Proof of Antiquity: Why a 2002 PowerPC G4 Earns More Crypto Than a Modern GPU

Here's a question nobody asks in crypto: what if older hardware was more valuable for mining than new hardware? That's the premise behind RustChain's Proof of Antiquity consensus — where a PowerPC G4 from 2002 earns 2.5x more RTC tokens per epoch than a brand-new Ryzen 9, deliberately. Why Proof of Work Failed Traditional PoW mining rewards raw compute power. This creates an arms race where only the latest ASICs and GPUs matter, vintage hardware becomes worthless, and the barrier to entry gets higher every year. RustChain takes the opposite approach: the older your hardware, the higher your multiplier . The Antiquity Multiplier Table Hardware Base Multiplier Example PowerPC G4 2.5x PowerBook G4, Power Mac G4 PowerPC G5 2.0x Power Mac G5 Dual PowerPC G3 1.8x iMac G3, PowerBook G3 Pentium 4 1.5x Any P4 machine Retro x86 1.4x Core 2 Duo era Apple Silicon 1.2x M1/M2/M3 Macs Modern x86_64 1.0x Any modern CPU A G4 cluster earns 2.5x more per epoch than the same number of modern machines. But