Developers behind the cryptocurrency monero are ramping up efforts to
keep specialized mining hardware from dominating its race for rewards.
Of the coins that have a strong privacy focus, monero – launched in
2014 – possesses the largest market capitalization by far with an
estimated $1.5 billion valuation. The annual mining rewards generated by the now 5-year-old blockchain total roughly $62 million, according to data site Messari.
But such rewards appear to be increasingly falling into the hands of
ASIC operators, nudging out smaller, independent or hobbyist
participants. To keep an even playing field, monero developers have
conducted regular hard forks to stave off ASICs – but analysis suggests that this approach has proven ineffective as of late and that ASICs are keeping ahead of such efforts.
“ASIC manufacturers can make equipment far faster than we expected,”
said monero contributor Justin Ehrenhofer. “It takes maybe a month for
them to have chips designed and in production so they generally can
still make a return on investment even within a six month period.”
Diego Salazar, another monero contributor, told CoinDesk:
“We [also] saw that this was very unsustainable. … It
takes a lot to keep [hard forking] again and again for one. For two, it
may decentralize mining but it centralizes in another area. It
centralizes on the developers because now there’s a lot of trust in
developers to keep hard forking.”
As such, monero developers are moving forward with activation of a
new mining algorithm known as RandomX, designed to render ASICs
non-competitive.
The new code is based off the work of Howard Chu
– CTO and founder of computer software firm Symas Corporation – who
also developed the database type the monero blockchain presently runs
on. Four different audits of the RandomX code are now being completed
for an expected code freeze date by July.
As it stands, the algorithm could go live in October.
“We’ve ultimately come to consensus in general that RandomX is what
will be implemented. It’s our best shot to preserve monero as it was
founded,” said Ehrenhofer. “If this fails then monero will probably
move to an ASIC-friendly algorithm.”
According to Salazar, RandomX is monero’s “last ditch effort to keep ASIC’s out.”
Putting CPUs at the fore
RandomX according to Chu is designed to be “CPU-centric.”
As opposed to application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs),
central processing units (CPUs) are a type of computer hardware designed
for multi-purpose use.
Calling it a “spectrum of computing power,” Salazar explained:
“On one end, where computers are a jack of all trades are
the CPUs… On the other end, computers which does only one thing but
extremely well are ASICs.”
CPU’s are the most widely distributed computing resource in the world, according to Chu.
“Practically everyone in the world now has a smart phone in their
pocket with a CPU and memory that’s capable of mining RandomX,”
highlighted Chu.
With maximum miner decentralization as the goal, Chu predicts that
RandomX will preserve an advantageous lead favoring CPU miners over
ASICs for at least the next three to five years.
Leaving GPUs behind
At the same time, estimates suggest the RandomX algorithm favors CPU miners over not only ASIC miners but GPU miners as well.
Graphics processing units (GPUs) are optimized for what Chu calls a “graphics workload which tends to be very sequential.”
“Data goes in at the head of the pipeline and you do some munching on
it and it all spits out at the end of the pipeline,” Chu said. “The
main emphasis there is fast transfers of data from the input to the
output, pretty much in a straight line.”
For monero’s current mining algorithm, called CryptoNight, GPU miners
take the lead over CPUs in terms of computation and energy efficiency.
Originally, however, even CryptoNight was intended to boost CPU
performance over other types of hardware.
“It’s really again kind of an accident of fate that [CryptoNight]
turned out to work fairly well on GPUs. Nobody expected CryptoNight to
be good on GPUs and it was anyways,” explained Chu. “The fact is today
GPUs have so much memory and so much massive memory bandwidth that it’s
not very much of an obstacle when it comes to CryptoNight, which was
designed back in 2013 or so.”
Soon, with the activation of RandomX, Chu predicts CPUs to be “at
least three times better than GPUs” at mining on the monero blockchain.
And while this has disgruntled “a very vocal but extremely small
minority” of GPU miners, Ehrenhofer maintains that “people with GPUs can
always either resell or repurpose their hardware.”
