How to Fight the ASIC Mining Threat

The culprits, many believe, are application-specific integrated circuits - the expensive, super-fast hashing chips known as ASICs, the engines driving the rigs in giant mining farms.

The reason many crypto purists have a problem with ASICs is that individuals like you and I, using comparatively sluggish PCs or even more powerful graphics cards, can't compete with the ruthless efficiency with which the ASIC mining farms carry out the proof-of-work consensus test and win bitcoin rewards.

Miners working with pre-ASIC devices - mostly graphic processing units, or GPUs - are supporting hard fork measures that would make new ASICs worthless again.

Even though one part of the community is so obsessed with decentralization that they fought a block-size increase on those grounds, there are such entrenched stakes in ASIC mining that it would be impossible to launch an ASIC-resistant code upgrade.

Even with less-established communities, such as zcash and ethereum, the mere prospect of forthcoming ASICs is prompting divided views, as Rachel Rose O'Leary's reporting in CoinDesk shows.

Not content to simply build a proof-of-work algorithm that includes tasks favoring GPUs over ASICs, the vertcoin community has also informally agreed upon a kind of pact to fork the code if and when a vertcoin ASIC appears.

The system has worked, perhaps because the mere threat of action by the vertcoin miners is enough to scare off would-be ASIC developers.

That threat is backed by the fact that vertcoin has already smoothly forked twice to address issues separate from the ASIC threat.

Until now, this has kept the vertcoin mining community more or less solely using GPUs, which as lead developer James Lovejoy explained during a debate about ASICs at MIT with sia lead developer David Vorick, is a great equalizer.

How does one achieve that goal if the tendency is toward monopoly powers and dependence on a single company, whether it's a GPU producer like Nvidia or an ASIC maker like Bitmain?