Crypto's War On Miners? It Might Already Be Over

Driving the defense is the ideological belief that lacking sufficient competitors, ASIC manufacturer Bitmain commands too substantial a portion of the network share, a market reality that threatens to undermine the open, decentralized participation that cryptocurrencies strive for.

For now, monero is willing to go it alone, with regular anti-ASIC updates that aim to keep ASIC hardware off the network until such time that ASICs become ubiquitous, like USB drives, so that they can be run by a wider pool of participants.

"Ultimately ASIC resistance is futile but between now and then, before we capitulate to ASICs, let's resist it for as long as possible until ASICs are commoditized," Spagni told CoinDesk.

According to Vorick's estimations, which have now been widely circulated, ASIC manufacturers move faster than anti-ASIC code.

Ultimately, he now believes that ASICs will continue, simply because the economics of beating the competition in crypto mining are so favorable to those who do it.

Even if software developers keep up the fight, Vorick warned of something he calls the "Secret ASIC.".

Projects could share their code with ASIC manufacturers from the beginning, in exchange for some promises in return, such that ASICs would be fairly distributed, and a cryptocurrency's community gets first pick.

Following the meeting, Bitmain published a blog post published on Friday, stating it would be exploring an exercise in "Radical transparency" when it came to the shipment of zcash ASICs.

While the zcash company has no intention to move away from the ASICs, the Zcash Foundation is embarking on anti-ASIC research, as well trying to better determine the breakdown of the mining network.

Going forward, Wilcox said it's possible the cryptocurrency will support both GPU and ASIC mining on separate networks.