Ethereum Core Devs Meeting Constantinople Session #1 Agenda about pm

[nico9111]

A vote on this topic was just closed and we have the result. It's a viable vote that was proposed and voted upon. What to do with it? apply it or just ignore it? If we ignore, will the community have faith in the next vote proposal? if miners say this is not representative because no ASIC resistance was introduced, does it excuse the fact that they didn't vote for their favorite EIP (I guess 1295 or 1227)? if they haven't, does that mean they lost their right to complain? questions, questions...

What's for damn sure is that this community urgently needs a defined guidance to properly vote on important issues. Weighted ETH vote on Etherchain is a good start. Now we need a clear process. I propose to add to all upcoming EIP voting proposals the ability to vote: "This vote should be void" so at least it gives a chance to voters to express their interest to propose another vote. Also, voting periods should be shorten so we don't waste so much time in debating and voting things that eventually go nowhere (a month is way too long, I propose 2 weeks).

Closed vote results: What should be done regarding proof-of-work issuance until Casper is ready?
Votes Ether Voted %
EIP-1295 7 283.2 0.2
EIP 1234 31 41938.5 27.7
EIP 858 129 108882.9 72.0
EIP 1227 3 65.5 0.0
Total 170 151170.1 100%
Winner by a landslide: EIP-858

[MoneroCrusher]

@justinjja
I don't think it's a stretch at all. Check my previous approximation based on GPU sales:

"How can you say ASICs are only 10% of the network? I can also say it's 60% of the network. Both are opinions.
Actually let me show you some arguments supporting my claim for ASICs making up ~40% of the network:
According to your own article you say $1.7 billion (in GPUs) were invested from September to March. Yes, it would have cost $1.7B in GPUs if the hashrate came solely from GPUs, but it didn't.

According to Jon Peddie research ( source: https://www.jonpeddie.com/press-releases/gpu-market-declined-seasonally-in-q4-cryptocurrency-provides-smaller-offset) a total of 3 million GPUs, worth $776m were sold to miners in 2017 by both manufacturers.
In Q1 2018 GPU sales went down by -10% compared to Q4 2017 (source: https://www.jonpeddie.com/press-releases/gpu-market-increased-year-to-year-by-3.4/).
And according to this article (https://www.ccn.com/declining-gpu-sales-to-cryptocurrency-miners-healthy-amd-ceo/), AMD and Nvidia both confirm sales of $165m and $289m to miners, or $454m for Q1 2018. Amd reported sales of GPUs to miners in Q2 2018 to be $65m (https://www.coindesk.com/amd-sees-q2-drop-in-gpu-sales-to-crypto-miners/).

So now we can do some math: If $454m worth of GPUs were sold to miners in Q1 2018, and it was down 10% from Q4 2017, then during Q4 2017 approximately $500m worth of GPUs were sold to crypto miners or a total of $954m worth of GPUs in Q4/17-Q1/18.
If we take a RX 570 as a benchmark (doing 30 Mh/s) and say it sold for $300 (that's a low price for a Q4 2017 RX 570), then the hashrate should have increased by 95 TH/s.
From the 1st of October to the 1st of April 2018 (Q4-Q1) the network hashrate rose by over 160TH/s.

Now what about the rest of 2017? According to our numbers, $276m worth of GPUs should have sold during that timeframe to miners (Q1 virtually nothing, because crypto wasn't hyped back then, and then it slowly rose during Q2 and at the latest by Q3 people were crazy for GPUs and crypto).

At the start of 2017 the network hashrate for Ethereum was 5.96 TH/s (https://bitinfocharts.com/de/comparison/ethereum-hashrate.html). Therefore by the end of Q1 2018, we should have had a total network hashrate of $776m+$454m/$250 per RX 570 = 4'920'000 RX 570 or 147.6 TH/s. We had 110 TH/s more than that by end of Q1 2018.

Where did that come from? Yes, probably Bitmain and other ASIC manufacturers (as was also evident in Bitmain secretly mining Monero and owning over 80% of the hashrate).
So the network hashrate of Ethereum as of this moment is more likely to be 35-45% ASICs, according to my estimations. Open for debate."

Here I even completely forgot about other networks (it was late in the night)! Since a big amount of GPUs went to mine other networks like Monero, Zcash, ETC and others, then even 50% is quite a conservative estimate.
The only way to to find out is through ProgPOW fork, and everyone will have an "Oh" moment, like when Monero forked ASICs off in April and it was revealed Bitmain owned 80% of nethash.
Bitmain even lied about it and said they didn't secretly mine Monero (but they conveniently put their miners up for sale 2-3 days after fork announcement had been made...right?! lmao) and some people even bought them for $13k a piece.

[MoneroCrusher]

Give me an upvote if you want ETH per-block reduction to 2 ETH and at the same time fork ASICs off with ProgPOW (which will be deployment ready soon) in order to keep the chain decentralized

Downvote if you don't.

[salanki]

There seems to be concern of possible centralization risk with EIP-1295 and also concern about the network impact of EIP-858 and EIP-1234. I've submitted a EIP that proposes a reward reduction similar to EIP-1295 but without changing the reward structure. This EIP is intended as a measured decrease to provide data for making decisions on further decreases in latter hard forks.

@Souptacular I would appreciate if this EIP could be added as an option to the agenda for Fridays meeting.

