[ANN] oETH: Optical Ethereum; ETH PoW fork using low-energy optical computers

oETH Announcement

What is oETH?
oETH stands for Optical Ethereum, and it intends to produce a fork of the current blockchain run on the Ethereum protocol. The Ethereum protocol is a powerful specification that allows nodes to carry out general decentralized computations and is not limited to value transfer as e.g. bitcoin.

What does “Optical” stand for?
This fork is compatible with Optical Proof of Work, originally proposed as BIP52 (https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0052.mediawiki) and implemented in a fork called Optical Bitcoin - oBTC (https://www.opticalbitcoin.org/), which was created by PoWx as an experimental currency, and was announced on March 18th 2021 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5324899.0). Kaspa (https://kaspa.org/) is another coin that adopted the oPoW specification for it's consensus mechanism. It uses a GHOSTDAG protocol, which speeds up transaction propagation, by keeping orphan blocks and letting them contribute to the chain/graph. Cumulatively these two coins produce about 52 TH/s today of oPoW/heavyhash computation.
Optical Ethereum aims at being yet another technology that uses oPoW, hence enriching the overall oPoW ecosystem.
In a nutshell, oPoW is compatible with optical processing units for mining, enabling a much lower energy consumption for the same security. The recent announcement made by PoWx gives a clear overview of R&D state for OPUs. To fill yourself in please read this latest blog post (PoWx.org/blog).
(PoWx is working on the hardware with optical computing manufacturers, but GPU miners are now available. I urge all for whom this is novel to study powx.org)

Intentions
The intention is a simple initiative of a set of community members to deliver a path forward for Ethereum to maintain PoW consensus and for oPoW to have broader adoption.

Manifesto
Ethereum is shifting to a PoS algorithm, and everyone is closely watching the evolution of this experiment.
One of the major reasons for this shift is the opposition to environmentally damaging energy consumption. Another reason is that prices for electricity are increasing in many areas, making mining less and less profitable. On top of that, European countries as well as the USA are strongly considering banning mining activity, which consequently makes conditions for conventional PoW consensus mechanisms very hostile.
We, on our part, are bringing about an alternative chain that shifts to oPoW, a low energy protocol that maintains the security of PoW while bringing out some operational benefits of PoS. See more about it here PoWx.org/opow.
A cryptographic algorithm named Heavyhash, which is a cornerstone of oPoW, is going to be used in the oETH network. Multiple attempts to break the algorithm have been conducted (as it is running live on Kaspa and oBTC), however none of the attackers succeeded. This showcases algorithms resilience and a strong security nature, inherited from it's base component, SHA3-256.
I want to be clear that the Optical Ethereum network will share historic data with Ethereum, and thus it will not start from the genesis state. Photonic block though might be considered as a 2nd genesis, and we may name it as exodus block.

Disclaimer
The work is still in progress, but it is planned to be launched within about 2 weeks. I want to be clear that PRISMOs (current contributors and initiators) are not part of PoWx, but are interested in collaborating and are willing to submit the project to the PoWx repository for a review, thus making it a part of oPoW based stack.
The following is a list of things that need to be done to turn oETH into a usable chain:

⁃ Core client testing
⁃ Explorer
⁃ GPU miner
⁃ Pool (optional for now)

Final
Anyone interested is warmly welcome to follow the project, submit suggestions, and do peer reviews of the code.

-> Here is a discord server freshly created to handle more vibrant discussions - https://discord.gg/6nvzdPYSxH. Please join if you'd like to have a say in various discussions and decisions before launch.
-> Here is a github repository currently in development - https://github.com/prismo0/optical-ethereum.