AxiomMemHash 2.0
Contents
Axiom coin and the development of AxiomMemHash 2.0.
AxiomMemHash 2.0. is a proof-of-work algorithm of the Axiom cryptocurrency. Axiom is a POW/POS (Proof-of-Work / Proof-of-Stake ) hybrid cryptocurrency. It was announced on July 26, 2015 by a group of anonymous developers. Axiom was developed as an egalitarian cryptocurrency, aimed to become an approachable coin for wide audience. It was designed to make everyone equally able to participate in mining and governance of the cryptocurrency. At the time of its peak, Axiom market capitalization reached 63 thousand US dollars, which happened not long after its establishment in August, 2015. This cryptocurrency managed to gather a community of CPU-mining enthusiasts. They believed that cryptocurrency should be available to mine for everyone who has a computer and strongly anticipated GPU and ASIC mining. Many cryptocurrencies at the time were already too hard to mine with CPU. Even some of the previous CPU-mined coins were accelerated due to the fact they were possible to be mined in pools through miner rental sites. The prominence of the GPU mining, ASICs and mining pools led to the centralization of the cryptocurrency industry and made it hard to become a member of the blockchain community. However, at the time of the coin’s prominence ASICs were not as popular as today so the development team of the Axiom coin mostly concentrated on the GPU-resistance. Axiom implemented SHA-3 competitor SHABAL-256 as a hashing function. However, for some time, the coin was actively and freely mined with GPU miners, which led to the community’s discontent. The development team intended to upgrade the POW mechanism of the coin by making it memory-hard and implementing I/O of the hard disk in the algorithm of the coin. The updated version of the Proof-of-Work algorithm was called AxiomMemHash 2.0. Currently the Axiom cryptocurrency is not abandoned. Latest commit to the cryptocurrency was made on Jul 31, 2015. It is not actively traded but still can be purchased on the YoBit cryptocurrency exchange.
Technical details
AxiomMemHash 2.0. is a CPU-only mining algorithm. It uses memory hard hashing function based on RandMemoHash by Sergio Demian Lerner and is ASIC-resistant. It is can be mined with GPU, but it is neither efficient nor even profitable.
Block rewards of the AxiomMemHash 2.0. were distributed in the following way:
- They initially started at 500 coins per block and dropped down to 5 over the course of 3 weeks.
- After 3 months they climbed back up to 100 before returning to 5 coins
- After the two stages mentioned earlier, halving is performed every year
This, rather unique model was chosen by the Axiom team to reward the initial participants of the Axiom cryptocurrency.
Mining
RandMemoHash algorithm that is implemented in AxiomMemHash 2.0. was designed to, while used for proof of work, prevent the use of GPUs or ASICs for spamming or obtaining a speedup over standard computers. While it allows both GPU and ASIC devices to mine the coin, it becomes not in any way better than CPU mining with standard computer. Axiom development team stated, that hybrid cpu/gpu mining implementation is possible for the AxiomMemHash 2.0 algorithm. However, according to the RandMemoHash Whitepaper, these implementations will offer no significant advantage over standard CPU mining and may actually be even less performant.