May 4, 2026
Cash me outside, CPU edition
How Monero's proof of work works
Monero Wants Your Regular Computer, and the Comments Are Fighting About Whether That’s Genius or Ridiculous
TLDR: Monero uses a mining system called RandomX that tries to favor everyday computers over specialized machines by making the work more varied and memory-hungry. In the comments, people split hard between “clever anti-big-miner design,” “wait, how does crypto money even make sense,” and “this is just burning electricity for nothing.”
Monero’s big pitch here is surprisingly simple: instead of making miners do the same repetitive puzzle forever, it gives their computers a constantly changing set of tasks that looks more like normal computer work. In plain English, Monero’s system, called RandomX, was designed so ordinary desktop processors have a better shot, while expensive custom mining machines have a harder time dominating. The crowd reaction? Instant split-screen chaos.
Some readers were fascinated by the engineering drama, with one commenter dropping a JavaScript version of RandomX and even name-checking a Bitcoin-style experiment using it, which sparked the classic internet response: wait, are we seriously trying to put this thing everywhere now? Others zoomed out and dragged in Monero history, pointing to older mining systems and the long-running cat-and-mouse game of coin creators trying to stop specialized hardware from taking over.
But the hottest comments were less “cool tech” and more existential crisis in the replies. One baffled reader asked the question a lot of newcomers secretly have: if crypto is supposed to act like cash, why does “making money by doing work” make sense at all? Then came the blunt attack from the anti-crypto corner, calling the whole thing a “useless waste of compute” and bad for energy and scarce resources. Meanwhile, another reader got stuck on a nerdy detail — why miners can’t just avoid tricky branching entirely — proving that even in a flame war, there’s always one person still trying to do homework.
Key Points
- •Monero uses RandomX as its proof-of-work algorithm, replacing a simple repeated hash approach with random program execution on a virtual machine.
- •RandomX is designed to make mining resemble general-purpose CPU workloads by combining integer math, floating-point math, branching, and heavy memory access.
- •The article says Monero adopted RandomX in late 2019 after earlier using the CryptoNight family.
- •RandomX uses a medium-term key derived from an older block hash and a per-attempt hashing input from the candidate block plus nonce.
- •RandomX applies Argon2d to the key to build a memory-hard cache, which the article says is 256 MiB under default parameters.