lrettig commented 5 years ago

Ethereum Core Devs Meeting 45 Agenda

Meeting Date/Time: Friday 24 August 2018 at 14:00 UTC

Meeting Duration 1.5 hours

Agenda

Testing
Client Updates
Research Updates
Constantinople a. EIP 1014 Issues b. EIP 1218: Simpler blockhash refactoring. Looks like we are dropping this one unless someone speaks up, like, immediately. c. EIP 1283: 1283 is moving forward per discussions on the previous call and the core devs chat room.
Three competing EIPs to delay the difficulty bomb and reduce/maintain the block reward: a. EIP-858 - Delay bomb and reduce block reward to 1 ETH per block. b. EIP-1234 - Delay bomb and reduce block reward to 2 ETH. c. EIP-1295 - Delay bomb, keep rewards to 3 ETH, change other factors such as POW incentive structure. There is renewed interest from miners to implement ProgPoW.

Different articles/links regarding potential issuance reduction conversation:

pcbacon commented 5 years ago

Can we please talk about forking these ASICs again? EIP 958

MadeofTin commented 5 years ago

This was posted in the Magicians Forum and seemed pertinent. https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/final-request-from-the-gpu-mining-community/1050/4

It also talks about adding EIP 958 to the discussion around the difficulty bomb.

MadeofTin commented 5 years ago

@lrettig when discussing miner sentiment (especially if some miners are able to join the call) I would love it for Miner Hashrate Signaling to be included in the discussion.

Specifically:

What if any changes to the protocol need to be made to allow this to happen?
Is this a candidate for an EIP?
Could the changes required be made at the client level alone?
Would miners like to see this implemented?
How would miners like to see this implemented?

zsfelfoldi commented 5 years ago

I would like to participate this call and "champion" EIP-1218 which would indeed be very useful for trustless light client syncing. Actually I would like to propose a slightly extended version of it where the same contract would also store the total difficulty. I will write a short doc about the reasons why I think this should be included too.

5chdn commented 5 years ago

I'll be around to champion 1234 this week. I was sick during the last meeting, sorry.

Just some thoughts that I will raise before the call:

858: this does not address the difficulty bomb at all. Unless someone champions to discuss this, we should drop it in this discussion. I just brought it up recently because I'm pedantic and this indirectly conflicts 1234 but should not be the focus part of this debate. it does now.
1227: I have not seen a single voice (apart from the author) that wants to increase the block reward, so it's safe to say we go with either status quo or reduce it (1234). Can provide some references at the call.

Also, now that hybrid Casper is off the table, we should discuss 958 again (ASIC resistance), there is a strong community sentiment in favour of having this dealt with. Edit: Just noticed, 958 is not an actual EIP. Not sure how to discuss this properly then.

olalawal commented 5 years ago

the three EIPs related to issuance are worthless unless they include an ASIC forking algo change of some sort. The majority of ether is being mined by large asic farms and bitmain in particular, when pos launches they will hold the majority of mined ether. For the good of the protocol they should be forked off if you intend to reduce issuance in a meaningful way

cslarson commented 5 years ago

@5chdn, 858 shouldn't be discussed because it's justification is not necessarily tied to the delay of the difficulty bomb? That seems strange when it's received community support through numerous discussions as well as a coinvote. EIP 858 could be edited to include a difficulty bomb delay or a separate EIP could be authored. Without a bomb delay the network would halt. Nobody is arguing for that.

atlanticcrypto commented 5 years ago

@lrettig Please include EIP-1295 in this discussion (https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-1295.md)

chfast commented 5 years ago

Small fix for EIP-1014: https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/pull/1247.

cslarson commented 5 years ago

Since it will hopefully make the relevant discussions easier I've made modifications (pending pull request) to EIP 858 to include delaying the difficulty bomb.

sorpaas commented 5 years ago

A small update on EIP-1283: Based on work by @chfast (https://github.com/ethereum/tests/issues/483), I added 17 test cases to the spec, with the two additional ones testing a slot being reset and then set again (https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-1283.md#test-cases).

atlanticcrypto commented 5 years ago

Presentation on EIP-1295 can be found here:

tinyurl.com/ycjec3no

chfast commented 5 years ago

@sorpaas can you add the two additional test cases to https://github.com/ethereum/tests/issues/483 ?

nico9111 commented 5 years ago

Can we drop EIP-1227- Delay bomb and increase block reward to 5 ETH? It looks like a joke...