[OperationNine]

@Souptacular Can you please add EIP 960 into the agenda as it is a fairly straight forward proposal to bring to the table for discussion. Technically it would be very easy to integrate into the Constantinople hardfork and at this stage I feel many others would also support the topic of an ETH hardcap being discussed as we are in the stages of addressing an unnecessary amount of inflation that has been long known about. Please see Vlads Medium post from all the way back to the beginning of 2017 for reference about this: https://medium.com/@Vlad_Zamfir/the-case-for-smaller-block-rewards-fb0eab38e15c

The 2 popular choices for block reward reduction thus far have proven to be EIP858 with 1 ETH per block and 2 ETH per blocks with EIP 1234. Keeping the block reward the same at 3 ETH shouldn't even be an option really with over 99% of the community vote weighing in favor a needed reduction:

https://old.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/9bc8i9/monthlong_ethereum_issuance_reduction_coin_vote/

Maybe 1.5 ETH could be some form of compromise?

I would like to point out that current ETH inflation schedule is not what was originally projected back in 2016 as per V's post here for reasons relating to the difficulty bomb delay: https://old.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/5izcf5/lets_talk_about_the_projected_coin_supply_over/dbc66rd

This is a strong justification for lowering the block reward.

There has been some good discussion happening so far about a hardcap on the Ether supply, and is one of the most commented on EIP's: ethereum/EIPs#960

At 32 ETH per staking validator node, in theory if the hardcap was set at 128,000,000 this would mean a total of 4,000,000 validator nodes if all Ether was staked. Just some food for thought in relation to Vitaliks 120-140M proposal :)

Personally I feel a hardcap would greatly help demonstrate more maturity of the Ethereum Project. Perhaps this is something we can discuss as a community! Hope to be able to hear about it.

[atlanticcrypto]

@MoneroCrusher I personally have no belief that ProgPoW can realistically be rolled out and tested across the entire network before this fork. I am all for a PoW algo switch - but logistically that is a HUGE ask in two months time. I may be wrong, and it may be possible to implement it into the client codebases and be thoroughly tested before. I would love to be pleasantly surprised by a fast rollout. We will also do anything we can to help in the process. But if a rushed rollout puts network security at risk - I don't think it's worth it.

@chfast's EIP-1355 looks like it may be a stopgap solution, but I am no algo engineer. If EIP-1355 gets the job done with minimal security risk, I'm all for it. If it can be done in this fork then we can also have quantifiable evidence to support a change to issuance at the next fork, if no other monetary policy schedule is adopted (please please please let's do this).

[justinjja]

@chfast What about a small tweak to the current Ethash algo to stop asics in the meantime?
similar to what Monero did with CN to CNv1? monero-project/monero#3253

Would be a much smaller change, and would keep miners happy until Progpow can be fully tested.

[MoneroCrusher]

@earthloong
Now, do you prefer giving Bitmain 40-50% of the network, or 0.0075% to 0.035% of the network to me and dozens of thousands other people like me?
Do you see the "future in ETH" as youve mentioned by ASIC mining monopolies? Do you think Bitmain gives a single shit about ETH?

Check their investor's deck, they seem to have almost no ETH, do you know what that means?
Yes, they're mining ETH, worth 3 million per day (up to 50% of emission) and are constantly putting them on the market to buy their BTC & BCH, driving ETH price down.
Would you rather give all those ETH to Bitmain, a single entity, that have a huge political agenda to promote their shitcoin and generally hurting the market, or would you rather give it to thousands of people like me, who see the large future potential and that are more likely to hold, effectively reducing "ask book" pressure?
Thousands of miners & I have aligned ourselves (consciously or by chance) with decentralization by buying hardware that isn't specially made for ETH mining, Bitmain & Innosilicon are the cancers of this space, they are good at what they do but have very scammy marketing schemes, they'll use their miners to mine in secret and once their second gen is developed they'll sell you their old version, giving you the illusion that you bought awesome hardware, which will be obsolete very fast. Bitmain's internal ASIC is the E9, now they're selling E3, their old product. They do that to offroll risk and to appear as if they're a hardware selling company, when in fact they're also a mining company. You could blow them out of the water with a fork to ProgPOW (brought for free to the crypto space by OhGodAGirl, who has been developing miners in this space before ETH was even born), and give the power back to thousands of people, making the network inherently more decentralized, therefore more secure & ultimately more valuable.

tl;dr
Investors could care less about which hashing algo is used in ETH, they won't notice a change in the overlying protocol. They only change they'd notice is rising prices because thousands of miners is better for price than a single entity selling 50% of daily emission.

[stobiewan]

The decision for the block reward shouldn't be limited to the values in the proposed EIPs. Choosing between one or two eth/block is an unnecessarily coarse resolution. 1.15 eth per block will match bitcoins inflation rate, and exceed it when uncle rewards are considered, so going all the way up to two just because it's a whole number and is one of the options above completely loses sight of the objective.

[justinjja]

In addition to the ProgPOW discussion,
I would also be interested in a tiny change to the current Ethash algo as a stopgap until ProgPOW can be properly tested.
The same type of thing Monero did with Cryptonight to CryptonightV1

[DarkDaoCharlieBrown]

@OperationNine My understanding is only a certain % of ETH will be available for is expected to be staked as Vitalik confirms in a reply to this post. The 4m validator nodes you are quoting is therefore incorrect and too optimistic. Implementing a hardcap doesnt demonstrate any sort of maturity without scientific data to support it and if once proven reductions in the hardcap can always be implemented in the PoS stage of Ethereum through a burn mechanism.

