Last Chance To Breathe: Why Monero Absolutely Must Implement Random-VDigital tyranny is at our gates. Intel, AMD, ARM, and Nvidia have Ring-0 vulnerabilities that software cannot ameliorate and free societies cannot tolerate.
The only practical strategy to forestall the emerging global digital tyranny is socioeconomic sovereign empowerment via private, permissionless communication and value-transfer networks running on end-to-end secure hardware.
In the beautific vision presented below, the two awful trends of digital tyranny and ASIC inevitability are set against each other, producing powerful harmonics sufficient to disrupt, defang, or domesticate both.Given, in general to the world at large:
1. Indulging in the security theater of running FOSS on Ring-0 compromised/backdoored hardware is pointless, futile, and hypocritical.
2. There is a narrowing window of opportunity for FOSH to remain competitive with proprietary, state-actor backed, incumbent and dominant semiconductor firms.
3. There is only one FOSH project with the critical socioeconomic and technological mass needed to potentially represent a viable challenge to the evil oligoploy of Big Silicon.
4. That one potentially viable large scale (and thus perhaps world-saving) FOSH project is called RISC-V (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V).
Given, specifically to the narrow world of Monero:
5. Monero's infamous 'champagne problem' of ASIC Inevitability is logically entailed by sufficient economic success (and/or sufficiently motivated adversaries).
6. Choosing specific parameters for Random-X intrinsically favors one microarchitecture over others.
7. Attempts to equalize performance for [(Intel CPU vs AMD APU vs ARM SOC) vs (nVIDIA GPU vs AMD GPU)] requires continuous readjustment as new generations of tech evolve.
8. The very inconvenient governance structures required to actively manage equalization of these moving/divergent targets expose undesirable social and technological attack surfaces.
Thus, be it therefore resolved that:
Lack of performant and secure FOSH is an existential threat to Monero and all FOSS, and,
Monero as a project and culture must accept the inevitablity of ASICs while transmuting FUD into features, by means of tweaking Random-X to target the RISC-V open-source instruction set architecture, and,
Monero as a united community has the unique power, unique opportunity, and unique responsibility to align historially malincentivized ISA development with its absolute necessities for fast/secure FOSH and decentralized PoW secruity.ConclusionRather than fuss endlessly with actively rebalancing Random-X performance in various proprietary micoarchitectures, Monero's PoW focus must shift to forcing all of them to emulate and optimize RISC-V instruction sets.
This arrangement passively creates competition to radically and rapidly improve the one singular open-source ISA which may be used to rebase critical infrastructure (servers, routers, PCs, SOCs, modems, etc) on FOSH.
As the hardware world is remade and rebased on RISC-V, all the things (smartphone, doorbell, smart-fridge, rescue drone, kill drone, anti-drone drone, Tesla, NAS, laptop, gaming rig, mainframe, etc) may mine XMR with priority accorded by user preference under local conditions.
This glittering futuristic world of all-the-things mining Random-V willy-nilly represents the closest possible approach to a perfectly free PoW market, which maximally preserves decentralization, antifragility, and permissionlessness.
Appendix
Random-V variants: tweaking word-width within a safe 'Can't Be Evil' libre paradigmRISC-V currently supports 32, 64, and 128-bit register sets. There are proposals to implement variable-width instructions up to 864-bits.
This flexibility allows Random-V developers to retain the ability to create best-fit variants based on the facts on the ground (IE we can still nerf/brick particular RV ASIC monopolies) and/or the facts we wish to encourage becoming true.
To be determined is whether or not to use the same variant on every block forever, or to pre-program future forks to wider word widths, or even to vary word-width between blocks either randomly or deterministicaly.
EG, if 1/3 of blocks are RV-32, 1/3 are RV-64, and 1/3 are RV-128 that may encourage better coin distribution among embedded 32-bit native miners, phone/laptop based 64-bit native miners, and PC/mainframe based 128-bit native miners.