Edit: let me make myself clear: Looking at the current price situation, if inflation i.e miners rewards remain the same or even worse increase, then that’s straight to double digits and then forget the network security, investors and miners’ profits. It’ll all go down in flame. Even Joe Lubin, super bullish on everything Ethereum fears about price going to unsustainable levels. If rewards reduction means a change in the algo to limit asics then fine. Anyhow mining will end when POS is launched but what is of the utmost importance is what happens in the meantime. Do we let it all go down the toilets because we can’t make a common sense decision or do we act like rational people and let the journey continue. I’m working an a dapp to be supported on Ethereum and would love nothing more than to be able to continue my journey as well...

cheeselord1 commented 5 years ago

Here’s what we can expect from miners in opposition to the block reward reduction EIPs, along with thoughts on each one.

But I’m going to have to shut off my operations! 1) Mining is a commoditized, highly competitive business. Without continuous price growth, mining costs will trend up towards mining revenue in the long term. Therefore, no matter if the inflation is 7% or 50%, some miners will always be at risk of becoming unprofitable when inflation decreases. We are not in a unique situation here.

2) If miners shut off their operations, it will be the least efficient miners shutting off first. This lowers difficulty and increases profitability for remaining miners until we reach an equilibrium. It's perfectly normal for the least-efficient miners to reach a point where they must upgrade their hardware/operational efficiency or risk becoming unprofitable. This is normal.

3) Based on historical data, reduction in block reward has a very small effect on hashrate. (source: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DlTEyKBV4AERGtB.jpg:large). If a miner does need to shut down because of a reduction in block reward with Constantinople, that means they were probably in the bottom few percent of miners by efficiency.

This is catching us completely by surprise! The difficulty bomb is hard-coded into the protocol, which would have gradually decreased mining revenues in the status quo. Last year, the difficulty bomb delay was coupled with a corresponding reduction in per-block-reward. A reduction in block reward with Constantinople is not unexpected news.

Ethereum hashrate will plummet, causing the network to be vulnerable to attacks! Based on historical data, reduction in block reward has a very small effect on hashrate. (source: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DlTEyKBV4AERGtB.jpg:large). Hashrate is currently well over 3x what is was at this time last year.

Bitmain will control the network if we decrease inflation, because ASICS There’s no evidence of this. The Antminer E3 is marginally more efficient than the 1080 Ti in terms of hashes per unit electricity. Also, Bitmain has little to no ETH on their balance sheet according to their IPO docs. Yes, the new (not yet shipped/verified) Innosilicon A10 may be more efficient per hash than the 1080 ti but is also well over $5000 USD. And the NVIDIA 2080 Ti is also coming in September. Overall, this is not yet a major threat to the network and shouldn’t preclude a reward reduction at this time. There will always be competing hardware, and some people will always have access to better hardware than others. Though I do agree that it may be worth adding additional ASIC resistance into the protocol (but I’m not too informed on the tradeoffs to consider in that decision)

atlanticcrypto commented 5 years ago

Based on historical data, reduction in block reward has a very small effect on hashrate. (source: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DlTEyKBV4AERGtB.jpg:large). If a miner does need to shut down because of a reduction in block reward with Constantinople, that means they were probably in the bottom few percent of miners by efficiency.

Ethereum hashrate will plummet, causing the network to be vulnerable to attacks! Based on historical data, reduction in block reward has a very small effect on hashrate. (source: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DlTEyKBV4AERGtB.jpg:large). Hashrate is currently well over 3x what is was at this time last year.

You cannot use a scenario with a coincident price surge as supporting evidence. What would have happened if price had dropped? What would have happened if price had stayed the same?

If your only historical reference is an upward sloping trajectory - it's not usable for scenario analysis.

cheeselord1 commented 5 years ago

You cannot use a scenario with a coincident price surge as supporting evidence. What would have happened if price had dropped? What would have happened if price had stayed the same?

If your only historical reference is an upward sloping trajectory - it's not usable for scenario analysis.

Look at the dates from 5/9 to now. Block rewards have dropped and hashrate has continued increasing. There's no period in history where a block reward has ever caused a massive decrease in hashrate. None. In all cases the hashrate reduction has been small and temporary. Would love to see data supporting otherwise.

