Nothing in a dynamic system like PoW mining can be 100% anticipated, for
example there might be advanced in manufacturing of chips which are patented
and so on.
It sounds like your take is that this means no improvements can ever be made by
any mechanism, however conservative.
We do go into
That’s interesting. I didn’t know the history of ASICBOOST.
Our proposal (see Implementation) is to phase in oPoW slowly starting at a very
low % of the rewards (say 1%). That should give a long testing period where
there is real financial incentive for things like ASICBOOST
Does that resolve
That’s a fair point about patents. However, note that we were careful about
this. oPoW only uses SHA3 (can be replaced with SHA256 in principle as well)
and low precision linear matrix multiplication. A whole industry is trying to
accelerate 8-bit linear matrix mults for AI so there is already
Devrandom is correct to point out that there is nuance to these things and it’s
better to look at the details rather than proclaiming that PoW is PoW. (I do
agree though w the original point that other ideas often turn out to reduce to
PoW despite their convoluted architecture)
A note on the
