From Zero to RustChain Miner in 10 Minutes — Proof-of-Antiquity Explained

What Is Proof-of-Antiquity? Proof-of-Antiquity (PoA) is RustChain's consensus mechanism. Instead of measuring compute speed, it measures hardware age — and older hardware earns a higher multiplier on its block rewards. The logic is elegant: Traditional PoW : You win by buying more hardware → rich get richer → centralization PoA : You win by having older hardware → levels the playing field → decentralization Hardware age is determined via cryptographic hardware fingerprinting . Each miner runs an attestation process that collects device-specific signals (CPU family, motherboard characteristics, BIOS data) that can't be spoofed by a VM or cloud instance. Reward = Base_Reward × Antiquity_Multiplier A machine from 2004 earns a higher multiplier than a machine from 2024. Period. This isn't just clever — it's anti-inflationary. Old hardware gets repurposed instead of scrapped. New hardware isn't incentivized at all. Who's Already Mining? The RustChain node exposes a public API you can query