Fighting the Threats of ASIC Mining

When there is a fight between a tiger and a cat, the tiger is entitled to win by virtue of power and strategy. Similar is the case in the field of cryptocurrency mining. Application-specific integrated circuits, popularly known as ASICs, are super-rapid, expensive but heavy duty hashing chips which are present in giant mining farms. The result- aggressive mining of cryptocurrencies thereby slowing down the process of other typical mining means. These have affected the current markets in a ruthless manner and have given rise to division in Blockchain communities. An apparent need, or rather necessity to fork the code is a must as seen by some experts of Blockchain. There is a need to fight ASIC mining because the common people with low-end PCs and even high-end PCs with powerful GPUs struggle to compete with the extra-powerful integrated chips and their extreme efficiency makes them able to execute the proof of work test of consensus and thus ASIC mining claims the bitcoin rewards. Some experts have put forward their suggestion as to how this problem can be resolved. One such method is to follow the model adopted by Vertcoin.

Vertcoin’s model is of the idea that only consensus test will not be sufficient, some tasks should also be completed and thus this model favours the use of GPUs over ASIC. Moreover, a pact has been agreed upon which states that whenever there is an ASIC mining, the code shall be forked in order to prevent continuous mining. This system has worked so far and can be adapted by the Blockchain community so as to fight the problem of ASIC mining, at least for the time period. Meanwhile, more and more researches are being conducted and the code algorithms are being worked upon so that Crypto-mining does not prove to be as smooth to ASICs as it is now.

Dmitriy

Having majored in Social Psychology and Economics, I worked as a team lead of a tech and fundamental analysis lab in the Applied System Analysis Research Institute. I write financial articles for various international media. I also hold the position of a Chief Analyst at RoboForex.