Grappling With Crypto Miners' Existential Question: ASICs or GPUs?

Both of these goals are close to the hearts of the cryptocurrency community at large, but they're especially important to the miners whose hardware rigs perform that proof-of-work: the power-hungry computations used to update the blockchains of bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies.

At a panel held Monday at CoinDesk's Consensus 2018 event, three big names in cryptocurrency mining came to grips with this debate, discussing ASICs' implications for security and decentralization.

ASICs are custom-built computer chips used to mine cryptocurrencies hyper-efficiently.

When an ASIC is developed to mine a specific coin, it tends to drive graphics processing units, used by many small-scale miners, out of the mining market.

For some, including panelist Marco Streng, CEO of Genesis mining, that's a problem.

"GPUs are the most decentralized mining hardware we have on the planet," he said at the event.

Part of the reason is that GPUs are cheaper, requiring less of a sunk-cost investment to launch a mining operation.

While Streng worried about concentration of mining power in fewer hands, Powell - who said he was "From the libertarian-anarchist wing" of the cryptocurrency space - was more concerned with hostility from governments.

He even brought up the possibility of working with them, providing them with GPU cloud mining to power their blockchain networks.

In any case, Streng continued, GPUs provide a practical benefit when it comes to the kind of anti-ASIC hard forks some in the zcash and ethereum communities are pushing for.