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Learn Ethereum
book

Learn Ethereum

by Xun (Brian) Wu, Zhihong Zou, Dongying Song
September 2019
Beginner to intermediate
540 pages
13h 3m
English
Packt Publishing
Content preview from Learn Ethereum

Mining and consensus protocol

Bitcoin uses a general-purpose cryptographic hash function SHA-256 as the PoW algorithm. With advances in specialized mining equipment such as ASIC, miners have been building large mining pools to compete with each other for the rewards of the bitcoin. It puts small miners at a disadvantage and leads to more mining centralization.

To avoid such concerns, Ethereum uses a memory-hard hash function called Ethash, a modified version of the Dagger-Hashimoto algorithm, as the PoW algorithm and targets GPUs as the primary mining equipment.

As with other PoW algorithms, Ethash involves finding a nonce that makes the resulting hash value fall under a protocol defined target. The design idea for a new hash algorithm is ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781789954111