How Monero’s proof of work works (opens in new tab)

Thank you for sharing!

Crypto wasnt so much straight up privacy, but like high information / low revelation. The idea was to create an economic system where you the individual could have relative anonymity while being able to go online and audit the bank in detail. Not a criticism of you enjoying monero I just think this got lost somewhere.

I think Ethereum is probably going to strike the closest balance eventually, but it depends on a lot of factors.

Think of it this way: If you pay with physical cash, there are people somewhere who do the work of digging ore out of the ground, smelting it, shaping it into coins, cutting and printing paper and so on. All these people do that, because they get paid in the same currency that they themselves have minted.

It turns out that nobody has yet found a way to create a digital decentralized currency that that works without incorporating a similar concept of incentivizing the creation of currency.

Because you need an incentive for 'miners' to participate in transaction processing.

Main functionality is transactions which are not controlled by any single entity (like the government).

Most of it is speculation unfortunately, which gives it a bad name, drowning out real usecases.

The post described both modes. The only difference is that Fast mode processes the cache to generate the full 2.1GB dataset, so subsequent programs can just reference it as needed. Light mode uses only the 256MB cache and generates the required dataset values individually, on each access. That saves RAM but costs more CPU time.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/1h6e4nk/randomx_5_y...

Most miners use AMD Ryzens. Couldn't tell you the actual breakdown of CPU types in use. Apple's M series CPUs are quite efficient at it too. Bitmain now sells a "Monero RandomX Mining ASIC" which is just a bunch of RISC-V cores, seemingly based on Sophon SG2042 SOCs. There's nothing special or more cost-effective about their product.

You can mine on old smartphones quite easily. I use a bunch of old Android TVboxes myself. Their hashrates are nothing to crow about, but their hashes/watt are still competitive with faster CPUs.

There is a RandomX V2 that will be deployed soon. Its main improvement is even cheaper verification cost.

It might lead to scenarios where a miner may optimise block generation itself, I guess?

I was more curious about the possibility of generating optimised branchless variants and then running them in parallel on multiple ASICs to ensure you cover every branch and submit all the results and hope you’re fast? Would that be more inefficient than relying on branch prediction and CPUs?