F2Pool announces support for ProgPoW

ProgPoW, short for Programmatic Proof-of-Work, is a mining algorithm designed by the IfDefElse team. As a successor to PoW, it aims to narrow the efficiency gap between GPUs and dedicated ASICs. It utilizes almost all the performance of GPUs and is pre-tuned and optimized for the most common hardware in the Ethereum network. The Ethereum community is currently considering implementing this algorithm on the Ethereum network.

(source: 2bitcoins.ru)

Generally speaking, we believe that PoW mining has a fixed algorithm, and hardware equipment can be designed to adapt to this algorithm to greatly improve computing efficiency. This is the origin of ASIC mining machines. However, ProgPoW is different. The algorithm is not fixed. For different hardware, ProgPoW will adjust the algorithm to adapt to the hardware to make the mining process fairer.

(source: 2bitcoins.ru)

Similar to the way Bitcoin voted to transition to SegWit2X by adding special information to the block to vote in favor of 2X, a similar method was used on Ethereum this time, adding a "PPYE (S)" tag to the block special information to indicate support for ProgPoW.

You can also see the real-time voting results at etherchain.org (www.etherchain.org/charts/progpow).

The design goal of ProgPoW is to match the needs of this algorithm with GPUs. If ProgPoW is deployed on a specific ASIC, the efficiency improvement of ASIC is not much compared to GPU. So for GPU miners, this can make GPU very competitive when mining ETH even against ASIC.

References:

Medium. (2018). Understanding ProgPoW – IfDefElse – Medium . [online] Available at: https://medium.com/@ifdefelse/understanding-progpow-performance-and-tuning-d72713898db3 [Accessed 14 Feb. 2019].

GitHub. (2018). ifdefelse/ProgPOW . [online] Available at: https://github.com/ifdefelse/ProgPOW#progpow%E2%80%94a-programmatic-proof-of-work [Accessed 14 Feb. 2019].