MoneroKon 2019 - ASIC-Resistant Proof of Work: Fact or Fantasy? (Howard Chu)
Channel: Monero Community Workgroup
Date: 2019-06-30

The original CryptoNote whitepaper makes the case for egalitarian mining and defined the CryptoNight PoW algorithm to achieve this objective. Time and technology have progressed, and specialized mining hardware manufacturers have conquered all of CryptoNight’s technical obstacles. The debate over whether ASIC-resistance is actually achievable or even desirable continues, but the Monero Project has so far continued to uphold this principle of egalitarian mining. This talk will investigate the question of ASIC inevitability and what approaches we’ve explored to mitigate the advantages of fixed-function mining ASICs. It will also give an introduction to RandomX, the new PoW algorithm we’ve proposed for Monero, based on the lessons we’ve learned so far.

Software engineer and genius of optimization, with proven track record of world's fastest multiprocessor TCP stack, world's fastest Appletalk stack, world's fastest LDAP server, faster than realtime speech recognition, faster than realtime radar data demux/decoders, etc.