War On Miners? Maybe Not On This $2 Billion Blockchain

Amidst what has been broadly called a "War on miners," with cryptocurrencies including ethereum, monero and siacoin taking aggressive steps to limit the effectiveness of certain types of hardware, developer Cody Burns has published a proposal that would alter ethereum classic's underlying algorithm to accommodate the technology.

If accepted, the change would make ethereum classic something of an anomaly among major cryptocurrencies, whose communities have largely viewed the powerful mining machines in question - application-specific integrated circuits - as a threat to maintaining an open competition for the rewards on their respective blockchains.

Case in point is the bitcoin blockchain, which saw less expensive, and less effective, graphic card mining eclipsed by not just ASICs, but by a few large companies that came to dominate their creation, marketing and delivery.

For one, not only will the change allow for ASICs to mine ethereum classic, but as it decreases the need for extra computer storage, it should also lower the cost of GPU mining - something likely to win over existing miners who are reluctant to pay for new and improved hardware.

One of the aspects that ethereum classic still shares with its rival ethereum is that every 100 hours - or what's called an "Epoch" - the DAG adds random data to the blockchain, which in turn causes the storage requirement for mining chips to grow.

In order to mine ether or ether classic mining hardware must contain sufficient memory, or RAM, to store this graph, as well as backup storage, as the memory requirement increases.

With the DAG and the memory requirements of the blockchain itself, GPU miners need about 4 GB of memory in order to cope with the data set.

While ethereum has always seen miners as a "Necessary evil that will be chopped off if possible," he continued, ethereum classic has allowed miners an opportunity to comment on design choices, since they are viewed as a long-term security measure.

Setting up an architecture that might harm miners - like blocking ASICs or keeping the DAG requirement - is considered a bad thing in ethereum classic developers' eyes.

"If proof-of-work is the long-term goal of ethereum classic, systems need more energy-efficient mining equipment. ASICs are the long-term answer to that need," he told CoinDesk.