The justification for a reward reduction seems to be to stop any continued fall in price. Some have tried to tie the reward to environmental impact while at the same time suggesting it would lead to an increase in price. Such logic is flawed because the $ cost of mining would continue to be the same should there be a price increase post reward reduction and therefore have no impact on the no. of miners.

Considering all reward reduction proposals are effectively an attempt to "bailout" ETH token holders who have bought ETH for speculative purposes at a high price, I think it would considerate to include EIP-999 in the discussion as a higher priority for a "bailout".

[stobiewan]

@DarkDaoCharlieBrown Read the spec instead of spreading false information. Relevant part is here

"DEPOSIT_SIZE - 32 ETH
MAX_VALIDATOR_COUNT - 222 = 4194304 # Note: this means that up to ~134 million ETH can stake at the same time"

The ongoing cost of mining is not fixed and it is not independent. At steady state it follows price * issuance.

[andrelegault]

@eth1337 a.k.a. "pamp it pleez"

[salanki]

@olalawal anyone who believes issuance and the current bear market is related is naive. ETH is down just like every other crypto as the hype of the rally from Q4 fall is out. Same for all other coins. Issuance is such a small part of the market forces that it won’t be noticeable in either direction. There might be reasons to lower issuance, but a quick price fix it is not.

[MoneroCrusher]

@chfast
ProgPOW will be live on a mainnet next week in approximately 158 hours.
OhGodAGirl helped them implement it, she said she could very easily offer several developers to implement it in Constantinope, for free that is.
GETH is done, ethminer implementation is done, benchmarks were made.

Can you let us, the community, in on your thought process of rejecting it in Constantinople. The community won't accept a simple "no time". Please be transparent to the community what exactly there is no time for. Each piece of the puzzle that is missing to accomplish it.
I'm in no way affiliated with ProgPOW or the developers behind it, I'm just a simple miner.

But I know: if you reduce BR without honoring miners and decentralization, there will be a fork. I'm not personally doing one but I've read about numerous people willing to support it, and I really hope it won't end that way, as it would probably damange crypto and the market if it were to happen.
There's also always the option to delay Constantinople until you are sure a majority of the community will support it.
Supporters of BR issuance reduction only all believe BR reduction will make ETH "moon", let me tell you: it won't.

Do you know what surpresses the price? Bitmain and other manufacturers mining ETH on a big scale in secret, putting constant market pressure on the books because they don't care about ETH. They'll sell it to buy BTC/BCH, the only thing that is more equalized is a big chaotic community of miners, each deciding themselves what they do with their coins, and not the investors behind them, which don't exist in the first place, mostly.

[MoneroCrusher]

@5chdn @ ALL ETH DEVS
Did you by chance miss OhGodAGirl stating that she and her devs can easily implement ProgPOW into Constantinople and that she would gladly provide all assistance & coding free of charge? The majority is done.

Here, read it for yourself:

So much misinformation about ProgPoW here, and what it does, and how it works.

First and foremost, it's not just a tweak that invalidates ASICs. Anyone involved in the development of hardware knows that these tweaks don't actually do anything when a sequencer and a creative architecture team comes into play, and with the development frame of ASICs, you're looking at about two months before a new revision with an alt-mask comes out.

Secondly, CNv2 and all Cryptonite variants are historically flawed. On a side note, when you go to tune something for multiple variations of a hardware, you run into the issue of actually becoming less centralized-resistant. It's (part) of the reason why ProgPoW is tied to 32-bit, rather than 64-bit.

Thirdly, ProgPoW actually takes very little work to implement in Constantinople. It requires client asistance, but that's about it. The hard part - the GPU architecture - is done. With enough serious adoption, I wager that larger companies will even throw their development efforts behind it. The ask for CNv2 to be adopted is baffling to me, because anyone in the know already knows that there are masks for the damn thing. Should I just start a Medium page, with designs for all these algorithms? If you don't believe me, go believe someone who lives and breaths silicon (someone like David Vorick, for instance).

Fourth, just because code hasn't seen widespread adoption in mainnet coins, doesn't mean it is a risk to implement. That is why the code is open source - you can pretty much catch any issue before being deployed. That's called peer review, folks. Innovation requires taking a chance sometimes.

You don't want to break existing ASICs, you want to tune the algorithm to a piece of hardware (a GPU) that everyone has access to, that is used for other things (not just cryptocurrency mining), and has natural resale value. Actually, there's a ton of neat tricks you can do (like ensuring its specialized on a single card, rather than multiple to benefit Average Joe Miner).

Fifth, ProgPoW is designed to not break ASICs, but to encourage development of open-source GPU cards. Creating an "ASIC" for ProgPoW will end up just mimicking a GPU. Open-source hardware is a wonderful thing. We need more diversity in this space, rather than the big three (Intel, AMD, NVIDIA). Imagine the kind of innovation we can see in a programmable world if everyone and their aunt has access to open-source graphic cards...

The constant whack-a-mole game with ASICs is tiring and a waste of development efforts. Please, don't go down that route.

I am really tickled pink that folks are pushing for ProgPoW, but please understand the algorithm's purpose isn't just to preserve cryptocurrency mining: it's to preserve a future powered by the most energy-friendly, compact, programmable pieces of hardware out there (GPUHoarder, don't you dare start).

Again, as I have said, if there is serious adoption this time by the governance of Ethereum, I am willing to spend the (personal) money to not only staff up, but lead the development effort.