It just doesn't make sense to say that block reward reduction from $17.5M/day to $10M/day coincides with a +5% increase in hashrate but another drop to $6.6M/day (what it would be at 2 ETH/block assuming no price change) would cause a massive, network-threatening drop in hashrate. Its just conjecture.

atlanticcrypto commented 5 years ago

Block rewards haven't dropped - total issuance has dropped due to a reduction in Uncle rates - partially driven by a reduction in network throughput. Reduce the headline Block Reward and I almost guarantee you those Uncle rates are going to skyrocket.

What are the medium term purchasing power implications of ETH if hashrate takes a large step down and ASICs become a larger portion of the network composition (which is a result of reducing the Block Reward directly)?

atlanticcrypto commented 5 years ago

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QSRTTPqmga3OOniGpQLtMqEahAHxESxMlfWN9v1AI2E/edit?usp=sharing

This shows mining margins net of electricity cost on a daily basis for a GPU and ASIC miner at current network hashrate and price.

As the headline Block Reward is reduced, the network ratio of ASIC to GPU will increase, both instantaneously as GPUs are priced out, as well as over time as the ASIC is significantly more economic in a low price environment. You can see from the waterfall sheet that high electricity price GPU miners (typically hobbyists, the truly decentralized) will be quickly priced out.

As is widely accepted, as ASICs become a larger portion of network composition, the network will theoretically become more centralized.

olalawal commented 5 years ago

No one truly belives bitmain is not hashing away in secret with thousands of thier E3 miners right? look at what happened with monero, they denied that they had secret mining farms but once monero announced thier fork Bitmain and other asic companies suddenly had cryptonite asics for sale.

And bitmain is not alone , there are lots of asic companies that do not sell gear to the public as well.

Again reducing issuance without a corresponding algo change to at the very least find out the REAL gpu and decentralized etherum hash rate is a half ass solution.

Ethier do both or leave it alone

Souptacular commented 5 years ago

Hey all!

Tomorrow is the meeting and one of the agenda topics is potential issuance reduction. I have invited a number of guest participants to explain their opinion. This includes:

a large mining pool.
a statement from the largest mining pool (pasted below).
a few smaller miners.
2 Redditors in favor of an issuance reduction. This is in addition to the normal participants and core developers.

I sent an e-mail to these participants and will re-post it here for the sake of transparency:

Thank you for participating in the All Core Devs call tomorrow to discuss issuance reduction. It means a lot to get different perspectives from different stakeholders in the ecosystem.

The meeting starts at 10AM US Eastern Time, 14:00 UTC (https://savvytime.com/converter/gmt-to-germany-berlin-united-kingdom-london-ny-new-york-city-ca-san-francisco-china-shanghai-japan-tokyo/2pm).

The agenda for the meeting is located here: https://github.com/ethereum/pm/issues/54

Here is how I imagine things going down:

We discuss agenda items 1-4.

Agenda item 5 is issuance reduction. I will have each participant involved in the discussion quickly introduce themselves and which EIP they support (if any). Please keep your intro to under 30 seconds.

We will first discuss if there should be a reduction in issuance at all.

We will use rough consensus to determine if there should be a reduction. If so we will discuss how much of a reduction.

Here is where I think things stand right now. Miners seem to care more about implementing a new PoW algorithm in order to disable ASICs from mining on the network. There may be able to be a sort of compromise between issuance reduction and implementation of a new PoW algortihm such as ProgPoW (https://github.com/ifdefelse/ProgPOW#progpow---a-programmatic-proof-of-work). The timing of such a change is still up in the air, but as it stands getting it into Constantinople seems unlikely due to our timeline to prevent block times from increasing drastically. All of the above is speculation, but something to keep in mind.

Here is the statement from Ethermine mining pool:

We have reached out to our miners and from their response it is clear that the most important point for them is to include a PoW change to obsolescence ASICS. Regarding the block reward, their opinion is somewhat ambivalent, some prefer an increase (obviously), some argue for it to remain the same and a small fraction wants it to be reduced. Regarding the difficulty bomb most of the argue for a delay and no complete removal. This is also the position Ethermine will take as a proxy for our miners.

olalawal commented 5 years ago

https://github.com/aionnetwork/aion_miner/wiki/Aion-equihash_210_9--specification-and-migration-guide.