“If I have a monero ASIC, I don’t have that same economic option available,” said Ehrenhofer.
As such, despite the impact RandomX will have on not only ASIC miners
but also GPU miners on the monero network, Ehrenhofer maintains:
“I’m not concerned about a community split here because
RandomX is the closest algorithm that we can pick that retains a vast
majority of monero’s ideals.”
Lingering concerns
Perhaps a more realistic concern in the mind of Ehrenhofer and others
is the proliferation of botnets on the monero network as a result of a
CPU-friendly mining algorithm like RandomX.
“The basic concern is there’s millions or hundreds of millions of
computers that are out there that are poorly secured,” explained Chu.
“It’s very easy for malware to invade these computers and take them over
to do whatever a particular network operator wants to do.”
Such botnets, infected by malware, have always been somewhat of an issue on monero, according to Ehrenhofer.
“Monero is by far the most illicitly mined cryptocurrency at the
moment and it has been for several years,” Ehrenhofer said. “RandomX
does not prevent people from crypto-jacking and other nefarious versions
of malware.”
Indeed, given that monero’s present mining algorithm – CryptoNight –
has always favored CPU and GPU mining, Ehrenhofer notes that there are
resources in place on the monero website and other related forums to
help users who’s devices are impacted.
New partnerships
Even still, efforts to bootstrap RandomX have seen support from those
outside of the community, particularly by other crypto projects that
might make use of CPU-friendly mining algorithm.
Arweave, which raised a reported $8.7 million in an initial coin offering (ICO), is testing RandomX.
“An ASIC-resistant proof-of-work algorithm like RandomX will further
enhance our permanent, low-cost, tamper-resistant storage network,” said
Sam Williams, founder and CEO at Arweave, in a press release
from earlier this month. “RandomX helps us ensure that power over the
decentralized content policies in the Arweave network remains well
distributed across many globally distributed parties.”
To this, Arweave has funded one of the four audits over the RandomX code.
Completed officially on Friday, the audit was estimated in public documents
to cost roughly $80,000. CEO and co-founder Dan Guido later affirmed to
CoinDesk the final cost for Arweave was actually $28,000.
Speaking to CoinDesk in an interview, Williams explained:
“It was one of our hopes going into the audit process
that by helping to fund it we could do a small public service by making
sure other [crypto] projects can see there is a programmatic
proof-of-work algorithm that is likely ASIC-resistant in practice
without fear of security.”
The other three audits totaling $130,000 that are still to be
finalized by security firms Kudelski Security, X41 D-Sec, and
QuarksLab were funded through crowd-sourced donations from the monero
community. They are expected to wrap up by July, according to Chu.
The next step after that is an eventual launch of the algorithm on a
public monero test network before a tentatively scheduled mainnet
activation this October.
Risky business
For all the discussion that has gone into preparing RandomX for a
mainnet implementation, Ehrenhofer maintains that the true benefits of
RandomX won’t be certain until it’s live on the network.
“We don’t know if RandomX will work yet even if all the audits come
back and they say your cryptography is pretty good. We don’t know in
practice how things will actually turnout,” warned Ehrenhofer.
But the worst-case scenario in Ehrenhofer’s mind if the algorithm
proves to be unsuccessful is a switch to an ASIC-friendly mining
algorithm similar to the one currently utilized by bitcoin.
“I think if RandomX does fail and monero switches to something more
ASIC-friendly, many in the bitcoin community will tell us, ‘I told you
so.'” Ehrenhofer joked.
Even so, Salazar maintains that monero should have the runway to try new things and fail at them.
“Isn’t the idea to see what’s going to work best so that one day we
can have a good digital, private, fungible cryptocurrency?” Salazar
asked. “If monero is not but a stepping stone to get to that good
currency then by all means let monero be the lost leader.”
Salazar concluded:
“The monero people are nothing if not resilient nerds
that decide to take on the man. So we said, ‘You know what? Let’s give
this a go, one last ditch effort.'”
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