[DarkDaoCharlieBrown]

@stobiewan Please see this post which Vitalik replies to: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/7n3t4u/economics_of_staking/drywix6/

Ive edited my post to reflect the correct semantics.

[olalawal]

Again that Eip vote its bullshit, miners didn’t vote , it does not have the most important options they care about... ASIC resistance along with issuance reduction.

At 2 eth mining becomes unprofitable for 90 percent of gpu miners , at 1 only asics will remain.

i mean they already hold 60 percent of the network hash rate and you geniuses want to hand them another 33.33 percent?

Unbelievable lol

[atlanticcrypto]

Presented without comment - EIP-960 (whether it was a joke or not) issuance paths:

[olalawal]

@salanki Exactly, do people really belive it will boost prices? Naw I think not , ita just Hodlers worried about their stake being diluted.

With no ASIC fork , I say leave things as they are and roll progPow + Issuance change to
1 or lower in the next fork six months from now.

The best case scenario for all parties is a pow fork NOW and a drop in issuance to say 1.5 ether , with a chance to revisit the rate next fork.

If we can’t do both , things should stay as they are , pushing out gpus from the issuance process could have so many dangerous consequences, 51 attacks, higher gas fees due to empty blocks being mined by large actors , which could drag the network to a screeching halt etc.

Ethereum started with Gpu pow and it should continue as such... so say we all 😇

[OperationNine]

1 ETH and a hard cap.

1.5 ETH is closer to current BTC issuance, but the fact of the matter is that we've had out of control inflation for close to a year now and a lower than BTC issuance would actually bring things more in balance.

[axic]

Would like to propose some new EIPs for consideration:

• chainid opcode: ethereum/EIPs#1344
• reserve precompile address range: ethereum/EIPs#1352
• reduce cost for calling precompile: ethereum/EIPs#1231 or https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/eip-1109-remove-call-costs-for-precompiled-contracts/447/8

[mohsenghajar]

Absolutely. Eth is crashing much harder than others and it will put everyone at risk.

…

On Fri, Aug 31, 2018, 8:41 AM Felix Watkins ***@***.***> wrote: 1 ETH and a hard cap. — You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#55 (comment)>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ANH0wu_zru0iipo-ii8ddHVVlMGD-dg4ks5uWS7qgaJpZM4WQsxW> .

[chfast]

We are reviewing ProgPoW, but this change cannot happen in Constantinople because there is not enough time.

[5chdn]

No. Window for new EIPs closed a while back. All new proposals have to go into the subsequent Istanbul hardfork.

[5chdn]

1234 is already changed and accepted. https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-1234

[justinjja]

I do think it is worth forking to ProgPow or EIP1355, but 40-50% sounds like a huge stretch.
It's not like Cryptonight where asics can beat a gpu by 100x, Ethash can only be optimized by about 2x.
Honestly I would bet that the percentage of Asics on Ethereum is lower than Monero right now.

[earthloong]

@MoneroCrusher
I don't support bitmain's mine behavior, but for ethereum or other public blockchain platforms, the consensus mechanism should be widely used to allow as many mining equipment as possible, not one (such as graphics cards). Moreover, the participants are more specialized (such as asic), but also have ordinary or discrete (such as video cards, mobile phones, etc.), which is more in line with the autonomy and operational logic of the public blockchain platform. In addition, as far as the present, asic does not pose a threat to Etherum (there is no direct evidence), we can use btc to compare, btc has such a large value (market value and security), the important reason is that it uses Pow algorithm and powerful asic computing support. The bitmain you mentioned, I know only the E3 mining machine, and basically the failed product. As for the so-called E9, I don't know where you are from? (Is there any evidence?), hasn't the other ethereum mining machines yet appeared on the market? So where does the so-called asic threat come from? Is it worrying?

[mohsenghajar]

For a more uniform and predictable block time, a reduction of difficulty is in order, namely deferrance of the difficulty bomb.

At this point what seems urgent is a measure to support the price and prevent a further fall. Most effective way is reduction of miner rewards. The 1 eth per block sounds the most promising of the three, as it most prudently addresses the urgency at this critical time. I would prefer the issuance to be even smaller, for the same reason. Miners will be winners too. Comrades -- Ethereum can dive really really deep, and not come back for a long time if nothing is done.

Fortunately, the voters have spoken. But I believe the option of capping the supply must also come back on the table. EIP 960

[timxor]

🍿😀

[Ramarti]

Hey guys, dapp dev here. I try to follow all the calls and last one I feel it was pretty "conflicted" at least looking at the comment stream.

Do you have an establish consensus method to reach a decision? Is it a vote? will the decision on point 1 happen in the meeting or at a later point in time or in a different forum? Maybe having clear expectations on how that decision will be made could help.

Anyway just my 2 cents. Much love, keep up the work!

[OperationNine]

@DarkDaoCharlieBrown Please see Vitaliks comments regarding a hardcap.

1. People do broadly support fixed supply
2. Community has gone a long way from "are the core devs up high going to make this happen or not?" closer to "I don't care about the source, I think it's a good idea", but there's still a long way to go to get there

We need to more actively encourage active community involvement especially in deciding economic parameters, which are legitimate tradeoffs between goals and not just a "technocratic security setting".