Aion is an Erc20 token and they have forked to a unique specification of Equihash , although i would prefer the Devs to pursue Cryptonite variant 2 , since Ethereum has been traditionally an Amd heavy algorithm similar to monero.

https://github.com/monero-project/monero/pull/4218

cn v 2 also will use far leas power thab the existing dagger algorithm and also provide much better resistance to fpgas as well.

cheeselord1 commented 5 years ago

No one truly belives bitmain is not hashing away in secret with thousands of thier E3 miners right? look at what happened with monero, they denied that they had secret mining farms but once monero announced thier fork Bitmain and other asic companies suddenly had cryptonite asics for sale.

This is a conspiracy theory that has been proven false. Bitmain released its IPO investor docs last week. Their share of revenue from mining operations is small and shrinking (<10%). Nearly all their revenue is from selling mining equipment. Unless you think they are lying to their investors....

olalawal commented 5 years ago

proven false by who? Bitmain is a chinese company no one except a few insiders truly knows what is really on thier books.

Even if they are not mining directly as they claim I would expect they have some subsidaries not linked directly to the parent that they have sold thousands of Asics to.

Remeber the hash rate spikes of oct 2017 and January 2018 , were all in times of extreme gpu shortages. A basic brand rx580 was selling for $700 , A nvidia 1070ti was at $900 and all retailers were limiting sales to 1 gpu per month in somecases or 1 of any brand per order.

yet the hashrate went up that month from 200k if i remeber to 240k

No one could sell that many gpus at the time. The october jump was even a worse scenario.... gpus were basically unavailable

to the point larger farms were renting entire aircraft to buy directly from the source.

In that case the hash rate went from 90k to 150k in two months.

If you cant put two and two together still , you must work for an Asic manufacturer lol

OhGodAGirl commented 5 years ago

I am tickled pink to see a resurgance in ProgPoW interest. Know that if the Ethereum community decides to adopt ProgPoW, they will have the full support of IfDefElse, SQRL (http://squirrelsresearch.com/) and Mineority (https://mineority.io/) behind them, and our assistance in implementation in consensus level code.

We support decentralized hardware, and decentralized mining, first and foremost.

DennisBPeterson commented 5 years ago

This paper analyzing attack scenarios on Ethereum's proof of work is probably relevant:

https://fc18.ifca.ai/bitcoin/papers/bitcoin18-final17.pdf

According to the paper, a 51% attack via AWS rentals would cost $1 million/hr, and a bribery attack would only be $125K/hr assuming miners are susceptible.

johnEth commented 5 years ago

We need a 1.5 to 2Eth per block reduction tomorrow or it could be disastrous for this whole ecosystem.

When they did not make a decision two weeks ago we slid from $515 to now $273. If the core dev doesn't reduce the inflation the market will do it for them. This whole crypto space is 20% of what it was when we were dishing out 3Eth / block. The market will just not allow the miners to profit at a tune of $3,000,000,000 in mining awards. It is absolutely wasteful and irresponsible. The market is 20% what it was in Jan so miners should also receive 20% or .6 Eth/block at this point to equal the same decline that holders and developers have to bear.

olalawal commented 5 years ago

There is basically zero profit right now for normal gpu miners , The majority of the inflatonary eth you are so worried about is going to large asic mega farms. Dropping the issuance with no algo change basically seeds the entire pow network to them and thier Ilk.

No sane proposal would advocate for this

Lol if you think its bad for the holders of eth imgine the pain for miners , 20 percent less value of the mined asset and a 30 percent increase in the global hashrate as the sugar on top.

Most miners I know have already quit

johnEth commented 5 years ago

Yes, there are entirely way too many miners at this stage. A tsunami of miners flowed in back in January when this space was overheating. Now that this space has declined 80% to 90%, unfortunately, this space cannot support a billion miners anymore. What can I say? No one said life was fair. We all suffering here not just miners. No one has $3,000,000,000 to give to a billion miners anymore.

Sometimes things have to get worse before they get better. It's like pulling a cavity tooth. Yes, it hurts for a day but then you come out on the other end and you get better health afterward.

Trust me as an economist, once Eth price starts to go back up miners will be happy again.

olalawal commented 5 years ago

A billion gpus? you cant be serious, Nivida and Amd combined can’t produce enough gpus to explain to total ethereum hash rate.

50% or more of the pow network is owned by asics and specialized hardware like fpgas ans asics.

There can be a fair playing feild again if the developers implement the proposed algo change , which should go hand in hand with issuance reduction if that passes.

johnEth commented 5 years ago

I cannot speak to the hardware aspect. This is not my specialty. But I do understand there is a correlation between speed and the cost of the hardware. So it seems the more money you throw at it the more Eth you are able to mine.

