It seems some interesting things are happening in the world of Monero. This altcoin recently hard forked to combat the launch of ASIC miners. It seems this fork has been successful in this regard, even though it triggered a near collapse of the Monero hashrate. How all of this will play out in the long run, remains to be seen.
ASIC miners are often considered to be a necessary evil in cryptocurrency mining. While these machines are powerful, they also lead to more centralization. If people control enough ASIC miners, they gain a bit more control over the coin they are trying to mine.With Bitmain releasing a lot of new ASICs lately, it is evident something will change in the future. Whether that will be a good thing, remains to be determined.
Monero Hashrate Drops off Sharply
In the case of Monero, the new ASICs have proven to be quite problematic. More specifically, with so many units being released, these networks face a risk of becoming centralized. As such, the Monero developers had to hard fork their own currency to avoid the impact of this new hardware. It seems that effort is paying off in quick succession. Recent charts show the XMR hashrate has dropped by quite a margin, as ASIC mining equipment is no longer usable.
Even so, this current trend can become rather problematic. With the hashrate dropping from over 1GH/s to just 150MH/s, things are not looking too great. That can become a big problem in the long run, assuming this trend keeps up. Even so, it seems the hashrate has picked up again in the past few days. With a current hashrate of 50 MH/s, things look pretty promising once again.
All of this seems to confirm ASICs were mining Monero for some time. With the network hashrate rising from 500 MH/s to 1.05 GH/s since early January, interest has certainly spiked. It is possible botnets also played their role in this regard, albeit that is difficult to determine. For now, we have to wait and see how things play out for Monero. Nullifying ASICs is a positive development overall, that much is evident.
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