(Hence why we should bring EIP960 discussion into this developer meeting)

I do now believe that fixed supply is worth considering. Arguments:

• With ASICs, PoW issuance fails at making coin distribution more egalitarian
• With PoS, PoW issuance not needed for security
• With rewards coming from rent+other burned fees, can have rewards without issuance

Source: https://twitter.com/vitalikbuterin/status/980744740277661696?lang=en

I am agreeing with Vitalik that a hardcap would be well worth the effort. Let's see if by discussing it more we can reach some organic conclusions as a community.

[DarkDaoCharlieBrown]

@OperationNine Please note that only 1 of the 3 arguments made by Vitalik:

• With ASICs, PoW issuance fails at making coin distribution more egalitarian

Could possibly have some relevance (debatable) as announced in June/July 2018, Casper FFG has been delayed by 1-2 years. The last two:

• With PoS, PoW issuance not needed for security
• With rewards coming from rent+other burned fees, can have rewards without issuance

Were reliant on Casper FFG being release this year. Vitalik's tweet you source is from April 2018.

[nico9111]

Above all else, we need to come up with a final answer sooner rather than later. Uncertainty is depressing for everybody and shows a real lack of governance ability. Crypto is watching and nobody wants to be the laughinstock i.e https://www.coindesk.com/ethereums-october-upgrade-could-be-29-billion-blockchains-biggest-test-yet/

@econoar proposed a few days ago on reddit that we must work on a process to vote on proposals.

This is my 2 cents:

• To the argument "well I didn't even know about the vote happening", I say each and everyone should be responsible for its own investment and opinion and do its due diligence. It was a month long vote that has been shared and discussed thousands of times on Reddit and Twitter. It's a bit of an easy excuse but anyhow this is what I would propose to solve it: Etherchain NFTs airdrops for each vote proposals to every Ethereum address. This way, noone can say they didn't know about it
• to the argument "well screw this vote, it missed the whole point", I say ok that's fair and there should be an automatic vote option within each and every vote proposal that says "None of the above" which, if winner, voids the entirety of the vote
• to the argument "well I don't care, it doesn't mean anything to me", I say ok fair enough, we call that the blank vote option and there should be an automatic vote option within each and every vote proposal that says "I don't care" which, if winner, makes the next vote the actual winner.
• to the argument "well I don't get it and would rather let the core devs handle it", I say sure, it makes sense. There should be an automatic vote option within each and every vote proposal that says "I trust the core devs to make the right call" which, if winner, lets the core devs make the call.
• to the argument, "well voting with a weighted approach using addresses' ETH amount is unfair to the masses that can't afford large amounts", I say the opposite is also true in the sense that among two people with the same wealth, the larger investor is considered to take more risk and should have a bigger voice. The traditional electoral system works pretty much the same way with lobbyists doing their thing. This is a point to be discussed though.

This way, it should simplify everything moving forward and we have an urgent need to make it all simpler, readily available (i.e. etherchain NFTs airdrops) and complete (i.e. all automatic voting proposals additions listed above).

[Nmining]

I´m looking forward for tomorrow show. This https://cryptonewmedia.press/2018/08/30/worlds-largest-bitcoin-mining-pool-launches-ethereum-operation/ news is coming out just day before the meeting. And im wondering what to do next with my small gpu farm. Is it still worth keep mining.

[justinjja]

@nico9111 "shared and discussed thousands of times on Reddit and Twitter"
um... There were only 170 votes.

[nico9111]

@justinjja "I say each and everyone should be responsible for its own investment and opinion and do its due diligence." the point is that the proposal was communicated a lot and was open for a long time. I understand people who say hey I didn't vote because none of the above made sense which ultimately counts as a vote but I don't get people complaining they would have voted if they knew about it like getting an email from the vote proposer. It's crypto, we don't send email to people.

[justinjja]

My point being, that poll wasn't big enough to be relevant.

Here is a poll that has 3x more people voting, but even 500 people still isn't close to enough to equate to consensus on global network the size of ethereum.
https://twitter.com/5chdn/status/1020631670398038016

[nico9111]

Another way to look at it is that combining all issuance related polls clearly shows that the community WANTS block reward reduction...

[eth1337]

I think it is apparent that the community would appreciate an issuance reduction.

[chfast]

@justinjja Start reading EIPs: https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-1355.

[olalawal]

https://crypto.omnianalytics.io/2018/08/23/ethereums-economic-breakpoint-an-analysis/

I don’t know how anyone can read this and not come to the conclusion :a pow fork is needed along with the issuance reduction to prevent grave levels of centralization and risk.

Pretty much covers all the angles and ends the discussion Imo.

Not seen anything posted that counters the main conclusion its the most detailed analysis I have yet seen.

[MoneroCrusher]

@atlanticcrypto
According to @OhGodAGirl the majority is already done and she can, according to her own statement, easily implement it into Constantinople - time wise.

[chfast]

@MoneroCrusher @atlanticcrypto
The problem is not with implementing ProgPoW but with upgrading the mining infrastructure - from new stratum and getwork protocol to upgrading software on mining pools. None of these has been started.

And if you say that only the majority of ProgPoW is ready, that's even worse. I assumed that the implementation is ready to go.

[MoneroCrusher]

@chfast
Correcting myself: everything is done. Since months.
Implementation in ethminer is done, geth is done, many more things are probably also done. Just go look st the github or ask @OhGodAGirl

[Nmining]

@olalawal, that breaking point analysis , just makes me think something has to be done. At these prices of eth today $279 gpu mining profits are around between nothing and maybe still cover electric bills. If eth price climbs up or to 300 or 350 , its much better situation. What are odds for eth price moving up then? If I just could store eth value into some kind of Ethownstablecoinvault for hard times and relase it later with earlier value when bears gone.

