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Bitcoin and Ethereum both use proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism. One of differences between Bitcoin Pow and Ethereum PoW is difficulty level, meaning that while in bitcoin block generation rate is 10 minutes on average, in Ethereum is around 12 seconds on average.

Is there any other major difference between these two PoW algorithm? For example, does Ethereum use proof-of-stake (PoS) in parallel?

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Not really, both projects use PoW as of right now. However, Ethereum plans to move away from PoW and use PoS.




With that being said, some of the key distinctions between the two PoW approaches;



Ethereum uses a memory intensive hashing algorithm (KECCAK-256) which mitigates against centralised ASICs mining (it’s quiet difficult to create a chip which is economically feasible for this purpose) and favours a decentralized approach to mining through GPU.

Ethereum also discourages centralised pool mining through its Ghost protocol which rewards stale blocks, so there is no advantage of being in a pool in regards to block propagation.



I’m sure there are many more differentiations between the two, however, those I believe are the big ones.

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  • Thank you, In this answer : bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/78117/41513 is said that hashing algorithm Ethereum uses is ethash. Does it mean that KECCAK-256 and ethash are the same? Thanks
    – Questioner
    Commented Aug 14, 2018 at 11:20
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    There’s actually a difference. Ethhash is the PoW Algorithm while Keccak-256 is the hashing function provided when you e.g. want to hash something in a solidity smart contract. You can use other hash functions but keccak-256 is the de-facto/most commonly used one atm.
    – 6egic
    Commented Aug 14, 2018 at 16:10

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