XMR Identity Crisis: Monero Undergoes Five-Way Split

Monero, the world's largest privacy coin by market cap, underwent an emergency hard-fork as an active measure against miner centralization.

With the recent release of the BK-N miner from Baikal and the Antminer X3 from Bitmain, the core XMR communities stance against specified mining cards has seen its user base splinter into five separate currencies.

These mining cards are implementations of ASICs, hardware geared towards the Crypotnight hashing algorithm, and offer a considerable performance advantage over CPU or GPU miners.

Dedicated mining hardware brings massive amounts of hashing power into the hands of a concentrated group of users, disrupting the power dynamic within the XMR community and leading to a consolidation of power in the network.

The position of the Monero community on dedicated mining hardware stems from the origins of Monero itself - fueled by an ideological diversion from Bitcoin's development, Monero prioritizes privacy and an egalitarian mindset, opting for fair distribution of mining power throughout the network.

Monero's official statement on the algorithm change also goes to great lengths to reaffirm the teams "Somewhat formal stance" against ASICs, outlining their plans and reasoning as to why the developers will combat the current wave of Cryptonight-specific miners.

There have been many conversations amongst Monero community members regarding how XMR should maintain their ASIC resistance, including transitioning their hashing algorithm to the Cuckoo Cycle.

Five new projects have spawned as a direct response to this hardline policy against specified Cryptonight mining cards, all of which are operating on the ASIC compatible Version 11 XMR code.

While many claim ASIC-compatible Monero forks will be dominated by large mining institutions, network speed and increased validation times will continue to be a selling point for new forks.

With multiple mining hardware manufacturers producing Cryptonight capable ASICs, consensus dominance may be dictated by the rate at which miners adopt specialized hardware.