a CPU, so we could instead use this kind of adversarial incentive mechanism to make a proof of work that essentially was executing general computation.

The decision was made at the time not to go this route since it opens up the possibility of long-range attacks: a malicious miner could simply "start a chain from block 1, fill it up with only simple contracts that they can create specialized hardware for, and rapidly overtake the main chain."

But that was then and this is now. I wonder if it's worth revisiting this idea now that the Ethereum network is much more mature and the chain is much longer. One naive solution is to combine this with a single checkpoint, hardcoded into the clients, of a recent block hash at the time of a fork, and require execution of a random set of Ethereum contracts throughout the entire chain from genesis up to the present. This might require ongoing checkpointing at each hard fork to remain secure, but it's intended as a stopgap until PoS anyway.

Edit: upon further contemplation I realize this is still susceptible to the long range attack since a malicious miner can still construct a chain of arbitrary length. Still, it's an interesting idea worth some consideration!

[Buttaa]

Last year cointelegraph released an article in which they forwarded you to the chinese website once you clicked "Chinese version of its site" on the article. However, that link is not available anymore .

I tried to find some articles which were talking about the specs, found an russian article from back then (use google translator) . Another source

Since I am not a miner ... are these specs providing this much of an advantage? Also it might help you figure out an algo to avoid them!

[motopila]

Sorry for my English, but:

What benefits do ASIC miners bring to the community (in fact, there is only one now - Bitmain) ? - No any!

What losses they bring ? - Bitmain currently controls a significant part of the network hash, this is already obvious. With a drop in eth price (perhaps a targeted dump), GPU miners around the world are forced to stop working, because it's simply not profitable, and Bitmain will get greater and probably critical control over the network hash. Which means the end. And this will happen much earlier then switch to POS.

As an investor, I don't want that the network has been under the full control of one company from a non-democratic China. Apparently many think so, and this is reflected in the fall of asset prices.

Initially, the developers announced that the algorithm would be ASIC resistant, because everyone understood how important it is. And now Bitmain, in fact, committed an attack on the network and community. The community with developers must immediately protect themselves.

And Plan B on this case should have been ready for a long time before.

[jamesray1]

Please keep comments on this thread on how we can actually make Ethereum more ASIC resistant. Comments outside this scope can be moved to Reddit here or Twitter here.

Thanks for your cooperation!

While I read through most of the comments, I didn't read every comment. The best proposal that I have seen so far is this one by @naure. If you have seen another proposal that looks better, feel free to summarise for others. Also, communicating with ZCash and Monero is certainly worthwhile.

AIUI I don't think Casper will be implemented until phase 5 of the latest sharding roadmap, which is probably at least 3 years away, if not longer, unless lots more developers and researchers join in to help out.

[Arachnid]

@naure @jamesray1 This will not work. There is no magic algorithm that is faster to compute on a GPU than on an ASIC; for any compute-bounded algorithm, you can make a dedicated chip that will execute it faster than a general-purpose one.

The only options for ASIC-resistance rely on computations that are bounded by something ASICs can't do faster than general purpose processors, such as memory bandwidth to large outboard RAM.

[pipermerriam]

@Arachnid I don't think it's productive to shoot things down because they can be made fast using ASICs. I'm fine accepting that anything we do can likely be done with an ASIC. What I think we're doing here is trying to brick bitmain ASIC miners and deter future development.

Setting aside your concerns about trying to do this without knowing how they work, is this a strategy you could get onboard with?

[Arachnid]

@pipermerriam You're suggesting we pick algorithms we know aren't difficult for ASICs, and instead rely on switching them regularly to deter ASICs being deployed?

I don't think that's a viable process, because algorithm design can't be automated, and doing it manually consumes a lot of resources and introduces risk every time you introduce a new algorithm.

I was critiquing @naure's proposal, too, which explicitly claimed to be ASIC-resistant.

[cryptomined]

@Arachnid how did XMR just do it?

what about doing what the equihash community is thinking? increase the memory requirement?

[pilsy]

It would appear that we can consider this proof that the F3 exists and is coming.

http://bit.ly/2pULqgf ~ 1500MH/s or roughly 50x RX580 GPU's.

