Decentralization First: Privacy Coin Monero Cuts Out ASIC Miners to Stay Independent

On March 9, Monero network was successfully upgraded via a hard fork.

Notably, the United States Drug Enforcement Administration has claimed that, although privacy coins are less liquid and more anonymous than BTC, the agency "Still has ways of tracking" altcoins, including Monero specifically.

Monero has been pushing out ASIC-powered mining from the XMR network since its birth, but the code has to be updated regularly to ensure that.

"The point of making Monero ASIC-resistant is to ensure sufficient decentralization of the network, since ASICs are far from being commoditized. As one of the goals of the project is to be a fungible currency, it is also important to be censorship resistant."

"The CryptoNightR algorithm is essentially another tweak that aims to reduce the efficiency gap for ASICs. One of its features is including random code generation, which presumably makes it more difficult for ASIC manufacturers to design and build a device," an active Monero community member told Cointelegraph via direct messages on Reddit.

Since the Boron Butterfly hard fork has been activated, Monero network's hash rate initially dropped over a whopping 80 percent - which seems to indicate that the network was once again largely controlled by ASIC-powered rigs despite Monero's previous efforts, as mining operations eventually get updated to comply with new algorithms.

As a Monero community member told Cointelegraph, the hash rate was approximately 350-400 megahash per second before ASIC devices entered the network, and is expected to come eventually back to that level.

"By the time of the Monero fork it was estimated that well over 80% of the hashrate was ASIC, and it would have been trivial for them to 51% attack the chain. In theory they could double spend, or even use the threat of the double spend to in essence blackmail the community into not making changes that would hurt their bottom line. Monero could not be taken seriously as a store of value if it was under the control of such entities, thus the situation undermines the entire value proposition of the blockchain."

By cutting out ASIC miners, Monero aims to remain a decentralized and open-source project.

"The announced hard fork and algorithm update of the Monero network on March 9 has lead us to the conclusion that we need to discontinue Coinhive," they wrote.