Inside Monero's 'Last Ditch Effort' to Block Crypto Mining ASICs

Developers behind the cryptocurrency monero are ramping up efforts to keep specialized mining hardware from dominating its race for rewards.

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.

Monero developers are moving forward with activation of a new mining algorithm known as RandomX, designed to render ASICs non-competitive.

According to Salazar, RandomX is monero's "Last ditch effort to keep ASIC's out."

For monero's current mining algorithm, called CryptoNight, GPU miners take the lead over CPUs in terms of computation and energy efficiency.

With the activation of RandomX, Chu predicts CPUs to be "At least three times better than GPUs" at mining on the monero blockchain.

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.

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.

"If monero is not but a stepping stone to get to that good currency then by all means let monero be the lost leader."

"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.'".