[cryptomined]

yes and 1500 mh/s is going to quickly take over the network, we need to stop this, it is not a joke

[invidtiv]

Sorry for my English... Somehow I believe that in reality there should be a way with memory bandwith and speed, to try and exclude the ASICs from mining, because they are already mining, the amount of network processing gain in the last two months is not at all coherent with more GPUs mining farms poping up. It is proof of a ASIC runover....

In someway the fork should be tightly based on current GPUs ability's , use what actually make them GPUs and don t use a system that is easilly reproduced on the ASIC, from the ASIC's the only details are the memory to be used, can t we use the difference between them.

For my understanding of technology, I besides having some hopes that this can be avoided, I believe that ASICs are mining, and that history shows that when a company invest enought money on tech, they can make a processor much more efficient than a GPU, however I believe that those ASICs are not perfect, and that should be a quest for the dev to try and figure out a way to use more of the unique caracteristics of the current pararell procesing power of the GPUs , something that to my belief is not possible currently with ASICs they haven t figured out how to make cheaper GPU clones.

So I do understand the dificulty of changing evolving the current POW, and I recall that POS will exist along side POW for a while, so I it is a need, ultimately many small time and medium size farms and a lot of personal mining rig will quit...

I myself will be shutting down for two weeks, to actually figure out what to do. Were I live it's 0,20€ per kw so this has been fun, but now it is no lounger a funny matter, I have been hoping for an anoncement for a fork.

[DanielRX]

@Arachnid is it viable to combine both mining as we have it with the original idea from Vitalik to have arbirary contract execution mixed in? It would (?) avoid the long range attack but would allow for the ASIC resistance that is claimed in @lrettig's post above

[DanielRX]

@pilsy Where is the source for those images? Until we can be sure, it's not proof

[krtschmr]

Antminer F3 confirmed. First video of existence: https://i.imgur.com/fh5Z5gW.gifv

Based on the date it's 31st March which is today. So then, everybody RIP

either ETH Devs do something very very quick or crypto(mining) ompletely gets recked by china.

[krtschmr]

If 1500 MH/s are real let me give you some current numbers:

• 50x RX 470/480/570/580 which equals roughly 6,3 kw/h
• 30x P102 Nvidia, which equals roughly 4,2 kw/h
• 47x 1070 which equals roughly 5.4 kw/h
• 65x 1060 (23mhs) which equals roughly 4.5kw/h

since Bitmain uses it's classy PSU, we can expect less then 1,3kw/h

If devs won't emergency fork, quickly, ethereum will be dramatically damaged

// edit

seems each miner does 500 mhs. (total was 3x 500 = 1500mhs)

500mhs, is a big rig with 13x GPUs which will cost in current situation at least 5.5k$ and consumes 1500Watt+

[gakonst]

Full video for context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9L-1iG6mdJ8 I wonder if it's true or not though.

[pilsy]

http://bit.ly/2Gr8dXW

[mwitt1337]

equihash appears to be protected (for now) by a increasing RAM requirement but Bitmain could just create PCI based hashing boards that could be plugged into PC motherboards.

The ASIC solution really needs to be independent of hardware and more fundamentally protective of decentralization. So far the ASIC discussion has been really about hardware mitigation but we all know the exponential growth of computing power can't be stopped.

Instead of focusing on hardware mitigation is there a way to throttle hash rates or hashing power of miners within the Algorithm? The simple concept would react to an ASIC attack on the network by throttling the hashing rate of the attackers.

[motopila]

Obviously, the new algorithm should focus on the specific capabilities of existing common GPUs. That is, benefits of L1/L2 cache memory should be maximized, maximum of available instructions should be involved, etc. Thus, processors with a less functionality exponentially lost in performance or became irrelevant.

To do this, it's necessary to hire/invite several professional engineers familiar with the GPU architecture. Because only mathematicians and programmers can't do this. Or/and announce a $5M grant for development.

[zangheri]

The video is suspicious, the label seem different from Bitmain usual one (square corner, different color of the border), the performance is incredible. I call it a fake. So said, ASICs resistance is to be enforced, we must have a plan, an efficient one, and be ready to adopt any measure to avoid the threat. But more important, we must continue to act in a manner that did not divide de community, an ASICs fiasco would be a major step-back.

