Ethereum's ASIC Rebellion Heats Up With New Effort to Brick Big Miners

The question - posed on an ethereum forum Thursday - is emblematic of a growing anxiety among the miners who today dedicate both computing power and machinery to securing the world's second-largest cryptocurrency.

Grappling with the emergence of ethereum ASICs, or specialized mining hardware built to maximize the software's rewards, the forum features no shortage of miners stating their intention to move their kits to other cryptocurrencies.

Dubbed Constantinople, the change, to be conducted via a hard fork, is set to reduce the amount of coins paid out to miners from 3 ETH to 2 ETH per block, as currently coded by developers.

Should ASICs become a more popular tool for mining ether, smaller hobbyist miners could be even more hard-hit by the proposed adjustment.

Ethereum miners beginning to back a code change that would prevent ASICs from dominating the platform.

In her effort to block ASICs, Minehan joins several major cryptocurrencies - most notably, privacy-centric cryptocurrency monero - in what has been termed "Crypto's war on miners."

Minehan not only believes the type of code change she's advocating for will remove ASICs from taking over ethereum, she also thinks it will lead to performance gains for GPU miners as well.

The implementation of ASIC-resistant code is being heralded by developers as a "Reasonable compromise" for GPU miners on the network.

The delay might be disheartening to the many miners calling for ASIC-resistant code.

With rapidly diminishing returns, there's a chance that the GPU mining community will have moved to new cryptocurrencies by the time Istanbul comes around.