As an economist, all I know is that we need a swift 1.5 to 2 Eth / block reduction like a month ago.

johnEth commented 5 years ago

I've also heard when Eth price starts to decline, miners start to sell their hardware and buy Eth. Sometimes it is better to just buy Eth than to mine Eth especially when you can now buy 5 Eth for the price of 1 Eth back in January.

olalawal commented 5 years ago

So you would prefer that the entire eth hashrate is run by asiscs

You most definitely know nothing about hardware or decentralized blockchains.

please stick to youe voodo economics.

For the reccord I was an economics minor in college even got recommended for the graduate program...

there were no classes on block chain based economies no one really knows what a reduction of issuance along with the pushing out of gpu miners will do for the price , its all speculation.

I can guarantee though it won’t be good in the long term if only Asics can secure the network. You think fees and gas is high now ? 😂😂😂

rufus210 commented 5 years ago

A billion gpus? you cant be serious, Nivida and Amd combined can’t produce enough gpus to explain to total ethereum hash rate.

Current ETH hashrate is around 3 TH/s, roughly half of which was added during Jan-Mar. A typical GPU (GTX 1070 or RX 580) is around 30 MH/s. So there are on the order of 10 million GPUs hashing on the network, and roughly 5 million were added during Jan-Mar of this year.

AMD + Nvidia ship 20-25 million GPUs per quarter: https://www.jonpeddie.com/store/market-watch

Miners buying 20-25% of the typical GPU supply for the quarter is completely believable, and would explain the channel shortages and inflated prices.

johnEth commented 5 years ago

Let us not forget the Ethereum community does not coddle to the whims nor exist to serve the miners. The miners exist to serve Ethereum. Getting any Eth through mining is a privilege, not a right.

Putting in the difficulty bomb was the right move. And we must follow the spirit of the difficulty bomb and make it harder and harder to mine Eth.

If the core devs are indecisive this morning again and we fail to cut the inflation significantly ASAP then we go down a death spiral that we may not recover from where prices get cut in half and miners bitch about not making enough money etc. Pick your poison, the miners will never get their $3,000,000,000 not in this market no way hosay.

holitics commented 5 years ago

Let us not forget the Ethereum community does not coddle to the whims nor exist to serve the miners. The miners exist to serve Ethereum. Getting any Eth through mining is a privilege, not a right.

I cannot totally agree with you there. It may be a privilege, but the community should not expect miners to lose money. Mining costs money (hardware investment + electricity), most miners are not doing it for the good of the community, they are making an investment. Once mining becomes unprofitable (like right now), they will stop mining and simply buy ETH, like you said above.

blurpesec commented 5 years ago

Let us not forget the Ethereum community does not coddle to the whims nor exist to serve the miners.

This is also true for investors. Investors are the only group in the ecosystem that advocates for decreased issuance, apart from maybe ASIC miners (due to their increased market share of the hashrate), because they're the ones who care about price when, ultimately, the price only matters to the point where it drives new developer and user interest in the ecosystem.

A high ETH price negatively affects existing users, because cost of transactions rise.

ghost commented 5 years ago

@vbuterin @OhGodAGirl @Souptacular @5chdn @sorpaas @chfast @lrettig If ProgPOW is rejected today EOSC development team will launch a hardfork of ethereum with ProgPOW implementation.

This is not a joke

jean-m-cyr commented 5 years ago

Why bother, there is already ETC.

nico9111 commented 5 years ago

Today is a major day for the future of Ethereum. Let’s be rational and put logic and common sense first! Don’t mess it up, crypto is watching!

johnEth commented 5 years ago

Bingo we need more Eth buyers, not miners.

This is the perfect thrust we need to put us on the right trajectory.

salanki commented 5 years ago

@johnEth: This whole crypto space is 20% of what it was when we were dishing out 3Eth / block. The market will just not allow the miners to profit at a tune of $3,000,000,000 in mining awards.

It is absolutely wasteful and irresponsible. The market is 20% what it was in Jan so miners should also receive 20% or .6 Eth/block at this point to equal the same decline that holders and developers have to bear.