[olalawal]

@Nmining If the price goes due to just a reduction per block ( and thats a big if, its not a given that the price will rise , especially when you factor in 90 percent of ethereum has already been distributed)

all that will happen is Asic producers will just deploy more hardware of course, nothing will change for the gpu miners.

Idk why that is ao hard to understand. The E3 asic costs bitmain less than 200 usd or lower to deploy.

An equivalent gpu rig costs 3 to 5k

what is so confusing about this

[Nmining]

@olalawal I understand that reduction and im not so confused really. That for mining. But will one or any of these "options" and asics off be enough of effect in any way at whole picture scale and for this year? Cryptomarkets live and Eth/btc(0.040196atm) rate keeps going down down. Everytime btc goes down, and takes other coins down also. And when its finally rising abit again, eth stays stuck at lowerl lvl. I realise its not all about mining and my rigs :) I hope decisions will be made and not just leave as it is.. for next 8 months. And asics off ...and fast before its too late.

[ipkryss]

Please consider implementing EIP-858.

[Nmining]

1 more thing. As from mining view, Dynamic blockreward mechanism. Could those rewards be balanced and scaled from data taken from current market value of eth? When markets are down, rewards should be still enough high to keep machines running, And when bulls are running high, mechanism could lower abit rewards. And stack some that time unused reward material outcome to be used for next bears market time and so on. If cryptos go down or up, material expenses like electricity and hardware still cost. But final point to stop mining (smaller mining operations)because of too low profit, and fear of losing miners to other coins could be arranged this way. At year rate maybe this could still lower network security expenses? without loosing miners.
I really havent been thinking this for more than few mins. I dont have any facts or evidence or research done to show this could work or fail.

[olalawal]

@Nmining , I just do not see any hard proof that dropping the issuance will bost prices to the point that the network is able to keep the gpu portion of the network.

Whn btc rose to 20k it took eth up with it , of couse btc dumping since january took us down as well, you have to take the good with the bad thats life.

The real reason for eth btc ratio being so bad are th delays in th upgrade of th protocal that were promised back in 2013 , delays in scaling solutions , plasma, raiden even Aion have not produced a working product.

Miners would not have to sell but a tiny portion of thier ethereum if not for all the delays which as a developer myself I have no problem with.

Making good robust software solutions that scale takes alot of time and effort, the market is too stupid to understand that but its easy to blame gpu miners who right now hold less that 30 to 40 percent of the daily issuance.

Its the mega farms and datorhalls of bitmain and co that are doing most the dumping.

If you hand over 90 percent of the issuance to them by pushing out the 30 percent gpu miners nothing will chang regarding the daily sold ether.

[Nmining]

When btc was at 20k peaks, mining and costs wasnt really a problem,. I had problems to find any more gpus, but then suddenly all stocks were gone. Maybe there comes better times again. 5 hours till devs meet. I hope the meeting comes up with answers for future of Ether and its path. I will prepare some popcorn.

[SaiLyfee]

I think 1.5 ETH is the best thing the community could ask for at this stage. EIP 858 is proposing 1 ETH block reward and EIP 1234 is proposing 2 ETH block reward. Let's take what EIP 1234 is offering and compromise for 1.5 ETH. We could even call it EIP 2092 as tribute to combining EIP 858 and EIP 1234 together as a means of recognition.

2 ETH most certainly is not the real compromise here.

1.5 ETH is the real compromise between 1 ETH and 2 ETH.

3 ETH should not even be being considered..the vast majority want a decrease. The options are on the table, so it makes sense to cut down the middle.

Just my 2 wei..

[ahsbqt]

We should stay GPU only and fork as monero did taking asics out of the equation

[MoneroCrusher]

Breaking news:
To all disbelievers & E3/E9 owners:
BCI TO ADOPT ProgPOW at block height 542524.
https://twitter.com/btcinterest/status/1035507316987232258

[bovcan]

until ASIC can mine ETH, ETH will crashing... If you lower block reward, GPUs will leave, ASIC will stay. So what did you do?

[MoneroCrusher]

Very important to prevent ASICs.
There will be a fork if devs don't respect the decentralized nature of the very protocol they're trying to develop.
Let us know what you decided with regards to ASICs.

[nico9111]

and more threats. If it doesn't go your way, it's not decentralized. grow up or fork the heck out of it, who cares. POS'll be there soon and this conversation will be over.

[nico9111]

There's already ETC for that. ETH is moving on with POS

[MoneroCrusher]

@justinjja
There will be an ASIC on day one if the change is too simple. The network is paying Bitmain & Innosilicon (which doesn't seem to bother ETH devs) several millions per day, they won't just sit around.
It has to perma brick ASICs for good, which ProgPOW does.

I fail to see how the community doesn't feel like decentralization (security) is any Blockchain's biggest asset.

[olalawal]

@justinjja it would be better than nothing, at least if its pushed before they can tape out new asics we will be able to see what the true ASIC hash rate is.

@MoneroCrusher I support
https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-1355

at least as a stop gap for that reason

[olalawal]

@MoneroCrusher If there is a fork of constantinople with progpow implemented unless the Eth devs at leas brick existing asics on the offical fork so we can get the true scale of ASIC infiltration of the network , I an the group network of gpu miners I am in contact will definitely throw our support behind it.

Ill vote with my modest 3gh farm and alot of them will follow suit I imagine.

