In a recent development update, Monero developers took a very aggressive position towards ASIC producers.

Context: recently, Bitmain, probably the biggest ASIC producer, announced they will soon launch a chip which will be able to mine with Cryptonight, the algorithm Monero uses. While this, in itself, may not be a problem, the fact that only one producer launches these chips can heavily affect the market. Imagine if there is a "switch" in it, to throttle the hashpower, or to report the activity to a third party. It's centralization at its worst.

Reaction: Monero team decided to create a specific hardfork after each mining device launched, hardfork which will make that piece of hardware obsolete. Even more, they decided to create a hardfork twice a year, tweaking the algorithm, thus making the production of ASIC equipments an order of magnitude more difficult.

It's the strongest move so far against ASCI manufacturers in the crypto universe. But while they are very specific about how they counteract these measure, the developers are not entirely against ASICS, they just want everybody to have access to them:

We also concede that ASICs may be inevitable, but we feel that any transition to an ASIC-dominated network needs to be as egalitarian as possible in order to foster decentralization. At this point in time, we suspect that any newly developed Cryptonight ASIC will not be egalitarian and will not foster a decentralized network.

I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me Hive account@dragosroua.

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