A top level meeting with Ethereum core developers last week ended with full agreement for the blockchain to implement the ProgPow algorithm and ultimately a move away from professional and centralized mining.
Discussions among the ETH dev community about a possible migration onto ProgPow have been on going for a couple of years, and although there are many critics about the move it is looking ever more likely.
ASICs Equipment Dominate Ethereum Block Rewards
Since application-specific integrated circuit (ASICs) were enabled professional miners equipped with the costly mining gear have dominated the ETH block rewards, which has angered many miners who don’t own the expensive and exclusive ASICs.
This hasn’t sat well with some of the core dev team, who say it goes against the Ethereum whitepaper proposal, which aimed to keep the network optimized for low-cost and easily accessible software, with an aim of keeping mining as decentralized as possible.
Some of the core dev team claim the powerful ASICs mining machines, costly and only in the hands of the few, ‘centralizes’ the mining and threatens the network security, by heightens the possibility of a 51% attack.
