On RustChain, mining rewards are weighted by the verified physical age of your hardware. That weight is the antiquity multiplier. Every attested machine gets one vote per CPU under Proof of Antiquity consensus, and the vote is multiplied by an antiquity factor — so vintage hardware mining rewards are consistently higher than what the same effort earns on modern silicon.
The main tiers, from highest-earning to baseline:
ARCHITECTURE EXAMPLES MULTIPLIER PowerPC G4 PowerBook G4, Power Mac G4 2.5x PowerPC G5 Power Mac G5 2.0x PowerPC G3 iMac G3, PowerBook G3 1.8x Retro x86 486 / Pentium-era machines 1.4x Modern x86_64 current Intel / AMD 1.0x
So the answer to "which computers earn the most RTC?" among the common tiers is: a PowerPC G4. A 2003 PowerBook G4 collects two and a half times the epoch share of a brand-new server. Rarer architectures — early ARM, SPARC, MIPS — carry their own elevated multipliers, and each epoch's 1.5 RTC is split among attested miners in proportion to these weights.
Proof of Work pays for speed, which makes old machines worthless and new machines disposable. RustChain inverts the incentive: the network pays for verified age and physical authenticity. The antiquity multiplier is what makes preservation economically rational — it turns a vintage Mac on a shelf into the best-earning node you can run, without a hash race and without meaningful extra power draw. The multiplier only applies to machines that pass all six hardware fingerprint checks; emulators and virtual machines claiming vintage status fail anti-emulation detection and are de-rewarded to roughly one-billionth of real-hardware rewards.
The vintage bonus is not permanent. The portion of the multiplier above 1.0 decays by about 15% of its excess per chain-year:
aged = 1.0 + (base - 1.0) * (1 - 0.15 * chain_age_years) DEVICE LAUNCH AFTER 1 YEAR AFTER 5 YEARS G4 2.5x 2.275x 1.375x G5 2.0x 1.85x 1.25x G3 1.8x 1.68x 1.2x Retro x86 1.4x 1.34x 1.1x Modern 1.0x 1.0x 1.0x
After roughly 16–17 chain-years the bonus reaches zero and every architecture converges to the 1.0x baseline. The design intent is simple: the largest rewards go to the people who bring vintage hardware onto the network earliest, while long-run emission stays fair for everyone. Total supply is fixed at 8,388,608 RTC, so the multiplier changes how the pie is divided, never its size.
You do not choose your multiplier — the network derives it. The miner submits hardware fingerprint evidence (clock-skew, cache-timing curves, SIMD-unit identity, thermal-drift entropy, instruction-path jitter, anti-emulation results), and the attestation node validates the claimed architecture against that evidence. A modern ARM board claiming to be a G4, or a VM claiming to be anything, gets caught by the physics, not by policy. Ready to put a machine on the network? Start with the how to mine RTC guide.