[mratsim]

@motopila This is not enough. The most common workloads that benefit the most from L1/L2 cache are Matrix Multiplication and convolution, which can achieve 90~95% of theoretical throughput. This is because it only needs n^2 data for n^3 operations.

And ASICs/FPGAs are being developed for this as they are key for deep learning. It is still an interesting approach

More info:

• Roofline performance model / arithmetic intensity. Note the "Particle body simulation" that even tops matrix multiplication on cache requirement/arithmetic intensity.
• Optimizing Matrix Multiplication on GPU (better than Nvidia) by better utilizing L2 cache
• Any article on theoretical throughput + matrix multiplication (that should talk about the benefits about reusing data in cache.)

[cryptomined]

@zangheri ASIC performance is always incredible.. dont be surprised if it does 500-600 mh/s... for an asic, thats not that big of a jump

[krtschmr]

@cryptomined 500MH/s is incredible of a jump

they easy put 50,000 units out as they did with X11, so expect 25 THs on top. maybe only ten % on top, however, they will then start makin more and more. and nobody know how many already runnin. dont foret, they most likely release them, if they have a newer, better version for themself.

[cryptomined]

@krtschmr for GPU to ASIC, its not that incredible of a jump for the ASICs... some ASICs are much more powerful/watt compared to their GPU equals...

and Right, the next model will crush it... and if we let this one pass, they will go ahead and make a more powerful one. These will end decentralization for ethereum, which is devastating...

what upsets me most is the stain this will leave on the ethereum whitepaper.. it does not look good on the developers if they can not stop the ASICs...

some developers might not care... but they should... it is their reputation on the line here.... and with POS taking so long... if they can't fix the POW... more questions will float around on if they can successfully implement POS.

With competition from Cardano, EOS, Stellar, NEO and the likes... the ETH development really needs to step up their game and show that they are really #1. Otherwise big corporations are going to jump ship... and that is really going to hurt ETH.

[krtschmr]

some developers might not care... but they should... it is their reputation on the line here.

we had an issue in the past with IceAge. Ethereum(mining) was about to die, so they emerencie'd and removed it. I really really hope that this exact same thing will happens with an emerency anti asic fork. If not, we can surrender. Due the declining price, you can see that hashrate was already removed. People are forced to turnoff gpus.

china not just produce and have those asics, they also have cheaper electricity then most modern-world citizen

[kimicg]

Is it absolutely necessary to find a solution trough fork and new algo, can be done trough hash output with pools to limit hash per worker, dont hit me.

[krtschmr]

ETH on Cryptonite7

Let's do it. Just use the algo. CPUs can also participate. World is getting better!

[ofpcarnage]

I agree just move ETH to Cryptonite7 that way we remove the threat of asics and the threat of cpu bots in one move. This also opens eth up to cpu miners as well. Win Win. If we dont do something then lets face it not only ETH but all GPU mining is under threat. Bitmain and all the other big companies win and then who really controls crypto...the community or the companies and the banks ...so we are back to square one again. And 1500mh/s will cripple ETH ....I see a Dash scenario all over again....market flooded with miners controlled by only really one entity.

One final point ETH is supposed to be ASIC resistant ...I know its been stated by a few people that nothing was ever said they would fork to prevent Asics...BUT the very name Asic resistant certainly implys it, and if you dont care about the poison of asics then why make your coin on a asic resistant algo why didn't you make it on the sha256 algo instead. I personally supported and continue to support the network because you said asic resistant.

Well thats my 2 cent

On Sat, Mar 31, 2018 at 6:28 PM, krtschmr notifications@github.com wrote:

ETH on Cryptonite7

Let's do it. Just use the algo. CPUs can also participate. World is gettin better!

— You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/958#issuecomment-377709530, or mute the thread https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AWHySnDF-3DHe9CilC1Q32w6ID_cI_Mmks5tj7zJgaJpZM4TAuxE .

[Grix]

I'm against it. One reason is that hard forks / breaking changes increase the maintenance upkeep for nodes and increases the risk of critical failures, so they should be kept to an absolute minimum. Some potential for mining centralization is not a good enough reason to do it.

