"While a high-speed hardware known as an ASIC has been used to secure bitcoin transactions for years, mining hardware manufacturer Bitmain recently announced a new model, the Antminer X3, that has been purpose-built for mining the privacy-oriented cryptocurrency monero.
Yet rather than greeting the hardware as a welcome sign of increased interest, monero will go so far as to enact an emergency software upgrade in April meant specifically to change the rules of the system so as to block the effort entirely.
Largely referred to as monero's first move in a "war" against ASICs, the upcoming software upgrade will render the Antminer X3 ineffective. Not only that but to keep hardware manufacturers from catching up, these algorithm edits are planned to continue with bi-annual networks upgrades.
Stepping back, the move is a defense of the mining made possible by monero's current algorithm, Cryptonight, which can successfully mine monero on consumer-grade laptops. Faced with competition by highly efficient ASICs, the fear is affordable laptop mining would be silenced.
And that's not a development developers are taking lightly."
"I will do everything in my power to help the community prevent the proliferation of centralization-inducing ASICs on the monero network," core developer Riccardo " 
" Spagni declared on GitHub."
https://www.coindesk.com/crypto-kill-switch-monero-going-war-big-miners/