Is Ethereum's ProgPoW ASIC Resistant?

Authors

Jason Orender, Old Dominion UniversityFollow
Ravi Mukkamala, Old Dominion UniversityFollow
Mohammad Zubair, Old Dominion UniversityFollow
Steven Furnell (Ed.)
Paolo Mori (Ed.)
Edgar Weippl (Ed.)
Oliver Camp (Ed.)

Document Type

Conference Paper

Publication Date

2022

DOI

10.5220/0008909203100316

Publication Title

Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy

Pages

310-316

Conference Name

6th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy, February 25-27, Valletta, Malta

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.

Comments

Link to conference website: http://www.icissp.org

Rights

© 2022 SciTePress, Science and Technology Publications, Lda.

Published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.

Original Publication Citation

Orender, J., Mukkamala, R., & Zubair, M. Is Ethereum's ProgPoW ASIC resistant? In S. Furnell, P. Mori, E. Weippl, & O. Camp (Eds.), Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy (pp. 310-316). SciTePress. https://doi.org/10.5220/0008909203100316

Repository Citation

Orender, J., Mukkamala, R., & Zubair, M. Is Ethereum's ProgPoW ASIC resistant? In S. Furnell, P. Mori, E. Weippl, & O. Camp (Eds.), Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy (pp. 310-316). SciTePress. https://doi.org/10.5220/0008909203100316

ORCID

0000-0001-7396-9996 (Orender), 0000-0001-6323-9789 (Mukkamala), 0000-0002-5449-1779 (Zubair)