David Wong

@lyon01_david Ah, I see now. I wonder how their design will hold up to recent cryptanalytic work in this space, e.g. https://www.internetsociety.org/sites/default/files/attacking-data-independent-memory%20hard%20functions.pdf …

@lyon01_david connection btwn PoW mining & this democratic principle was expressed as "One-CPU-One-Vote" in the original Bitcoin whitepaper.

@lyon01_david is held by a small number of individual entities, could be made far simpler & cheaper, such as by using standard voting tech.

@lyon01_david If decentralization were not the goal, then systems with concentrated power, where influence over the system

@lyon01_david is 2 establish incentive structure that leads towards decentralized, effective participation from diverse population of miners

@lyon01_david The "Fair Mining'' property is the fundamental underlying design goal. fundamental role of PoW puzzles in all cryptocurrencies

@lyon01_david thus the high-level design goals of Ethash were not considered a reasonable direction 2 take in the face of this uncertainty

@lyon01_david Ultimately, Ethereum Project believed the controversial arguments for or against ASIC-resistance remains inconclusive.

@lyon01_david of the motivation along w/the leading counterarguments. This should serve to provide a clear background 4 the puzzle design.

@lyon01_david such as ASIC-resistance & memory-hardness. EP goal was not to thoroughly validate rationales, just 2 give coherent explanation

@lyon01_david In discussing the proposed POW function in detail, EP set out some of the basic high-level rationales underlying design goals.

@lyon01_david Wait, what are they doing with these 'custom randomizing' functions exactly? Are they part of the ETH proof-of-work?

@lyon01_david I did this in the 90's, it's just not the same type one fun in 2016.