So, there is this rumor about a massive 72GB of ram "ASIC" miner coming up from bitmain specifically to mine Ethereum.
I knew that Ethereum is ASIC resistant, so how would this potential miner even work ?
Will Ethereum be capable to resist this kind of miner ? And in general, what could it mean for the whole Ethereum ecosystem ?
Best Answer
Resistant to the technology available, but not fundamentally, provably resistant forever. It's always been theoretically possible to manufacture an ASIC able to run Ethash, it's just the cost of the memory required has so far made it economically implausible. So no one bothered.
By having enough memory to get around the memory-hardness imposed by the DAG, which is presumably what that huge wad of 72GB is for. (See By what mechanism are ASIC-based miners made less favourable?)
If the technology works like they say it will, then Ethash will no longer be "ASIC-resistant".
Probably not a lot.
And, finally (though there are probably other things... ):
Speculative, off-topic part...
I haven't talked about social or community resistance. You could speculate that the community wouldn't be happy: we've all been playing along nicely without ASICs.
Without going into a discussion about chain governance, one possibility would be a community-driven hard-fork to replace Ethash with a different hashing algorithm, thereby nullifying the effort and cost that Antminer has spent on development and production. They've presumably factored this into their gamble...