Another reason is that it's not a real solution, it just treats the symptom. Decentralized blockchains work by assuming that every player acts in his interest to achieve nash equilibrium. And that's exactly what ASIC manufacturers are doing. Someone will always try to create more efficient mining hardware to gain an edge. Changing the algorithm when everyone followed the rules undermines that system. Instead we should work towards a real solution where the consensus mechanism does not allow for economies of scale to cause unfair advantages so that the nash equilibrium is a state of decentralization, such as PoS. Anything else is a distraction.

[ofpcarnage]

Pos will not be ready for sometime. So in the meantime we should fork. Yes it's a temp solution until pos. But doing nothing does not just affect eth it will spill out onto other crypto remember that. This matter has been voted on twice now that I know of and both times the majority voted yes to a fork.

On Sat, 31 Mar 2018, 19:35 Gitle Mikkelsen, notifications@github.com wrote:

I'm against it. One reason is that hard forks / breaking changes increase the maintenance upkeep for nodes and increases the risk of critical failures, so they should be kept to an absolute minimum. Some potential for mining centralization is not a good enough reason to do it.

Another reason is that it's not a real solution, it just treats the symptom. Decentralized blockchains work by assuming that every player acts in his interest to achieve nash equilibrium. And that's exactly what ASIC manufacturers are doing. Someone will always try to create more efficient mining hardware to gain an edge. Changing the algorithm when everyone followed the rules undermines that system. Instead we should work towards a real solution where the consensus mechanism does not allow for economies of scale to cause centralization so that the nash equilibrium is decentralization, such as PoS. Anything else is a distraction.

— You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/958#issuecomment-377713863, or mute the thread https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AWHySpp5bJoOASrz4SkqsXKUbZdJHWRAks5tj8xxgaJpZM4TAuxE .

[crazydart]

@Grix you would be right if ethereum didn’t promise to be asic resistant... but they did. I would NEVER have started with ethereum if they didn’t have this commitment. Many miners doubled down knowing they had ethereums support if asics were ever developed. Now is the time for them to uphold that.

[cronie]

Modifying the fnv aggregation in Ethash may do the trick in stopping the asic miner. The asic is likely implementing the aggregation and a wide memory bus for bandwidth from what we read on the internet. The DAG will be in conventional DRAM (e.g. DDR 3). So change the core aggregation to something else and the asic needs to be redone. Which means new verilog/vhdl, place and route, fab, etc (many months and lots of capital). On the other hand GPU miners are easily adapted. Change it twice a year and it will not be possible for asic manufacturers to keep up.

[7runks]

@cronie, bitmain and co have got their development money already and now are just getting net profit, they have been mining eth with these asics since december 2017. The double huge added hashrate from december 2017 to january 2018 were 95% asics.

[cronie]

@7runks yeah that's what I read also. However, it's still valid to get them off now right? And preferably with a rather 'minimal' algorithm change. If you change the core aggregation in ethash, they need to make a new asic but it buys at least another 6 months.

[Buttaa]

Since there is no clear evidence that Bitmain actually runs these ASICS... this is my assumption:

I just went through some popular GPUs for mining and checked their price drop. Due to high demand the prices obviously shot up in december but they dropped recently, assuming that Nvidia/AMD sold a bunch which increased the hashrate. I used the chrome extension "The Camelizer" and grabbed the prices from Amazon.

https://i.imgur.com/UmqRnM9.png https://i.imgur.com/BWFYCBh.png https://i.imgur.com/pSNoUDb.png https://i.imgur.com/sG0tnzl.png

[crazydart]

@ButtaTRiBot the price shot up because crypto became super popular and miners bought up all the gpus. The price is mostly back to normal now because the difficulty is so high it would take you many years to break even on a new gpu alone for mining... so you would be an idiot to build a new rig today. The only thing this has to do with asics is that bitmain made them for Monero and ethereum around that same time and mined the crap out of everything. Causing the difficulty to skyrocket. Right up until recently everyone with Monero also blamed it on popularity and new gpu sales.... however much like ethereum the number just didn’t add up. Then all of the sudden several companies announced presales of asic miners for Monero. This was because Monero scheduled a fork just in case it was asics and the asics days were numbered... so why not dump them as fast as you can?

[raodluffy]

Eth and most coins have a position against Asics on their whitepapers, it's time to keep the promises. Asics are totally against decentralization, if we allow Asics, soon only huge farms will mining and will have the power on cryptos. With GPUs every person can buy and be part of the cryptos.