Steem: New POW2 not GPU resistant, closed source miner owning all of the Que.

[b0y2k]

The updated POW2 algo has addressed the problem with the pre calculation exploit but has opened the door for 1-2 people to effectively do the same with a suspected closed source GPU miner.

I have supported Steemit since the beginning with my machines, putting my own hand in my pocket to fund them. Unfortunately today i have been forced to close them down. The open source miner provided by steemit just cannot compete against the closed source version which has allowed the same people who exploited the previous fork to retake control.

I believe this coin should be CPU and open source. As of now the POW side is completely centralized and as such no longer viable.

Sad times.

I would love to hear back from the developers as to how they view the situation and if there is any work being done to address the current situation.

Thanks.

[abitmore]

IMO GUI-miner-resistance is never a goal. Competition should be encouraged (unless it's exploiting a bug). As @bytemaster said in a post, being able to run ECDSA with GPU's would greatly improve the performance of operating the blockchain.

[iamsmooth]

@abitmore agree entirely with what you said, but Steem also benefits from wider access to mining, which attracts more people to get involved both as miners and as stakeholders.

Thus encouraging more open source development is a positive over private development that, even if completely fair, in practice may result in the less desirable outcome of a much smaller number of participants. In short, mining has multiple goals (some of which I enumerated above), and accomplishing as many of them as possible is preferable.

In this case I support open-source GPU development though, not trying to keep it CPU-mined, which is difficult to do anyway and isn't consistent with the goals stated in the white paper (and as repeated by @abitmore)

[b0y2k]

Thanks for the comments guys, its nice to see someone talking about the issue rather than just silence.

I stated GPU because thats how it comes across.. it is unproven but from the front end its how it looks. There is no hard evidence other than people claiming to be the miners in chat saying they are using GPU... It could still be an exploit... who knows?

I still believe a crypto coin which is so community based should never rely on anything other than CPU to run. Open source code means accessible to everyone, it encourages people to look at the code, to learn, to improve. What better way to do this than steemit? I myself have learned a lot through my time mining steem, which has been since the beginning, pre steemit.com. It has pushed me to understand things i would never have even looked at. I am an old GPU miner back from the middlecoin and high BTC days. I still believe this should be CPU. Just check the amount of help being handed out in the mining channel every day to hobby miners or have-a-go heros.

Anyway i still would like to know how the devs feel about the POW side.

[liondani]

There is a bounty available to whoever open source it....
https://steemit.com/steem/@picokernel/bounty-community-bounty-for-open-source-gpu-miner
there are already strong indications that @djm34 will open-source the gpu mining code...

[faddat]

The closed source nature of the miner is the root of the problem. Not that all STEEM ecosystem tools MUST be open source, but, well, this one happened to be very poorly timed and also very well executed. What it boils down to is that this GPU miner changes the "open source balance of power" and the "anybody can hop in" nature of steemit.

Now, at the same time, it looks like it is conformant to spec.... so..... let it ride?

Me, I don't know in fact. :/.