Proof of Work Wheel
Chains that buy their security with electricity.
Press Spin. Every coin on the wheel has the same chance.
Your cryptocurrencies
The proof of work wheel picks one of twenty mineable cryptocurrencies at random. These chains buy their security with electricity: rewriting history means redoing the computation, which costs real money in the physical world.
Security you can price in kilowatt-hours
A chain secured by computation makes rewriting history expensive in a very literal sense: you would have to redo the work, faster than everyone else is currently doing it, and the electricity bill arrives whether or not you succeed. That is an unusually concrete security argument, and it is the reason the design persists despite everything said about it.
It also does not require knowing who anyone is. There is no validator set to identify, no stake to track, no question of who holds enough to matter. The cost of attack is a physical quantity rather than a governance question, which some people consider worth the energy and others plainly do not.
Mining stopped being domestic
For most chains on this wheel, the era when a home computer could meaningfully participate ended long ago. Specialised hardware arrived, industrial operations negotiated electricity prices no household can reach, and the economics settled where they were always going to settle.
A handful of entries here resist that deliberately, choosing algorithms designed to be awkward for specialised chips so that ordinary hardware stays competitive. Whether that resistance holds is an ongoing contest rather than a settled property, and it has been lost before.
The energy argument, briefly and without a verdict
The consumption is real and large. So is the observation that much of it is sited where power is stranded or otherwise wasted, and that the figure is frequently quoted without a comparison that would make it meaningful. Both of those things can be true.
This page is not going to resolve it, and a random picker has no standing to try. The wheel holds twenty mineable coins and selects one with equal probability. What you think about the electricity is yours to work out.
What is on this wheel
| Rank | Ticker | Name |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | BTC | Bitcoin |
| 10 | DOGE | Dogecoin |
| 11 | ZEC | Zcash |
| 15 | XMR | Monero |
| 17 | BCH | Bitcoin Cash |
| 20 | LTC | Litecoin |
| 54 | ETC | Ethereum Classic |
| 63 | KAS | Kaspa |
| 95 | BSV | Bitcoin SV |
| 114 | CFX | Conflux |
| 200 | DGB | DigiByte |
| 331 | RVN | Ravencoin |
| 368 | CKB | Nervos Network |
| 508 | ETHW | EthereumPoW |
| 513 | SC | Siacoin |
| 622 | ERG | Ergo |
| 667 | FLUX | Flux |
| 730 | NMC | Namecoin |
| 770 | PEP | Pepecoin |
| 837 | FIRO | Firo |
Market data provided by CoinMarketCap — CoinMarketCap. Rank, ticker and name only; this site stores no prices.
This list is a judgement about what belongs in the category, not a market-cap ranking, so it carries no date. See how the lists are chosen.
Questions
Which coins are on the proof of work wheel?
All 20 of them are printed under the wheel: BTC, DOGE, ZEC, XMR, BCH, LTC, ETC, KAS, BSV, CFX, DGB, RVN, CKB, ETHW, SC, ERG, FLUX, NMC, PEP and FIRO. Stablecoins and wrapped tokens are left off, and you can replace the whole list in Custom mode.
Why does proof of work still exist?
Because its security argument is unusually easy to state and does not depend on knowing who the validators are. The cost of attacking it is a power bill, which is a property some people value enough to accept the energy use.
Can these coins still be mined at home?
A few, by design — some deliberately resist specialised hardware. For most the answer is no: industrial operations with cheaper electricity long ago made domestic mining uneconomic.