Do you have a link to this proposed ProgPow fork ?

Etc is really not an option, they DAO hack fork is not one many of us would look to as a vaiable network to support

[justinjja]

Nice, somehow I missed EIP1355. Will it be included in constantinople?

[olalawal]

@justinjja looks like no

I can’t belive someone mentioned ETC lol , yall are really reaching here.

I think GPU miners will stay on the old chain after constantinople with a ProgPow update.

There will be no place for us on th old network anyways , its a logical move

[justinjja]

You want to wait as long as possible before posting a change like this, to prevent ASIC manufactures from getting a head start.

If you really can't put a new EIP in, you can include it with EIP-1234, which is getting changed anyway.

[MoneroCrusher]

So even though community supports forking ASICs off you don't deem it important. So much for respecting the GPU miners that kept you secure over the years.

If there's a community driven fork to:

• implement ProgPOW
• merge pulling all EIPs that Ethereum does otherwise (including BR reduction to 2 ETH) in the future
• reduce DAG size to 750 MB and fix it there (because DAG increase is not necessary anymore with ProgPOW)

This would provide most decentralization as people with 1 & 2 GB cards will also be able to mine & secure the network.

I would be ready to point my farm to it (not disclosing exact number but its more than 20 GH/s and less than 100 GH/s).
Absolutely disappointed with the IMO bad decision of ETH devs with regards to ASICs

[MoneroCrusher]

BTW ETH issuance reduction only will make it barely profitable for me to mine. Think about all the hobbyist miners paying 20c for their household electricity, this will definitely put them out of business.
You're losing more & more miners

[salanki]

And gain more and more ASICs controlled by the same few companies

[5chdn]

I don't think the core devs are opposed to implementing progpow. But it's a very involved change and there is no way we can properly implement and test this before Constantinople. That's why it's realistically being dealt with on the way up to the Istanbul fork.

[chfast]

I am willing to spend the (personal) money to not only staff up, but lead the development effort.

If you want to help you can benchmark ProgPoW on as many GPU models as possible.

[salanki]

@MoneroCrusher: From a fellow miner; it's not that easy. Even if all of the code was done, the amount of testing, review and coordination such a major change requires is not something that you can rush in a couple of weeks. It is not something specific to Ethereum, it is just how software development of production code works. The best thing we can do is to test it ourselves. Get a testnet up, run benchmarks on GPUs and do longevity tests to make sure it is stable.

[MoneroCrusher]

@chfast
I was quoting OhGodAGirl
Github on old ios device is quite terrible for me so I didn't even try to format it.
Anyway here are some stock benchmarks:

Model Hashrate (MH/s)
RX580 9.4
Vega56 16.6
Vega64 18.7
GTX1070Ti 13.1
GTX1080 14.9
GTX1080Ti 21.8

There's also a testnet so I can bench all the GPUs you want if it helps ProgPOW making it into Constantinople.

@salanki
In 156 hours there will be a mainnet launching ProgPOW. They have a tiny dev team and managed to do it. I think 8 weeks of testing is plenty...

[MoneroCrusher]

Here's the testnet of ProgPOW if anyone wants to try themself (don't worry it's not gonna bite u :-))

"ProgPOW testpool up! Windows miner: https://www.dropbox.com/s/t427mpf0kzyidrg/Progpow.zip?dl=0 ....... Miner source https://github.com/BitcoinInterestOfficial/ProgPOW startup for testpool: -P stratum+tcp://[email protected]:3033"

[mohsenghajar]

I'm ok with forks.

…

On Fri, Aug 31, 2018, 1:15 PM MoneroCrusher ***@***.***> wrote: @chfast <https://github.com/chfast> ProgPOW will be live on a mainnet next week in approximately 158 hours. OhGodAGirl helped them implement it, she said she could very easily offer several developers to implement it in Constantinope, for free that is. GETH is done, ethminer implementation is done, benchmarks were made. Can you let us, the community, in on your thought process of rejecting it in Constantinople. The community won't accept a simple "no time". Please be transparent to the community what exactly there is no time for. Each piece of the puzzle that is missing to accomplish it. I'm in no way affiliated with ProgPOW or the developers behind it, I'm just a simple miner. But I know: if you reduce BR without honoring miners and decentralization, there *will* be a fork. I'm not personally doing one but I've read about numerous people willing to support it, and I really hope it won't end that way, as it would probably damange crypto and the market if it were to happen. There's also always the option to delay Constantinople until you are sure a majority of the community will support it. Supporters of BR issuance reduction only all believe BR reduction will make ETH "moon", let me tell you: it won't. Do you know what surpresses the price? Bitmain and other manufacturers mining ETH on a big scale in secret, putting constant market pressure on the books because they don't care about ETH. They'll sell it to buy BTC/BCH, the only thing that is more equalized is a big chaotic community of miners, each deciding themselves what they do with their coins, and not the investors behind them, which don't exist in the first place, mostly. — You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#55 (comment)>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ANH0wj5iLRV3yRjMV5G3yjq9poKpNAyLks5uWW8igaJpZM4WQsxW> .

[olalawal]

@MoneroCrusher you should stop wasting your breath here I think the ship has sailed on an Asic Resistance update for Ethereum.

I think we should spend our energy on Bci since they are focusing on progPow , that way we could roll alot of those changes into a potential fork on the mainnet Constantinople rollout.

