Proof-of-Antiquity doesn't just preserve old computers. It pays them better than new ones — on purpose.
Every mining network I know pays the newest, fastest hardware the most. RustChain pays it the least. A PowerBook G4 from 2003 mines at 2.5× the rate of a modern AMD Threadripper, and a Power Mac G5 gets 2.0×. That's not a bug or a novelty gimmick — it's the entire economic design, spelled out in the whitepaper. Here's how the numbers actually work.
The reward table: rarity beats age
RustChain's multipliers are based on rarity + preservation value, not simply how old a machine is:
Tier
Multiplier
Hardware
Mythic
3.5–4.0×
Acorn ARM2, DEC VAX, Inmos Transputer
Legendary
3.0×
Intel 386, Motorola 68000, MIPS R2000
Epic
2.5×
PowerPC G4, Intel 486, Pentium
Rare
1.5–2.0×
PowerPC G5, POWER8, DEC Alpha, SPARC
Uncommon
1.1–1.3×
Core 2 Duo, AMD K6, Sandy Bridge
Common
0.8×
Zen 3+, Skylake+ (modern x86_64)
Penalized
0.0005×
ARM SBCs (Raspberry Pi)
Banned
0×
VMs and emulators (fingerprint fail)
Notice the two ends. A Raspberry Pi — the classic cheap-farm board — earns essentially nothing, and a VM earns exactly nothing. The network doesn't fight farms with paperwork; it prices them out of existence.
The architecture table goes deeper
Within a tier, individual chips are rated precisely. From the whitepaper's Antiquity Multipliers section:
Architecture
Years
Multiplier
PowerPC G4 (7450/7455)
2001–2005
2.5×
PowerPC G5 (970)
2003–2006
2.0×
PowerPC G3 (750)
1997–2003
1.8×
IBM POWER8
2014
1.5×
Intel 386/486
1985–1994
2.9–3.0×
Pentium/Pro/II/III
1993–2001
2.0–2.5×
Core 2
2006–2008
1.3×
Coffee Lake+
2017–now
0.8×
AMD Zen 2/3/4/5
2019–now
0.8×
So the ideal rig isn't exotic — a G4 or a Pentium III from a closet beats a data-center machine 3:1.
Multipliers decay over time (15% per year)
The bonus is a vintage premium, not a permanent entitlement. RustChain applies a time-aging decay that rewards early adopters:
DECAY_RATE_PER_YEAR = 0.15
def time_aged_multiplier(base: float, chain_age_years: float) -> float:
if base < 1.0:
return base # sub-1.0 penalties stay as-is
return 1.0 + (base - 1.0) * (1 - DECAY_RATE_PER_YEAR) ** chain_age_years
Year 0: G4 mines at full 2.5×
Year 5: vintage bonus 75% decayed → G4 at 1.375×
Year 6.67: bonus fully decayed → back to 1.0× baseline
Every year the network is alive, the premium shrinks. Mine now with vintage hardware and you capture the multiplier at its peak; join later and the economic edge you saw on day one is gone. That's the incentive engine that converts "I should donate this to a museum" into "I should plug this in today."
Why the fingerprinting matters
All of this only works because RustChain can tell a real G4 from a VM pretending to be one. The consensus runs a 6-layer hardware fingerprinting system — oscillator drift, cache timing, SIMD identity, thermal entropy, instruction jitter, and more — so emulators get caught and multiplier-zeroed instead of farming the bonus. This is also why RustChain calls itself Sybil-resistant agent authentication: a machine's identity is attested by physics, not by self-report. (See the hardware verification docs.)
Run the same rig twice — once bare-metal, once under QEMU — and the fingerprint layers diverge: the oscillator's frequency jitter pattern comes from silicon, not from a host kernel, and cache-timing profiles expose virtualized memory hierarchies. A VM can spoof one signal, but not six correlated ones. That's what makes the banned tier (0×) enforceable rather than aspirational.
Run the numbers yourself
Roughly, if a modern Zen 4 miner on a 0.8× multiplier earns 8 RTC/day, an authenticated G4 on 2.5× earns 25 RTC/day — over 3× more, while drawing a fraction of the power. Even after the 15%-per-year decay, a G4 plugged in today still clears ~21 RTC/day in year 1 and ~13 RTC/day by year 4. The old machine's total lifetime earnings at current multipliers beat the new machine's for years. The economics don't require sentimentality about retro hardware; they just require arithmetic.
The bigger picture: e-waste as an externality
Traditional consensus rewards the wrong thing:
Consensus
Hardware incentive
Result
Proof-of-Work
Fastest/newest wins
Arms race → e-waste
Proof-of-Stake
Richest wins
Plutocracy
Proof-of-Antiquity
Oldest wins
Preservation
The world generates ~62 million metric tons of e-waste a year (Global E-waste Monitor 2024). RustChain's bet is that you can't moralize your way out of that — but you can price preservation into a reward system. When a 2003 laptop outearns a 2024 workstation, the economically rational move is to keep the old machine running.
Bottom line
The multiplier tables are the product. If you've got any vintage hardware — a G4, a Pentium III, a 486 — the economics are on your side right now, while the decay curve is still flat. Install the miner, watch it fingerprint, and collect the premium while it lasts.
One more angle: RustChain anchors to Ergo and bridges RTC to Solana (wRTC), so the rewards you mine aren't trapped in an obscure ledger — there's a path to real liquidity when you eventually sell. The tokenomics are designed for the same preservation-first logic: vintage machines create the network's security, and they're the ones paid for it.
Whitepaper: Proof-of-Antiquity (PDF/DOI 10.5281/zenodo.19442753) · Explorer: rustchain.org/explorer · Repo: github.com/Scottcjn/Rustchain
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