Ethereum developers announced today that funding has been approved to audit hotly-contested code change “Progressive Proof-of-Work” (ProgPoW).
Since February, developers have been gathering finances to launch a third-party audit of the ProgPoW code. Today, during a weekly meeting, it was announced that the targeted amount of 50,000 DAI (equivalent to roughly $50,000) has been fully met through crowd-sourced donations on open-source bounty platform Gitcoin, as well as, other unnamed sources from the community.
The aim of this audit as stated by Ethereum Foundation community relations manager Hudson Jameson in a former blog post is to examine “the expected effect of ProgPoW on the security of ethereum,” as well as, on ethereum’s mining landscape.
The proposed code change would, if approved, essentially make it more difficult for specialized hardware known as ASICs from mining on ethereum. Estimates show that mining rewards gained on the the $16 billion dollar blockchain presently are about $700 million annually.
With ProgPow activated on the ethereum network, the efficiency gains of an ethereum miner using an ASIC machine versus a comparatively lower-cost, general purpose computer also called a GPU would be much smaller and result in more equal competition for mining rewards on the network.
Kristy-Leigh Minehan – one of the developers behind ProgPoW – explained to CoinDesk in a past interview:
“ProgPoW is a dynamically changing algorithm that is tuned for today’s GPUs…The compute vs memory intensity is tuned to match current consumer GPUs, which minimizes any gains from a specialized ASIC.”
Jameson noted on Friday’s bi-weekly ethereum developer call that the ProgPoW audit should begin next week and could be completed sometime in July of this year.
“The ProgPow audit is going to be funded,” said Jameson. “Everyone has confirmed their funding. It should be started this week or next week hopefully. There’s just some logistics to work out, meaning people have to sign some paperwork and the funds have to be sent.”
The third-party auditor that will be contracted for the ProgPoW audit is a Berlin-based computer security firm called Least Authority.
Back in January, Least Authority was announced to have been hired by the Electric Coin Company – which is developer team building the privacy coin zcash – for three separate security audit reports.
Mining image via Shutterstock
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