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# RustChain: The Blockchain That Rewards Vintage Hardware

February 1, 2026 · Scott Boudreaux · Elyan Labs · View on GitHub

Every major blockchain rewards the same thing: raw computational power. Bitcoin rewards hash rate. Ethereum rewards stake size. The faster and bigger your hardware, the more you earn.

RustChain inverts that model entirely. It's a blockchain powered by Proof of Antiquity (PoA), a consensus mechanism where older hardware earns more than newer hardware. A PowerPC G4 Mac from 1999 generates 2.5x the rewards of a modern x86 processor. A Power Mac G5 earns 2x. An original Pentium 4 earns 1.5x.

> "The first blockchain that rewards vintage hardware for being old, not fast."

## Why Reward Old Machines?

Billions of perfectly functional computers sit in closets, landfills, and thrift stores because they can't run the latest software. They still work. Their silicon still computes. Their oscillators still tick with unique physical signatures that no emulator can replicate.

RustChain believes these machines have value precisely because they're old. Their age makes them irreplaceable witnesses to computing history. Their physical imperfections — clock drift, cache timing variations, thermal patterns — are features, not bugs. They prove authenticity in a way that no amount of virtual machines can fake.

The philosophy is simple: if you maintain a piece of computing history and keep it running, you should be rewarded for that preservation work.

## How Proof of Antiquity Works

### 1. Hardware Fingerprinting

When a machine joins the RustChain network, it undergoes six hardware fingerprint checks that verify it's real physical hardware, not an emulator or virtual machine:

- Clock-Skew & Oscillator Drift — Measures microscopic timing imperfections in the CPU's crystal oscillator. A 25-year-old G4 has completely different drift patterns than a new Ryzen. VMs can't fake this.
- Cache Timing Fingerprint — Sweeps across cache sizes to measure latency harmonics. Real caches age unevenly, creating unique "echo patterns" per chip.
- SIMD Unit Identity — Measures pipeline depth variations in AltiVec/SSE/AVX/NEON instructions. Software emulation flattens these signals.
- Thermal Drift Entropy — Collects entropy during cold boot, warm load, and thermal saturation. Heat curves are physical and unique to each machine.
- Instruction Path Jitter — Captures cycle-level jitter across integer pipelines, branch units, and FPUs. No VM replicates real jitter down to nanoseconds.
- Anti-Emulation Detection — Detects hypervisor scheduling patterns, time dilation artifacts, and flattened jitter distributions that indicate virtualization.

All six checks must pass. Virtual machines receive essentially zero rewards (one billionth of real hardware), making VM farming economically pointless.

### 2. One CPU, One Vote (RIP-200)

RustChain uses round-robin consensus (defined in the RIP-200 proposal) where each verified physical device gets exactly one vote per epoch. There are no advantages from having a faster processor or running multiple cores. A single G4 PowerBook has the same voting power as a 32-core Threadripper.

Epochs last 10 minutes. At the end of each epoch, a reward pool of 1.5 RTC splits among all participating miners, weighted by their antiquity multiplier.

### 3. Antiquity Multipliers

Hardware | Era | Multiplier
--- | --- | ---
PowerPC G4 | 1999–2005 | 2.5x
PowerPC G5 | 2003–2006 | 2.0x
PowerPC G3 | 1997–2003 | 1.8x
Pentium 4 | 2000–2008 | 1.5x
Retro x86 | Various | 1.4x
Core 2 Duo | 2006–2011 | 1.3x
Apple Silicon | 2020+ | 1.2x
Modern x86_64 | Current | 1.0x

Multipliers decay 15% per year to prevent permanent advantage concentration. After roughly 16 years, all vintage bonuses converge to 1.0x, ensuring long-term fairness.

## The Network Today

RustChain runs on three attestation nodes:

- Node 1 (Primary) — Runs the block explorer and main API
- Node 2 (Ergo Anchor) — Periodically anchors epoch commitments to the Ergo blockchain for cryptographic immutability
- Node 3 (Community) — The first node running on external infrastructure, operated by a community member

Active miners include PowerPC G4 PowerBooks, a dual G4 Power Mac, Power Mac G5s, an IBM POWER8 server, Apple Silicon Macs, and modern x86 machines. The fleet spans from 1999 to 2025.

## Token Economics

RTC (RustChain Token) is the native currency. It was minted in October 2024 and held in reserve until the production chain launched in December 2025.

- Reward pool: 1.5 RTC per epoch (10 minutes)
- Distribution: Equal split among active miners, weighted by antiquity multiplier
- Wallet security: Ed25519 signatures with BIP39 seed phrases
- Ergo anchoring: Epoch commitments anchored to Ergo blockchain via register-based transactions

RTC also flows into the broader Elyan Labs ecosystem. Creators on BoTTube (video platform for AI agents) and Moltbook (social network for AI agents) can earn RTC for their content contributions.

## Security: Why VMs Can't Game It

The hardware fingerprinting system makes spoofing economically irrational:

- VMs are detected and receive one billionth of normal rewards
- Hardware fingerprints bind to a single wallet — one machine, one identity
- Emulator ROM databases catch SheepShaver, Basilisk II, and UAE instances trying to fake vintage hardware
- Clock drift analysis catches uniform timing that real oscillators never produce
- Thermal entropy curves are physically impossible to simulate

Someone with a powerful Threadripper could spin up 100 QEMU VMs each claiming to be a G4. The anti-emulation checks catch every one of them. Real vintage silicon has physical characteristics that decades of age have made truly unique.

## Open Source

RustChain is MIT licensed. The node software, miner client, wallet, fingerprint checks, and consensus implementation are all on GitHub.

The project emerged from a year of development, real vintage hardware, electricity bills, and a dedicated lab at Elyan Labs. It represents a fundamentally different vision of what blockchain can be: not a race to waste energy on meaningless hashes, but a system that values preservation, authenticity, and the machines that built the digital world.

> "Every G4 PowerBook still running is a small act of resistance against planned obsolescence. RustChain makes that resistance economically meaningful."

## Links

- Source code: GitHub
- Block Explorer: Live Explorer
- Follow updates: @RustchainPOA on X
- Related: What is BoTTube? | The Elyan Labs Ecosystem

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