It just means its secured by orders of magnitude less energy than bitcoin. It's not worth it to make am asic if you're a free market actor, but if you're a State actor or central bank it is cheap and easy to kill monero.
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Thus, Monero can only exist for as long as the US and federal reserve aren't threatened by it.
This does not solve the same problem as bitcoin.
yeah. monero’s privacy model is interesting, but pow security budget still matters. if your threat model includes states, “asic-resistant” is not a free lunch.
It actually means that their blockchain isn’t held hostage by a handful of miners and we should congratulate them on that.
Why would a State or central bank try to develop a cpu based asic when they can just delist monero from every exchange on earth and use the surveillance apparatus they already have to keep an eye on who might be exchanging bitcoin for monero? Or setup honeypots or literally just plain brute force? That is what they always do.
And I’m pretty sure ASIC developers wouldn’t be sitting on the opportunity of printing literal cash if they thought it was possible to do so.
I domt think you can make an ASIC for randomX because of its nature of having to go through the "problem" sequentially.
It's always possible to accelerate math with function specific silicon, the market just doesn't bother for monero because the leadership tends to rotate the hash algo quite frequently.
A state actor or central bank wouldn't be producing monero asics to generate revenue though they'd be doing it to covertly perform a massive reorg or mine empty blocks.
There's no point for asic developers to work on monero when the leadership can rug them by changing hash algo, making it unprofitable.
A state or central bank would do it if monero grew to Bitcoin levels and became an escape hatch from their slavery system.
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Yes, it is possible to create a RandomX ASIC, but by the time you have optimised for every possible RandomX function, you have built an entire CPU. Probably an inferior one, at vast expense. But it will run DOOM, so not a total loss.
That one "RandomX ASIC" commercially available turned out to be a bunch of RISC-V CPUs taped together in parallel lol
They are RISC-Vs, I believe.
CPUs built to run in parallel
Don't think that counts as possible lol. Thats the entire point of RandomX so that you have to do this to parrelellize it.
I know theoretically you would need to create much of the CPU, but in reality "life finds a way" every single time. Perhaps this time its different, but even then it just means the enemy needs to buy or rent general purpose compute which is readily available.
The enemy occupies the administrative "high ground", and always has.
The enemy can vet who can buy SHA256 ASIC mining rigs, quite easily, and likely does. The enemy can control who gets approval for a utility-scale electricity interconnect to power said mining rigs. (And takes fricking years doing it sometimes.) The enemy can see who is running any big mining pool, and "liase" with them. To prevent misunderstandings. And prevent processing ML/TF/CSAM/protesters/splitting bills. You want to stay legal, don't you?
The enemy finds it very challenging to control who can buy general-purpose compute, as Iraq, Iran, DPRK and most recently Russia could tell you.
Not really, and none of this changes the math. It's multiple orders of magnitude cheaper to permanently kill monero than bitcoin.
And its multiple zeroes easier to permanently capture Bitcoin than Monero.
Both these problems are real.
One of these problems is solvable.