Due to the rise in ASICs, mining is shifting away from a decentralized and egalitarian pursuit. 

Mining ecosystem and ASICs

Miners rely on a centralized mining pool to provide block headers, 3 of such pools now indirectly controlling 50% of processing power.

Block validation not done locally

Vulnerable to two forms of centralization
- Mining ecosystem and ASICs
- Block validation not done locally

University of Connecticut

- Modified GHOST Implementation
- Fees
- Computation and Turing-Completeness
- Currency and Issuance
- Mining Centralization
- Scalability


Ethereum Concerns

Buterin, Vitalik. (2013). A Next-Generation Smart Contract and Decentralized  

Application Platform. https://ethereum.org/en/whitepaper/


Ethereum Whitepaper

GHOST resolves network security loss by including stale blocks in calculating the longest chain. In Ethereum, this is limited to seven levels. 

Modified Ghost Implementation

Malicious users can potentially shut down miners and full nodes by forcing them to enter an infinite loop. However, the alternative, Turing-incompleteness, is too messy to implement, and leaving the machine Turing-complete is a better solution.

Computation and Turing Completeness

Need to reduce excessive wealth concentration and give incentive for obtain and hold currency, so use a permanent linear supply growth model as opposed to the Bitcoin capped supply model.

Currency and Issuance

Mining Centralization

With rising sizes of blockchain, only larger businesses could run full nodes while individual users used lighter nodes. Use an intermediate state tree root so even if validation is centralized, at least one honest node exists and a verification protocol can then be used. 

Scalability

Bitcoin uses a market based approach to set the price of transaction fees, but much of transaction processing is made by third parties and not the miner making the decision to include it or not. Ethereum uses the GHOST protocol to rely on regulated block limits, providing a more stable baseline. 


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