Monero’s dedication to ensuring that the network is not controlled by a few mining giants has led its core developers to come up with an anti-ASIC mining algorithm.
The Monero Outreach team this week announced the new anti-ASIC algorithm, RandomX in collaboration with Arweave, a blockchain storage protocol built on the Proof of Access mechanism. It follows up on the hardfork in March as part of its bid to wave off ASIC miners who dominate the network instead of the original intent of being a CPU or GPU coin, mined by the people who utilize it.
Now, so they are taking things further by switching to a new Proof of Work (PoW) algorithm.
The duty of the RandomX algorithm is to make CPUs and GPUs more effective than the ASIC. The algorithm would generate unpredictable codes that an ASIC equipment would find difficult to solve in the place of having a set function for the proof-of-work puzzle to solve.
Monero developers aim that the new algorithm will keep the privacy coin GPU-mineable. Howard Chu, the developer of the concept of a randomly generated proof of work for Monero speaks more on the idea.
He says,
“The idea with RandomX is to require anyone who wants to build an ASIC for it to basically reimplement an entire CPU, thus constraining their performance to that of a CPU. It will help mining on everyday computer hardware to stay more competitive.”
Monero isn’t the only one who will benefit from the new Algorithm as Arweave’s distributed data storage technology will gain reduced vulnerabilities and greater security. Arweave and Monero developers had partnered to co-fund the audit of the new algorithm at the cost of $150,000.
Although Monero’s approach to kicking off ASIC miners had been criticized for being overly centralized, a recent hardfork that left Monero with a lower hash rate raised worries from users are that the chain is vulnerable to a 51% attack.
Arweave calms these fears stating that RandomX will need less intervention from developers to stay ASIC-resistant. The algorithm will require miners to dedicate more than two gigabytes of RAM to the process, thus making any attempt at cryptojacking more difficult to conceal.
Also, since the mining power will be distributed over many computers it will help strengthen the currency. To be clear, the implementation of the project isn’t yet confirmed although it gained wide acceptance from the Monero community.
Meanwhile, in another report, Coinfomania reviewed the possibility of Monero and other privacy-focused coins eventually beating regulatory issues and lasting long into the future.
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