Very excited to see this happening. Another holy grail for Mnoero!
Given the roughly strong consensus that if MNO is an economic success then ASICs are inevitable, do you think it's possible to turn that PoW 'bug' into a killer feature by effectively subsidizing development of an open-source hardware instruction set architecture?
Since RandomX performance is ~impossible to equalize among implementations (ye olde AMD/GCN vs NVDA/CUDA dilemma), why not help catalyze RISC-V instead of unduly rewarding private corps for making proprietary hardware?
If it's possible to redirect 'inevitable' excess hardware mining profit to a hardware ecosystem sharing with Monero's wild & free ethos (rather than continue supporting Silicon Tyranny), let's consider the benefits users and devs of Monero would gain in a world blessed with cheap and plentiful RISC-V things/phones/laptops/servers/miners all happily securing our blockchain according to their individual economic conditions/situations.
Instruction Sets Should Be Free: The Case For RISC-V
Krste Asanović, David A. Patterson
Conclusion
The case is even clearer for an open ISA than for an open OS, as ISAs change very slowly, whereas algorithmic innovations and new application demands force continual OS evolution. It is also an interface standard like TCP/IP, thus simpler to maintain and evolve than an OS. Open ISAs have been tried before, but they never became popular due to the lack of demand. The low cost and power of IoTs, the desire for a WSC alternative tothe 80x86, and the fact that cores are a small but ubiquitous fraction of all SoCs combine to supply that missing demand. RISC-V is aimed at SoCs, with a base that should never change given the longevity of the basic RISC ideas; a standard set of optional extensions that will evolve slowly; and unique instructions per SoC that never need to be reused. While the first RISC-V beachhead may be IoTs or perhaps WSCs, our goal is grander: just as Linux has become the standard OS for most computing devices, we envision RISC-V becoming the standard ISA for all computing devices.
I'd like to weigh the open-source hardware development ASIC implications of sha3 vs my crazy(?) idea for a RISC-V optimized/native/friendly variant of RandomX.
But there is a lot of nuance in this thicket of law and culture and game theory and compsci and economics. Any insight is appreciated in advance.
