Ethereum Meeting Leaves Open Questions Ahead of October Upgrade

A meeting that brought together a broad representation of ethereum stakeholders to discuss code changes on which decisions need to be made ahead of a software upgrade scheduled for October, failed to produce immediate results Friday.

The bi-weekly developers call, which this week included a majority of the network's miners and some prominent investors, had the goal of forging consensus on changes to ethereum's underlying economics, the speed of its upgrades and the mining methods it supports, as well as establishing an order in which concerns might be addressed through future upgrades.

The presence of the deadline, set for early 2019, has complicated the question of whether to implement a proof-of-work change to remove specialized mining hardware, or ASICs, from the platform, whether its rewards are being distributed fairly, and whether such changes should be made together.

Since miners, developers and investors are all impacted - some could gain or lose money, depending on the decision - the conversation might be best seen as a difficult first step in making such choices.

A lack of firm decision-making aside, significant time was spent discussing how much ether is created and distributed with every transaction block that is mined.

Two participants in the call - Brian Venturo, CTO of mining facility operator Atlantic Crypto, and software developer Matthew White - called not only for an issuance reduction, but went as far as asking developers to commit to limiting the total amount of ether that can ever be created.

Speaking at the meeting, Xin Xu, the CEO of an ethereum mining pool named Sparkpool that supports over 20 percent of the ethereum hashrate, warned about the consequences of lowering the issuance rate or block reward too substantially.

Even though ethereum's proof-of-work mining is expected to be replaced later in the roadmap, stakeholders faced another contentious topic: whether to block the use of specialized chips that could crowd out many of today's GPU-dependent miners.

At issue is the recent release of specialized ASICs designed to maximize miner profits and push out those who have less-competitive miners - or are unable to buy the latest hardware.

Given that the issuance reduction would effectively amount to a cut in pay for miners, ethereum developer Danny Ryan suggested that blocking ASICs from the network might constitute a "Reasonable compromise" for GPU-dependent miners.