Distributed Digest: Friday, February 1, 2019

Your daily distillation of crypto news for Friday, February 1, 2019:

ProgPoW Audit and Vote

During today’s Ethereum core devs call, the developers decided to (1) conduct a third-party audit (possibility two or three) of ProgPoW to answer some outstanding questions and (2) ask miners to vote for or against the proposal using the extraData field. The recently formed Ethereum Cat Herders will facilitate the audit.

Key ProgPoW advocate Kristy-Leigh Minehan expressed satisfaction with the decision to let miners vote using the extraData field. “This is exactly what mining was meant for – one GPU, one vote,” she tweeted. “Whether or not [ProgPoW] gets adopted, this will go down in history as one of the coolest decisions of all time.”

Cosmos Cartel Busted

A “cartel” was recently discovered on Cosmos’ Game of Stakes (GoS) testnet, according to a January 31 Medium post from Leopold Schabel. Around 53 percent of the game’s voting power appears to be concentrated within “a single, densely connected network running with a single provider.”

Through some data analysis, several pieces of evidence were uncovered pointing to the presence of a cartel. For one, there was an unnaturally high number of genesis transactions on the nascent testnet originating from the cloud provider DigitalOcean. Upon further review, the registrations from these nodes occurred within a short window with regular spacing between them, which suggests “a highly coordinated effort.” Schabel said it was “clear that someone successfully executed a sybil attack” on the game’s registration process.

Since GoS is a proof-of-stake experiment, the team waited for a censorship attack to happen and did not let on that it was aware of the supposed cartel – such an attack would provide valuable research insights. But an attack did not occur. It was then decided that a community fork to oust the cartel would be the best option to pursue.

Gitcoin Gets Radical

Vivek Singh of Gitcoin today announced its “first formal experiment” with a liberal radical donation-matching system. Referred to by Gitcoin as capital-constrained liberal radicalism, the mechanism uses a formula (“the square of the sum of the square roots of contributions”) to provide projects that have more contributors with a larger donation match.

In Gitcoin’s first run, the group will match crowdfunded donations to its Gitcoin Grants platform up to $25,000 worth of Ether. Gitcoin plans to announce the projects that receive the most funding at the ETHDenver hackathon on February 15.

Dani is a full-time writer for ETHNews. He received his bachelor’s degree in English writing from the University of Nevada, Reno, where he also studied journalism and queer theory. In his free time, he writes poetry, plays the piano, and fangirls over fictional characters. He lives with his partner, three dogs, and two cats in the middle of nowhere, Nevada.

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