Recently Monero, Ethereum, and Sia have all been facing the challenge of ASICs. But Monero forked away from ASICs, as they have been doing for years. But I’d really like to encourage the cryptocurrency community to encourage this kind of behavior in the future. If we really wish things to be decentralized and give power, data, and privacy rights back to the common folk…. Forking away from ASICs is a prerequisite for empowering the public. Nothing can be private if there is a centralized company/organization who is in control of the network/product.
ASICs are machines built just for mining cryptocurrencies and typically are produced by a company, like Bitmain. These machines soon take over as they become better and more cost efficient, and eventually cause GPU mining to become unprofitable – thus dying out. It leads to centralization as the initial capital cost of these ASICs is high and it’s a risky investment. Further, creating a high barrier to entry into the mining market.
The recent Monero fork created four new coins - Monero classic, Monero zero, Monero Orginal, and Monero-Classic (with a dash, as opposed to without a dash). The forks are basically coins that decided not to upgrade to the new proof of work algorithm in version 12. That means those still support a ASICs algorithm.
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/monero-just-hard-forked-and-it-resulted-four-new-projects/
In my opinion, ASICs are damaging to both the reputation of cryptocurrency as a decentralized community, as it shows they aren’t decentralized. And further, it can create insane FUD, just look at the Bitcoin wars last year. /r/bitcoin was flooded with stupid shrill comments about “Bitcoin being a store of value” or “ASICs are actually good for the network!”
We need to remember the people whom cryptocurrencies were originally started to empower – the common man. And ASICs are not open to the common man. We should reject ASICs. Fortunately, Monero is continuing this tradition.
Ps: I’m planning to write a more indepth article on my website about the different consensus algorithms and more fleshed out thoughts on why ASICs are bad.
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