The Most ASIC-Resistant Coin Nobody Has Ever Told You About

I see a lot of talk here about ASIC-resistance and decentralization. For those that don't know, ASICs are specialized computers purpose-built for mining and are widely used to mine Bitcoin. The downside of ASICs is that production of the ASICs themselves trends towards centralization. CPU-mineable coins like XMR using algorithms like RandomX have built a name for themselves as being "ASIC-resistant" and they are. But as traditional PoW coins, they do still suffer from the problem of all hashpower inevitably centralizing into pools. Though tools like P2Pool have helped prevent this to some extent, they are still not quite there in terms of scalability or profit per watt. We should all be aiming for ASIC-resistance, pool resistance, and decentralization, it's an obvious win for everybody.

One coin I never see mentioned in this discussion but absolutely should be is Gridcoin. With Gridcoin, consensus is handled by a proof-of-stake layer (with rewards for stakers), but most coins are minted as a result of computational work, making it a sort of hybrid system. The best part is that the computational work is people crunching data for open scientific research projects working on everything from disease cures to mapping the galaxy (including Folding @ home). There are good pro and con arguments to be made for traditional proof of work, but work that benefits scientific research is a clear win for everyone. Gridcoin's daily compute measures in the petaflops. And projects are selected by Gridcoin user's themselves through on-chain votes on which projects are incentivized with newly minted coins. This means any scientist who needs gobloads of computational power can just make a poll and if voted in (if they can convince people their research is valuable), they now get it all for free. It's also the only coin I know of with a functional federated oracle system and a essentially zero-cost entry proof-of-stake system. No need to have access to an exchange, just fire up your CPU/GPU and to earn your first few GRC.

Because the research projects are constantly changing, they are completely ASIC-resistant. In the absolute worst case scenario, if an ASIC we're developed, the project could be banned from the network, and as a side benefit now there's an ASIC out there for protein folding or something. And because of the way the currency is minted, there is zero benefit to aggregating mining power into pools. Some pools exist to simplify the mining process, but they do not grant you access to any more coins than if you had mined on your own. That is HUGE.

This coin has been around since like.. 2013, Bitcoin's first block was mined in 2009, Eth didn't happen till 2015. I guess you never see about it posted here because it's never on some crazy rally, isn't "partnered" with some big institution, and just doesn't have the VC backing or cult following other coins have. But it has been quietly doing its thing for years. And I wish more people knew about it because it's my favorite coin.

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