[STEEM on RPi] Equihash hypothesis

Hello, it's @joviansummer. This post is related to @etainclub's "STEEM on RPi" project. What I'm going to present here is a hypothesis(or wild guess) which means I'm not sure of its validity. But hopefully this could give you(anyone interested in this subject including @etainclub) something to think about.

Equihash is a part of steemd(the STEEM node software), and it employs SSE which is x86-specific instruction set. Initially, I thought equish won't be needed for steemd on ARM64 because it was for now-obsolete POW(proof of work) algorithm. Currently, STEEM blockchain is based on DPOS(delegated proof of stake), not POW.

But recently, I began to think that equihash might still be required to run steemd. I didn't investigate further(thus, hypothesis), but what if POW algorithm is still used when steemd is synchronizing with the past POW blocks?

I'm not sure, but maybe steemd uses equihash to validate the past blocks produced via POW algorithm. If this is true, blockchain synchronization is not possible withoug equihash. In that case, steemd on ARM64 still needs equihash, which means that equihash must be ported to ARM64 architecture in one way or another.

Thanks for reading, and let's do steemit!