It's Time to Plan for a POW Change

With the recent attacks on some coins and the ongoing drama with some core developers pushing for a POW change it got me thinking. What would happen if we suddenly needed one? Saw someone came out with a quantum computer that could break SHA256. What would happen to any SHA256 crypto? Nearly all of the hash comes from specialized ASIC miners. Those can't be just switched to a new more secure algorithm.

I think it's time for both developers and ASIC manufactures to start planning for the day a POW change is required. Right now if a change were needed the entire security of any SHA256 coin that changed would be lost. With no ASICs (or not nearly enough) to hash the new algorithm the coin would need to be CPU or GPU mined. This would leave it subject to attacks and probably with a minority of hash power. We have seen what happened to Bitcoin Gold with the recent attack. Imagine that happening to BTC or BCH. Developers need to have a plan in place for when it happens. It may be years or even decades down the road but as we have seen with the bitcoin block size plans need to be in place well before it happens.

So what could be done? Well first a more secure algorithm would need to switch to would need to be selected. Once that was done code would need to be updated to allow for a quick changeover in the event it was needed. Those 2 would be the easy steps. The third and harder to achieve change would be to the miners themselves. ASIC miners would need to be able to fail over to the new algorithm as well. This would add additional costs to miners if it could even be done. I remember back in the early days of ASIC mining there were USB sticks that could mine both SHA256 and SCRYPT at the same time. Don't know why those never caught on for bigger ASIC miners. Anyway something that could mine both SHA256 and the new algorithm. This would mean there would be sufficient hash to secure the network.

It's time to start planning for the future. I'm sure it's one heck of a lot of work to accomplish.