Disclaimer: ran a 150k GPU eth mining operation

PoS is the obvious choice now that ETH has had a bit of time to run. But, I remember when they went through the switch (before ETH PoS). Doing some sort of variation on GPU memory hard mining would have been a smart choice (ethash, progpow, etc), knowing full well that ETH would eventually go PoS. It would have given all the miners something to switch to, instead of just shutting down entirely, because there wasn't anything but ghost chains.

▲

subsistence234 3 days ago | parent [-]

I'm still a fan of PoW. PoS incentivizes centralization.

▲

latchkey 3 days ago | parent [-]

Hilariously posting in a thread about a 51% attack happening, because of miner centralization.

▲

subsistence234 3 days ago | parent [-]

It's mainly an argument against CPU/GPU mining. If you have invested in specialized hardware that can mine only one coin, you're strongly incentivized to protect trust in that coin. An attacker like Qubic would need to pay you a lot more than they need to pay a CPU miner.

▲

latchkey 3 days ago | parent [-]

So then, _centralize_ around an ASIC?

Tell me, how well did that work for Grin?

	▲	subsistence234 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		>Tell me, how well did that work for Grin? Crypto projects succeed/fail for all kinds of reasons that are completely unrelated to de-/centralization. You'll have to be more specific about what Grin's case should teach us. >So then, _centralize_ around an ASIC? ASICs are commodities. For BTC (SHA-256) there are at least 8 different companies producing ASICS, and even a smaller project like KAS (kHeavyHash) has >4 competing companies. Not much centralization risk on that side, at least not for mature projects (which a hypothetical ASIC-XMR would be by now). The main challenge for ASIC-miners is the same as for CPU- and GPU-miners: cheap electricity -- and that's not something that can easily be centralized.