One Musician's Creative Solution to Drive ASICs Off Monero

At least, that's according to Howard Chu, a monero core developer who has dedicated his time to protecting the crypto from specialized mining hardware, called ASICs, built by a multibillion-dollar mining industry.

Recently, Chu found a solution to permanently keep ASICs off the network - a proof-of-work algorithm he calls RandomJS which exploits the fact that the hardware cannot so "Multiple things at once."

From his hometown in Donegal, one of the most rural and musically rich corners of Ireland, Chu told CoinDesk, the algorithm was created with the same imagination he draws on for his musical practice.

As a result, Chu said there's a frequent overlap between programming and musical talent - one that he tapped into for the algorithm.

Because ASICs can only be designed to work towards one algorithm, using randomly generated code in an algorithm would make ASICs quickly incompatible, and as such, unprofitable.

More specifically for Chu, Bitmain released the Antminer X3 ASIC in March that was programmed to run monero's underlying proof-of-work algorithm, cryptonight.

Because of the risk that the small software changes monero has committed to may be insufficient to dissuade hardware manufacturers long term, Chu built RandomJS as a more sustainable solution for the cryptocurrency.

Chu described the challenge as striking a balance between two functions of a proof-of-work protocol - the time it takes to compute an algorithm and the speed of which it is verified.

While SHA 256 is simple to verify, according to Chu, it's fundamentally "Too easy" to compute, meaning that it's trivial to build hardware around it.

Still, the algorithm itself is being evaluated by the monero core team, and according to Chu, there's a number of things that might delay its adoption.