Re:Monero Declares War on ASIC Manufacturers
by plasticmachine on Thursday February 15, 2018 @03:40AM
(#16382643)
There are no "insiders" with Monero. Just like many FOSS projects, everything is developed in the open and entirely transparently. The first time anyone has visibility on PoW changes is when someone comes up with specifics and opens a PR, and as can be seen on the current PR there's little chance that the first pass is the one that will go in.
I have not heard anything bad about the Monero people, but given the number of bad actors in the cryptocurrency space they should probably describe what steps they are taking to ensure that nothing like what I'm about to describe can occur.
> Moving forward, developers will seek to protect the network’s ASIC resistance by slightly modifying its PoW algorithm at every scheduled hard fork, which generally occurs twice annually. These changes will not be noticeable to ordinary XMR users, but they will alter the network’s hashing algorithm enough that Cryptonight ASIC miners would become obsolete following every fork
Suppose an insider is conspiring with one of the ASIC makers. The insider gets the modifications to the ASIC maker before they go public. The ASIC maker gets a head start on making new ASICs.
During the time between the modifications going public and other ASIC makers getting chips out, the conspiring maker does NOT sell their chips. They use them themselves, splitting the results of their mining with the insider.