ProgPoW is not only shady, it’s baloney — Opinion

Opinions are my own and not a reflection of my employer.

Progressive Proof of Work, cleverly re-branded by their creators as Programmatic Proof of Work is not just shady — it’s baloney.

The goal of ProgPoW is to reduce the efficiency gap of ASICs and GPUs. This will increase mining equity by regimenting the stake of high performing minorities in the network (ASICs).

ProgPoW is built on a false premise.

The truth of the matter is human production is incredibly unequal. You’ll always have the MVPs and a more competent minority. Most people are not professional basketball players and most people are not genius scientists. However, there’s probably far more people envious of professional basketball players and geniuses which is why ProgPoW will always be more marketable. In a sense its virtue signaling at this point.

ProgPoW is equity theater.

Equitable distribution is incredibly unrealistic for PoW (and even more so in PoS) — especially right now when so many small miners have dropped out of mining since the 2018 crash. There are miners with incredibly huge GPU operations as well as ASICs, but most of Ethash is powered by GPUs and the whale miners will always have the bigger GPU farm than you.

ProgPoW is security theater.

ProgPoW is not ASIC resistant, it is prolonging ASICs. Ironically, Ethash is not ASIC resistant either but “they told you it was”. It sounds cute until you become the sucker when an ASIC wipes out your 30 laptops. If you don’t want to coexist with ASICs, then you’re pretty much creating a Monero-like problem and forking just because you want to retain your share from competitors. By bullying ASICs from staking in your network, you’re hindering the “stakers” completely dedicated to securing your network. ASICs contribute RND to sustainable more-efficient hardware and investment in the ecosystem. “NVIDIA and AMD don’t care about your network. ASICs do.”

ProgPoW is a political debate, not a technical one.

The efficiency gap of ASICs and GPUs is a non-issue. The efficiency gap of ASICs and GPUs is not designed to be sustainable — since ProgPoW is prolonging ASICs, not resisting them. So what’s the real reason? Well, ProgPoW people lobbied hard in the Ethereum Classic community right after our 51% attack and when grilled about the reason for ProgPoW in a recorded ETC community call, the representative said the sole purpose for “ProgPoW is to protect the ETH PoS agenda”. How does ProgPoW contribute to the ETH PoS agenda? By kicking out stakers (ASICs) who disagree. In summary, ASICs help create immutable fortresses and ASICs make it harder to change the flying colors.

Feel the POWer!