Im positive a different chain will be supported by gpu miners since no sane miner will mine on the main chain at a loss

Let asics have the mainet like the took over the zcash mainnet.

Im also spinning up a znomp pool for bci to test progpow this weekend in anticipation of a successful fork.

[olalawal]

found this post on reddit its summs the current situation up perfectly :

Exactly, decentralized mining leads to widespread adoption, centralization in mining leada to stagnation which is what we are seeing now. Now of course if dapps start to gain usage or scaling solutions take off you will see a boost.

Its strange how you guys and the devs seem to have forgotten how we got here

[earthloong]

@MoneroCrusher
I suspect that you should have a large number of graphics card mines. Your point of view is to maintain the interests of a large number of graphics card mining machines or some graphics card manufacturers, and not the future of ethereum, a mature community or public chain platform should be much more A variety of miners and mining equipment to maintain an overall balance.

[MoneroCrusher]

@olalawal
I think it's very important to spread awareness that centralization, which as of the moment will happen at Constantinople fork is extremely harmful to ETH (and other CCs).
Everybody's thinking resucing issuance will make ETH moon, this is very wrong, all what will happen is a further network shift to ASIC monopolies, boosting them far beyond 50% of network composition. And since they are the ones putting on daily sell pressure, it's quite easy to imagine that ETH might decline even further, as effectively Constantinople in current state will fork off all "miner holders", aka hobbyst miners & smaller farms.

[mohsenghajar]

I am not saying the narrative is wrong but the study has a lot of holes. For example, the possibility of hash rate coming into Ethereum from other networks was not considered. A lot of people I know went from playing fallout to mining Ethereum. Another, too much reliance on GPU manufacturers data and its quality. They are not obligated to try hard and give accurate miner sales number (they can't know for sure). So they're just rough estimates.

…

On Sat, Sep 1, 2018, 1:10 AM MoneroCrusher ***@***.***> wrote: @justinjja <https://github.com/justinjja> I don't think it's a stretch at all. Check my previous approximation based on GPU sales: "How can you say ASICs are only 10% of the network? I can also say it's 60% of the network. Both are opinions. Actually let me show you some arguments supporting my claim for ASICs making up ~40% of the network: According to your own article you say $1.7 billion (in GPUs) were invested from September to March. Yes, it would have cost $1.7B in GPUs if the hashrate came solely from GPUs, but it didn't. According to Jon Peddie research ( source: https://www.jonpeddie.com/press-releases/gpu-market-declined-seasonally-in-q4-cryptocurrency-provides-smaller-offset) a total of 3 million GPUs, worth $776m were sold to miners in 2017 by both manufacturers. In Q1 2018 GPU sales went down by -10% compared to Q4 2017 (source: https://www.jonpeddie.com/press-releases/gpu-market-increased-year-to-year-by-3.4/ ). And according to this article ( https://www.ccn.com/declining-gpu-sales-to-cryptocurrency-miners-healthy-amd-ceo/), AMD and Nvidia both confirm sales of $165m and $289m to miners, or $454m for Q1 2018. Amd reported sales of GPUs to miners in Q2 2018 to be $65m ( https://www.coindesk.com/amd-sees-q2-drop-in-gpu-sales-to-crypto-miners/). So now we can do some math: If $454m worth of GPUs were sold to miners in Q1 2018, and it was down 10% from Q4 2017, then during Q4 2017 approximately $500m worth of GPUs were sold to crypto miners or a total of $954m worth of GPUs in Q4/17-Q1/18. If we take a RX 570 as a benchmark (doing 30 Mh/s) and say it sold for $300 (that's a low price for a Q4 2017 RX 570), then the hashrate should have increased by 95 TH/s. From the 1st of October to the 1st of April 2018 (Q4-Q1) the network hashrate rose by over 160TH/s. Now what about the rest of 2017? According to our numbers, $276m worth of GPUs should have sold during that timeframe to miners (Q1 virtually nothing, because crypto wasn't hyped back then, and then it slowly rose during Q2 and at the latest by Q3 people were crazy for GPUs and crypto). At the start of 2017 the network hashrate for Ethereum was 5.96 TH/s ( https://bitinfocharts.com/de/comparison/ethereum-hashrate.html). Therefore by the end of Q1 2018, we should have had a total network hashrate of $776m+$454m/$250 per RX 570 = 4'920'000 RX 570 or 147.6 TH/s. We had 110 TH/s more than that by end of Q1 2018. Where did that come from? Yes, probably Bitmain and other ASIC manufacturers (as was also evident in Bitmain secretly mining Monero and owning over 80% of the hashrate). So the network hashrate of Ethereum as of this moment is more likely to be 35-45% ASICs, according to my estimations. Open for debate." Here I even completely forgot about other networks (it was late in the night)! Since a big amount of GPUs went to mine other networks like Monero, Zcash, ETC and others, then even 50% is quite a conservative estimate. The only way to to find out is through ProgPOW fork, and everyone will have an "Oh" moment, like when Monero forked ASICs off in April and it was revealed Bitmain owned 80% of nethash. Bitmain even lied about it and said they didn't secretly mine Monero (but they conveniently put their miners up for sale 2-3 days after fork announcement had been made...right?! lmao) and some people even bought them for $13k a piece. — You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#55 (comment)>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ANH0wvk9IU2-CR-m5ZLN_VS2E8HAcj43ks5uWhbQgaJpZM4WQsxW> .

[lrettig]

Closing as I think nothing is outstanding here, @Souptacular reopen if I've missed something.