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Moving forward, developers will seek to protect the network’s ASIC resistance by slightly modifying its PoW algorithm at every scheduled hard fork, which genera
by nkurz 9y ago
Moving forward, developers will seek to protect the network’s ASIC resistance by slightly modifying its PoW algorithm at every scheduled hard fork, which generally occurs twice annually.
I presume they've considered this, but this seems like a dangerous approach. How will they decide which change occurs, how far advance will it be decided, and how will they keep this decision secret? Think of the potential advantage to a party who uses foreknowledge of the exact change to have ASIC's ready at the official announcement. If done on a small scale, it's possible that no one would ever know. If done on a large scale, it would be obvious after the fact that a leak had occurred, but the repercussions would likely destroy the currency.
- plasticmachine 9y agoEverything is open and transparent, so a "leak" is absolutely guaranteed. It appears the plan is to merely make some sort of change every 6 months such that an ASIC manufacturer hardly has time to develop a change, tape out, and actually mine for longer than a month or two. This should make it prohibitively expensive.