Well-known financial blogger PZ published an article on ASIC mining machines and Monero fork

To all the cryptocurrency community members:

Hello everyone, I am PZ, an early Bitcoin evangelist and a blockchain ecosystem builder. Most of you know me because of my persistence and efforts in the development of the blockchain industry ecosystem. In the past few years, I saw that Bitcoin and Litecoin had different concepts, which led to a long-term split in the community and the development of the main chain could not move forward. So I organized the Litecoin International Roundtable Forum and the Bitcoin International Roundtable Forum in 2017. Both meetings were very successful, and Litecoin and Bitcoin also successfully upgraded their main chains.

Recently, our team noticed that Monero, the world's largest anonymous currency, is about to change its POW algorithm and plans to change it twice within a year. As we all know, the official reason for this algorithm change is that several companies (Bitmain, PinIdea, etc.) have developed professional mining machines for the Monero algorithm.

In fact, the emergence of professional mining machines for a cryptocurrency is a normal market economic behavior. In the nearly ten years since the birth of the cryptocurrency community, we have seen the birth of professional mining machines for Bitcoin, followed by the birth of Litecoin, which was expected to resist professional ASIC mining machines. It used the scrypt algorithm that was considered to be "resistant to ASIC" professional mining machines at the time, but only two years later, professional Litecoin mining machines appeared. We once considered whether to modify the Litecoin algorithm to resist the emergence of professional ASIC mining machines. However, after our careful and serious discussions, we believe that for any valuable algorithm, the emergence of professional mining machines is only a matter of time. In the end, we made our own choice and accepted the existence of professional mining machines. Now more and more high-value currencies (algorithms) have given birth to professional ASIC mining machines, which has become a very common phenomenon in the industry.

So is the existence of professional mining machines completely useless? Obviously, this argument is absolutely unfair. The emergence of professional mining machines will indeed accelerate the emergence of various problems such as the centralization of computing power, but please do not forget that the emergence of professional mining machines will also greatly improve the security of the network. If there are professional mining machines, then similar incidents such as "Monero was attacked by more than 500,000 zombie networks" can be avoided.

We understand the Monero team's desire and work to maintain Monero's "ASIC-free professional mining machine". For a long time, due to the excellent work of the Monero team, Monero and its community have achieved great development and provided many valuable contributions to the entire cryptocurrency community. In the community, many people agree with this hard fork to change the algorithm. However, I think that the wishes of some people who want to keep the original algorithm and accept the existence of mining machines should be respected.

We believe that the two ideas of "embracing professional ASIC miners" and "going away from professional ASIC miners" have their own advantages and disadvantages. The current vigorous development of the global cryptocurrency ecosystem is due to the emergence of various creative ideas from different people. The collision of different ideas has brought about the flourishing of various digital currencies. We have always believed that the ecological diversity of the cryptocurrency community is very conducive to the birth of a safer, stable, prosperous and beautiful crypto world. We can and should allow these few people who hold different ideas to have equal opportunities to show themselves with the majority, and the free market will make its own choices.

Therefore, we believe that both development ideas should be given equal development opportunities. We will invest our efforts to maintain the Monero system before this algorithm modification, so as to retain the spark that allows the ecosystem to have more development potential. At the same time, we also invite all developers, mining machine manufacturers, trading platforms, miners, wallets and other friends in the ecological chain to join us to make the network ecology more possible!