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RIP 200 Consensus

Scottcjn edited this page Mar 7, 2026 · 1 revision

RIP-200: Round-Robin 1-CPU-1-Vote Consensus

RIP-200 is the core consensus mechanism of RustChain. It implements a Proof of Antiquity model where each physical CPU gets exactly one vote, and vintage hardware receives weighted multipliers based on architecture age.

How It Works

Every 10 minutes (one epoch), the network distributes 1.5 RTC among all miners that have submitted valid attestations. Each miner's share is proportional to their hardware antiquity multiplier.

Attestation Process

  1. Miner runs 6 hardware fingerprint checks (clock drift, cache timing, SIMD identity, thermal drift, instruction jitter, anti-emulation)
  2. Results are submitted to attestation nodes along with device information
  3. Server validates fingerprint evidence and records attestation
  4. At epoch settlement, rewards are distributed proportionally

Antiquity Multipliers

Architecture Base Multiplier Examples
PowerPC G4 2.5x PowerBook G4, Power Mac G4
PowerPC G5 2.0x Power Mac G5, Xserve G5
PowerPC G3 1.8x iBook G3, Blue & White G3
Pentium 4 1.5x Early 2000s Intel
Retro x86 1.4x Pre-Core era x86
Core 2 Duo 1.3x 2006-2008 Intel
Apple Silicon 1.2x M1, M2, M3 Mac
Modern x86_64 1.0x Current AMD/Intel

Time-Aged Decay

Multipliers decay slowly over the chain's lifetime to prevent permanent advantage:

aged_multiplier = 1.0 + (base - 1.0) * (1 - 0.15 * chain_age_years)

A G4 starts at 2.5x and reaches 1.0x after approximately 16.67 years, ensuring long-term fairness while still rewarding vintage hardware participation today.

Anti-Emulation

Virtual machines are detected and assigned near-zero weight (10^-9). The fingerprint system checks for hypervisor signatures, timing uniformity, and ROM clustering to prevent VM farms from gaming the antiquity bonuses. See Hardware Requirements for details.

Why Proof of Antiquity?

Traditional Proof of Work wastes energy on computation that produces nothing useful. Proof of Stake concentrates power with the wealthy. Proof of Antiquity rewards diversity: keeping old hardware alive, reducing e-waste, and creating an inclusive network where a $50 PowerBook from 2003 meaningfully participates alongside modern servers.

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