As per the latest rumours in the market, the Ethereum Community is working on ways in order to fight against the alleged centralization of the mining of Ether tokens. As per the rumors, a China-based ASIC manufacturer ‘Bitmain’ is preparing for shipping its first Ethash compatible ASIC miner.
Ethash is a proof-of-work algorithm that is used by a variety of alt coins including Ethereum. In order to protest against this possibility of centralization, Ethereum developer Piper Merriam posted an Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) on Github which asks to “Modify block mining to be ASIC resistant.”
Merriam mentioned that “According to ‘the internet[,] there is an ASIC miner [-]based Ethereum miner on the horizon” and also further proposed “Should [Ethereum] hard fork to make ASIC miner mining harder and to demonstrate a willingness to hard fork any future ASIC[-]based Ethereum mining.”
As these things came to the notice of Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, he published another EIP where has proposed to have a hard cap on the total supply of ETH tokens at 12 million. Vitalik states that the proposal has been made “in light of the fact that issuing new coins to proof of work miners is no longer an effective way of promoting an egalitarian coin distribution or any other significant policy goal.”
Buterin further goes to argue that introducing a hard-cap on the ETH supply will “ensure the economic sustainability of the platform under the widest possible variety of circumstances.”
Buterin further goes to argue that introducing a hard-cap on the ETH supply will “ensure the economic sustainability of the platform under the widest possible variety of circumstances.”
For implementing this proposal, Buterin said that “During the next hard fork that alters reward distributions (likely phase 1 Casper), this proposal requires re-denominating all in-protocol rewards.”
He further added: “If for some reason this EIP is adopted at a point where it is too late to set a max cap at 120 million, it is also possible to set a higher max cap. I would recommend 144,052,828 ETH, or exactly 2x the total amount released in the genesis block including both the sale and premines.”
