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In practice PoW is pretty centralized also. Most of the mining is done by those who have the capital to set up massive ASIC/GPU farms.


There are coins like Monero that are ASIC-resistant and can only be mined with CPU, not GPU.


Can you explain how this does not benefit people who have the capital to set up massive CPU farms, with all the advantages of scale that that implies? After all, you can get discounts on both power and CPUs if you buy in bulk so anyone who starts off with enough capital will only get further ahead.


Incorrect. Monero can be mined using GPUs, and that is the dominant way it is mined.

Source : Mined Monero on an R9 290X until a few months ago.


If by "a few months ago" you mean prior to November 2019, then sure.

Since then the PoW is RandomX which heavily favors CPUs. I'm 99% sure there is no GPU in existence that can profitably mine Monero since then, assuming your electricity isn't free.


Monero's PoW algorithm is RandomX [1], which is optimized for CPU mining. While it is possible to mine with GPUs, it is significantly slower and unprofitable.

[1] https://github.com/tevador/RandomX/blob/master/doc/design.md




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