Is Ethereum’s ProgPoW ASIC Resistant?

Jason Orender, Ravi Mukkamala, Mohammad Zubair

2020

Abstract

Cryptocurrencies are more than a decade old and several issues have been discovered since their then. One of these issues is a partial negation of the intent to “democratize” money by decentralizing control of the infrastructure that creates, transmits, and stores monetary data. The Programmatic Proof of Work (ProgPoW) algorithm is intended as a possible solution to this problem for the Ethereum cryptocurrency. This paper examines ProgPow’s claim to be Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) resistant. This is achieved by isolating the proof-of-work code from the Ethereum blockchain, inserting the ProgPoW algorithm, and measuring the performance of the new implementation as a multithread CPU program, as well as a GPU implementation. The most remarkable difference between the ProgPoW algorithm and the currently implemented Ethereum Proof-of Work is the addition of a random sequence of math operations in the main loop that require increased memory bandwidth. Analyzing and comparing the performance of the CPU and GPU implementations should provide an insight into how the ProgPoW algorithm might perform on an ASIC.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Orender J., Mukkamala R. and Zubair M. (2020). Is Ethereum’s ProgPoW ASIC Resistant?. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy - Volume 1: ICISSP, ISBN 978-989-758-399-5, pages 310-316. DOI: 10.5220/0008909203100316

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icissp20,
author={Jason Orender and Ravi Mukkamala and Mohammad Zubair},
title={Is Ethereum’s ProgPoW ASIC Resistant?},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy - Volume 1: ICISSP,},
year={2020},
pages={310-316},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0008909203100316},
isbn={978-989-758-399-5},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy - Volume 1: ICISSP,
TI - Is Ethereum’s ProgPoW ASIC Resistant?
SN - 978-989-758-399-5
AU - Orender J.
AU - Mukkamala R.
AU - Zubair M.
PY - 2020
SP - 310
EP - 316
DO - 10.5220/0008909203100316