It has been more than six years since specialized cryptocurrency mining chips, ASIC miners, appeared on the market. In Bitcoin and other blockchain systems, these devices have completed the era of GPU, CPU and FPGA mining. In addition to the growth of hash rate and other advantages of specialized equipment, as ASIC-mining developed, problems were revealed. The "arms race" has begun: blockchain protocol creators are looking for ways to resist ASIC-mining, and mining equipment manufacturers are looking for ways to bypass the tricks of the developers.

To get a picture of the community's views, we turned to mining and equipment specialists. Alex Petrov, Andrei Veliky, John Tromp, Dmitry Zyablov and Matvey Sivoraksha helped us to prepare the material.

The special project sponsor is æternity, a third-generation blockchain platform for creating decentralized applications and scalable smart contracts. To enable smart contracts in the system to interact with the outside world, æternity has a system of oracles, special nodes that receive and verify information from outside the blockchain.

The scalability of applications and smart contracts in the network is achieved through the use of p2p state channels - the operation between the parties is processed in a separate channel, and the main blockchain works as a data archive to which the parties turn in case of disagreement. In addition, æternity has an on-chain management system based on liquid democracy principles.

æternity uses a Cuckoo Cycle-based PoW algorithm to counteract ASIC mining. The developers are also considering the possibility of switching to an ASIC-friendly version of the algorithm.