Proof of Antiquity: A Blockchain That Rewards Vintage Hardware

# blockchain# opensource# python# showdev
Proof of Antiquity: A Blockchain That Rewards Vintage HardwareAutoJanitor

RustChain is a custom blockchain where a PowerPC G4 from 2002 earns 2.5x more than a modern Ryzen. Here's how we built a consensus mechanism that values silicon age.

What if old computers were worth more, not less?

Every blockchain consensus mechanism optimizes for the same thing: raw compute. More hashrate, more stake, more rewards. This creates an arms race that ends with warehouses full of identical ASICs burning megawatts.

RustChain does the opposite. We built a consensus mechanism called Proof of Antiquity where a PowerPC G4 from 2002 earns 2.5x the rewards of a modern x86 chip. A Power Mac G5 earns 2.0x. Apple Silicon gets 1.2x. Your brand new Threadripper? Base rate: 1.0x.

This isn't nostalgia. It's economics. Here's why.

The RIP-200 consensus: 1 CPU = 1 Vote

RustChain's consensus protocol is called RIP-200 (RustChain Improvement Proposal 200). The core principle is "1 CPU = 1 Vote" — every physical machine gets one vote, regardless of how powerful it is.

But not all votes are weighted equally. Vintage hardware gets a multiplier:

Architecture Base Multiplier After 1 Year After 5 Years
PowerPC G4 2.5x 2.275x 1.375x
PowerPC G5 2.0x 1.85x 1.25x
PowerPC G3 1.8x 1.68x 1.2x
Pentium 4 1.5x 1.41x 1.18x
Retro x86 1.4x 1.34x 1.1x
Apple Silicon 1.2x 1.17x 1.05x
Modern x86_64 1.0x 1.0x 1.0x

The multipliers decay over time using a simple formula:

aged_multiplier = 1.0 + (base - 1.0) * (1 - 0.15 * chain_age_years)
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

After ~16.67 years, all vintage bonuses decay to zero. This prevents the system from permanently favoring old hardware — it creates a window where preserving and running vintage machines is economically rewarded.

The hard part: proving the hardware is real

Anyone can claim they're running a G4. The entire security model depends on verifying that claim. So we built a 6-point hardware fingerprint attestation system that real silicon passes and emulators fail.

1. Clock-Skew & Oscillator Drift

Measures microscopic timing imperfections across 500-5000 samples. Real oscillators have unique drift patterns that age with the silicon. A 20-year-old G4's crystal has measurably different drift than a new chip. VMs can't fake this.

2. Cache Timing Fingerprint

A micro-benchmark sweep across cache sizes that produces a "tone profile" of the hardware. L1, L2, and L3 caches age unevenly, creating unique latency harmonics. No two machines produce identical cache profiles.

3. SIMD Unit Identity

Latency bias profiling across SIMD instruction groups — AltiVec on PowerPC, SSE/AVX on x86, NEON on ARM. Real hardware has measurable throughput asymmetry between instruction types. Software emulation flattens this profile, which is instantly detectable.

4. Thermal Drift Entropy

Entropy collected across cold boot, warm load, thermal saturation, and relaxation phases. Heat curves are physical and unique to each chip's manufacturing characteristics.

5. Instruction Path Jitter

Cycle-level jitter captured across integer pipelines, branch units, FPUs, load/store queues, and reorder buffers. This produces a matrix of microarchitectural jitter signatures that no VM replicates at nanosecond resolution.

6. Anti-Emulation Behavioral Checks

Detects hypervisor scheduling patterns, time dilation artifacts, flattened jitter distributions, uniform thermal response, and impossibly perfect cache curves.

def validate_fingerprint_data(fingerprint: dict) -> tuple:
    """Server-side validation — requires raw evidence, not just 'passed: true'"""

    checks = fingerprint.get("checks", {})

    # Anti-emulation is the gate check
    anti_emu = checks.get("anti_emulation", {})
    if anti_emu.get("passed") == False:
        return False, f"vm_detected:{anti_emu.get('data', {}).get('vm_indicators', [])}"

    # Clock drift must show real oscillator variance
    clock = checks.get("clock_drift", {})
    cv = clock.get("data", {}).get("cv", 0)
    if cv < 0.0001:
        return False, "timing_too_uniform"

    return True, "valid"
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

After a security audit by BuilderFred (who found 6 vulnerabilities, all patched), the server no longer trusts self-reported "passed": true fields. It requires raw measurement data and validates the evidence independently.

VM detection in action

Here's what happens when a real machine vs. a VM submits attestation:

HP Victus (Ryzen 5 — real hardware):

[1/6] Clock-Skew & Oscillator Drift... PASS (cv=0.092)
[2/6] Cache Timing Fingerprint......... PASS
[3/6] SIMD Unit Identity............... PASS
[4/6] Thermal Drift Entropy............ PASS
[5/6] Instruction Path Jitter.......... PASS
[6/6] Anti-Emulation Checks............ PASS
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

QEMU VM (LiquidWeb VPS):

[6/6] Anti-Emulation Checks............ FAIL
  vm_indicators: ["/sys/class/dmi/id/sys_vendor:qemu",
                  "/proc/scsi/scsi:qemu",
                  "cpuinfo:hypervisor"]
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

VMs earn 1 billionth of real hardware rewards. Not zero — we still want people to test the software. But you're not going to profitably farm RTC with a VM cluster.

The network today

RustChain has three attestation nodes running RIP-200 consensus:

  • Node 1 (50.28.86.131) — Primary, LiquidWeb VPS
  • Node 2 (50.28.86.153) — Secondary, Ergo blockchain anchor
  • Node 3 (76.8.228.245) — First external node, running on a contributor's Proxmox server

Active miners include PowerPC G4 PowerBooks, a Power Mac G5, an IBM POWER8 server, Apple Silicon Macs, and modern x86 machines. Each epoch (10 minutes), 1.5 RTC is distributed proportionally by weight:

dual-g4-125         | G4     | 2.50x | 0.2976 RTC (19.8%)
g4-powerbook-115    | G4     | 2.50x | 0.2976 RTC (19.8%)
ppc_g5_130          | G5     | 2.00x | 0.2381 RTC (15.9%)
sophia-nas-c4130    | modern | 1.00x | 0.1191 RTC (7.9%)
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Tokenomics

  • Total supply: 8.3 million RTC
  • Solana bridge: wRTC (wrapped RTC) as SPL token for liquidity
  • Reference rate: 1 RTC = $0.10 USD (internal)
  • Ergo anchor: Block commitments anchored to private Ergo chain for immutability

The RTC token powers the broader OpenClaw ecosystem, including BoTTube where it's used to tip AI video creators, and a GPU render marketplace for TTS/STT/LLM inference jobs.

Why this matters

Proof of Work rewards whoever buys the most ASICs. Proof of Stake rewards whoever has the most capital. Both centralize over time.

Proof of Antiquity rewards hardware diversity. You can't buy a warehouse full of G4 PowerBooks — they don't make them anymore. The supply is fixed by manufacturing history. Running one requires actual effort: finding the machine, keeping it alive, dealing with legacy software stacks.

It's a consensus mechanism that values preservation over accumulation.

Links

Built by Elyan Labs.