You do realize that miners already make 20% of what they used to make, as the mining reward is in ETH and not in USD? What you are arguing for is that miners should be making 20%*20% of what they were making previously, basically you want to reduce miner revenue by 96%. That's a great way to alienate the providers who secure and run the network.

olalawal commented 5 years ago

I listened to the meeting, it was a sham imo , they had mining pools , but no small to mid size miners , all they kept talking about is issuance and prog pow , like there are not other asic resistant algos available

salanki commented 5 years ago

@olalawal: Agreed. The decision on which PoW to choose can be handled later, the decision to try to combat ASICs or not is really what it is about.

olalawal commented 5 years ago

@salanki exactly, the algo change to even hex,x16 , eqihash flavors or eveb progpow or cn variant 2 , was not even discussed in any seriousness.

The true Asics hashrate needs to be flushed out NOW even if some brands of cards are not as good on the new algo as others at the very least we can find out the ASIC penetration percentage

nico9111 commented 5 years ago

I have never been so concerned about the future of Ethereum and I've been part of the community since the early stages. Basically we are being held hostages by a group of people that is going to be obsolete sometimes soon (When POS damnit?). While we're waiting for interests alignment with POS (validators are investors with a single agenda) we're running the risk that ETH will trade at double digits in the fall and we all know the consequences of it. People running out, miners not buying ETH because inflation will still be too high, dev salaries not paid, black swan event, bye bye Ethereum and all its potential. Unless EOS (which I don't like) hard forks it and proposes inflation reduction in the form of EIP-1234 or 858 and then what happens? We're at a turning point where a big decision has to be made. Is ASIC a bigger threat than reducing inflation? absolutely not, POS is around the corner!!! I'm certain miners with cheaper electricity will continue mining with rewards at 2 ETH as their holdings will gain in price. That's simple. We are overpaying for security right now and if we don't do anything about it, it could get ugly and fast!! Use common sense, look forward and don't abide by one group's agenda. EIP 1234 now!!

Eliovp commented 5 years ago

Combat ASICS, fully agree, going for ProgPow is just doing a 360 turn and ending up with the same issue and worse.

Here's some very interesting replies to the "ProgPow" idea.

https://medium.com/@alex_6580/disclosure-my-name-is-alexander-levin-jr-president-of-gpushack-com-60e5543ef6ef

https://medium.com/@g4merdelight/id-give-this-argument-more-credit-if-it-was-transparent-about-how-the-author-works-in-the-interest-1b3cf21854ed

Further no comment

olalawal commented 5 years ago

@Eliovp agreed fully.

One concerning thing i heard in the meeting was one of the panel members stating that due to dagger hashimoto being memory hard there are no intrinsic advantages for Asics such as the bitmain E3.

If you remeber after the cn7 fork bitmain was worried about ethereum forking as well and listed thier E3 batch one at $800!!

thats means they make these things for far less than the price of one GPU. thats 7 gpus worth of hash for $250 lets say production cost. You cant eveb buy a new gpu for that.

Memory bandwidth doesn’t matter when they can use cheap ddr3 in huge banks since its dirt cheap.

also factor in economies of scale and the advantages ballon even more.

cslarson commented 5 years ago

@olalawal the cost for new equipment is not really a concern if we don't want hashrate to grow or if we want it to decline (my preference).

salanki commented 5 years ago

@olalawal: The point that panelist missed is that by building specialized hardware (with a lot of cheap GDDR3 modules) they are making it much cheaper and more efficient than a GPU miner available to anyone. It is not an ASIC specifically that makes it that much better, it's a combination of customized hardware for this specific purpose.

@cslarson: The cost of equipment is still a concern when one party (the ASIC vendor) can build a lot of highly efficient equipment cheaper than anyone else did. It allows them to with little capital add enough hashrate to push normal GPU-miners into loss. This will make the regular GPU hashrate disappear and all of a sudden one actor has control of the network.

They do not have to build miners to match 51% of the hash rate today. With an issuance reduction it is already hard to make a profit for most miners. If the ASIC vendor has a 2x more efficient miner, he would just have to add ~20% of the hashrate to push most people into the red while he remains in the black.

It is naive to believe that more than a few percent of the network hashrate are miners who mine "for the good of the network" and do not care about profits. People in general don't like losing money, and will support ETH buy buying ETH instead of spending it on electricity.

One important point that was missed during the meeting is that during the last reward reduction, it wasn't a direct issuance reduction as the block time was reset at the same time. The issuance of ETH generated/day was essentially the same, which is why it had a smaller impact on miners.

ethereum / pm