HomeCryptoAltcoinRavenCoin vs ASIC and FPGA: new PoW in October

RavenCoin vs ASIC and FPGA: new PoW in October

In recent months, in particular between April and May 2019, the RavenCoin network has undergone substantial growth in its hashrate, partly as a result of the use of FPGAs for the mining of the currency. For this very reason, the development team has started to work towards finding a solution to temporarily eliminate FPGAs and ASICs. A bit like what’s happening with Monero, which has developed the new PoW RandomX.

RavenCoin (RVN) is a rather well-known currency among cryptocurrency miners, especially among GPU miners, since it is a coin that can only be mined – theoretically – with graphics cards, given the particular anti-ASIC PoW.

Not only that, the fact of being a cryptocurrency born from a community of developers, thus without ICO, IEO and the like, has made it quite famous (somewhat similar to Grin), thanks also to the sudden growth of the project during 2019, which led RavenCoin to be listed on the main exchanges, including Binance itself.

New PoW X16Rv2 from October 1st on RVN

To counter ASICs and FPGAs, the developers recently announced that the Proof of Work adopted by RavenCoin (RVN), the X16R mining algorithm, will be revised, introducing new hashing functions that will result in the birth of a new PoW, which will be, at least initially, immune to ASICs and FPGAs.

X16Rv2, which is the name of the PoW, will introduce the Tiger function in three different parts of the current X16R algorithm. The Tiger hashing function, in fact, will be executed before the Luffa512, Keccak512, and SHA512 algorithms, already present and used by the current PoW.

In this way, any ASICs and FPGAs developed for RavenCoin will have to perform a function for which they have not been programmed, and will, therefore, be excluded from the network since they are unable to execute this function.

As mentioned in the beginning, this is a temporary solution, which should provide a sigh of relief for several months to the GPU miners of the coin. However, as the community points out, it will still be necessary to work on a completely new PoW to be implemented as soon as possible in the protocol, so as to eliminate specialised hardware for a long period of time.

The PoW X16Rv2 will be implemented in the RavenCoin 2.5.0 release and is expected to make its debut on the currency network on October 1st, 2019. As with all the upgrades and forks of the main cryptocurrencies, in this case as well, the miners and the node/wallet managers will have to update the software to the versions able to support the new features and improvements introduced in the new release of the protocol.

Emanuele Pagliari
Emanuele Pagliarihttps://www.emanuelepagliari.it/
Telecommunications engineer with a strong passion for technology. His adventure in the world of blogging started on GizChina.it in 2014 and then continued on LFFL.org and GizBlog.it. Emanuele is in the world of cryptocurrency as a miner since 2013 and today he follows the technical aspects related to blockchain, cryptography and dApp, also for applications in the Internet of Things.
RELATED ARTICLES

MOST POPULARS

GoldBrick