Ethereum Classic Wants Thanos To Restore Mining With Older GPUs

Ethereum Classic wants Thanos, the latest hard fork, to restore crypto mining with older GPUs and to finally find a new home for the 4-gigabyte devices that are becoming obscure so let’s read more in today’s Ethereum Classic news.

Ethereum Classic wants Thanos, the latest upgrade for the network to ensure a few more years of mining functionality for graphics cards that are 4 gigabytes of RAM. The upgrade scheduled for block 11,700,000 is set to be mined between November 28 and November 29 which will roll back the epoch parameter for the ETC mining algorithm ETHash.

ETHash features are basically a set of precomputed data that is used during the mining process named DAG. The data set grows at a rate of 1 gigabyte every 18 months and it is now very close to reaching 4 GB. This poses a problem for a lot of graphic cards and some of the ASICs that are used for ETHash mining as these devices will not be able to mine Ethereum Classic anymore. This mechanism is an important component of the ETHash resistance to ASICs since memory is expensive and the constant growth of the DAG will eventually discourage investments in this sector.

The Thanos hard fork wants so halve the size of the DAG thus allowing 4 GB devices to keep mining for about three years. The purpose of the hard fork is to attract more hash rate from the Ethereum blockchain which is expected to throw 4 GB miners off before the end of 2020. Due to the few successful instances of 51% attacks on Ethereum Classic, the community now wants to boost the hash rate and resistance to other attempts of an attack.

While another proposal seeks to change the mining algorithm in its core, there’s quite a lot of controversy and could require even more time to be passed. The Thanos hard fork is presented as a short-term fix to capture a huge portion of the total GPU hash rate and to also secure the network. According to the statistics by Hive Os, about 24% of the users are still deploying 4GB cards and 2% of all devices mine Ethereum Classic. The hash rate of the blockchain is above 1% from Ethereum’s so a small percentage of ETH miners migrating to the ETC blockchain will boost the security quite a bit.