RandomX VS equix

This is not true for all crypto coins. A small proportion of mining hash functions are deliberately designed to thwart ASICs, e.g. https://github.com/tevador/RandomX. It's a cat-and-mouse game, though: CryptoNight was designed to fulfill the same role, but ultimately failed: https://monerodocs.org/proof-of-work/cryptonight/.

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Can we reference this specs doc from the Randomx repo https://github.com/tevador/RandomX/blob/master/doc/specs.md . I am going to be using the variables K and H as described in the doc.

Monero uses randomx, an ASIC-resistant and CPU-friendly POW algorithm created by Monero community members, designed to make the use of mining-specific hardware unfeasible. Monero previously used CryptoNight and variations of this algorithm. More info in the GitHub repo.

Here's the randomx github. Or at least I think its the same randomx that xmr uses? https://github.com/tevador/RandomX. There's some stuff in there under the documentation section.

Monero does not have ASICs since RandomX was implemented in 2019. CPU is the best way to mine it. See https://github.com/tevador/RandomX.

From https://github.com/tevador/equix/blob/master/devlog.md

> The service would give the request a priority value based on the "difficulty" of the puzzle solution.

Seems like single clients could increase the difficulty to higher than what the bot net would do (so it gets priority), and hence get access. Operators of the bot net would probably hard code one value as the difficulty, and it would be lower than what you could typically set on consumer hardware.

Maybe user agents could even do this increase automatically?

Here is a great write-up by Tevador on the new proof of work function he made for Tor. It borrows heavily from Random X but is optimized for the tor architecture. It even borrows from Zcash old's pow alg. World-class work from Tevador 💪

From what I can see there, they're going to base it on the Equix algorithm. It's not a "captcha" that the user solves, it's a computational challenge that is hard to solve and easy to verify, so that connecting to an onion site legitimately requires just a tiny amount of computation, but DDoSing will be prohibitively expensive.