A Phone Call Could Impact Ethereum's Future

That's a summary of the diverse set of ethereum stakeholders that will be in attendance at an upcoming developer call, according to Ethereum Foundation communication officer Hudson Jameson.

These code proposals could alter the regularity of ethereum upgrades, change the network's economic policy and prevent specialized hardware from mining on the blockchain.

"We have multiple miners, including nearly 50 percent of the ethereum hashing power either attending the call or making statements that will be read during the call," Jameson said.

Adding urgency to the current discussion is the so-called "Difficulty bomb" - a piece of code locked into the platform that makes its blocks steadily less efficient to mine over time.

While there's a host of ethereum investors who have yet to publicly comment on the matter, several investors have taken to social media to call for a reduction in ethereum issuance, contending that the current inflation rate is an unnecessarily high tax on the holders of the cryptocurrency.

Still, because it decreases the quantity of ether that miners are awarded to mine blocks, there's a risk that too high an issuance reduction with be harmful to miners, forcing them to move their equipment onto another network.

As detailed by CoinDesk, while ethereum was previously thought to be a GPU-friendly, ASIC-resistant cryptocurrency, the specialized mining chips have been available for use on the network since March.

That's because proponents argue that a reduction in issuance could push the last remaining GPU miners off the network, that are already competing against a rising hashrate.

Speaking to CoinDesk, Peter Pratscher, the founder and CEO of Ethermine, an ether mining pool, said that among the company's miners, the question of ASIC resistant eclipses all other concerns.

"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 change to obsolescence ASICs," Pratscher said, adding that the attitude around issuance was "Somewhat ambivalent."