Malicious mining cartel isn't good for anybody. We need Luke to threaten another POW change. That always helps.
It is my opinion that a PoW change should be devised, engineered, tested and put in the code ready to activate. Activation should not involve any kind of miner support, of course. It should on the contrary assume miners will fight back.
The new PoW should have suitable tweakable parameters. Certain choices for parameter values would basically leave the PoW as it is, and other choices would be more disruptive. There should be signaling to get a feel for the available hashpower with different PoW's/parameter choices.
If the machinery works well enough, this could become the weapon that will never have to be used.
A POW change needs to be kept secret until released, this prevents pre-prepared attacks from malicious miners, and an ASIC head start.
Not necessarily. The parameters might be coefficients in a linear combination of probability/frequency distribution for several algos. Good luck designing an ASIC that can do all of them. Besides, a RAM-hungry algo makes ASICs economically nonviable. It could be one of the several algos, just to enforce mining by non-specialized hardware with a specified frequency.
By the way, wouldn't a sudden unannounced PoW change freeze BTC for days?
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LukeJr has already completed a POW change, where the hashing algorithm can be changed at the last minute. But POW change has got to be a last resort, it opens the network up to all kinds of abuse, many of the enemies have very deep pockets.
It seems to me that the mere threat of a PoW change ready to trigger might be as effective, without being so disruptive - as long as it's only crouching. I guess it would drive an ASIC designer nuts to assess the production and stocking of several board types which would possibly lie unsold until forever.