The danger of ASIC mining.

A few days ago, it was announced that Monero bifurcated its network in order to prevent its centralization by the action of the ASIC miners, leaving inoperative any equipment of this kind that specialized in its CryptoNight /CryptoNite algorithm.

After having carried out this event and its consequences, the inexperienced or new people were wondering what all this meant, which are the ASIC miners, which is a Hard Fork and what is the real danger facing the Cryptocurrency with dedicated mining equipment, in this article I will explain all this in the simple way.

It should be noted that the cryptocurrency mining is one of the most substantial activities that occur in its ecosystem, thus allowing the confirmations of transactions, the replication in each node the accounting history of the Blockchain and in the process obtaining a reward for it.

In addition, the global security of the network is invigorated, but if this is abused with dedicated equipment, serious consequences can occur.

What are ASIC equipment?

The ASIC miners (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) they are a set of integrated circuits designed, constructed and optimized specifically to fulfill a single task in particular, which in this case would be the mining of cryptocurrencies.

The creation of this class of equipment arises from the need to obtain a greater power of mining that due to the high difficulty in the network, both CPUs and GPUs cannot provide enough power to fulfill this action profitably, it’s for that these systems are counting on an advanced design that allows to mine Cryptocurrencies at an incredible speed.

Currently, there are a large number of models of different sizes, with yields and levels of consumption that vary greatly from one to the other, thus adjusting to the needs of the user.

It should be noted that most of the benefits provided with each ASIC are usually obtained during the first six weeks.

The danger of centralization.

In the past, there was a time when Cryptocurrency mining was an activity that anyone could do and with this, people using their home computers could obtain a small wealth, and therefore, a power would be formed through a large user base.

But over time and the number of users, the difficulty of mining increased, so some professional mining groups began to have specialized computer equipment (ASIC) and so, emerged and formed these groups — or pools — mainly in China, to have a large part of the domain over the creation of the digital currency.

Within the community, there is concern about this type of centralization that would damage the security of the network, the competence of the miners helps protect the system and its participants, preventing the network of intruders.

Bitmain became the main force in the mining of both Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies with the development of the ASIC chip, which saw its processing power rise to about 29 percent of all hashing power worldwide with its control of Antpool and BTC.com

When Bitmain announced to have developed an ASIC for Monero, the developers of this Cryptocurrency, already warned, that they would not allow their Cryptocurrency to suffer the same fate as Bitcoin with the centralized mining with these equipment.

They mentioned that if these products reached the market, they would update the protocol on which this cryptocurrency is based, to leave them as an expensive paperweight and Bitmain does not accept returns.

Well, Monero has updated its protocol and has left the ASICs for CryptoNight / CryptoNite useless.

The developers of Monero refuse to have a centralization of the mining of their cryptocurrency and for that reason they have updated their Blockchain to version 12. Leaving the ASIC miners inoperative.

Monero applied a Hard Fork to his network, in order to render inoperative any ASIC mining hardware that specializes in his algorithm. The network suffered a significant slowdown due to the drop of the hash rate, however, they informed once the difficulty of the network is updated to the current hash / rate, it will return to normal.

What is a hard fork?

When we talk about a Hard Fork, in the world of programming it refers to the action of copying the source code of a program and as we speak of Cryptocurrencies, with it you can have two things:

Clone the code for the creation of a new Cryptocurrency

In the case of being an open source currency, anyone with sufficient knowledge of Blockchain can execute its own fork in order to create a totally new Cryptocurrency.

Make an update to the existing code.

This is done when you need to update the code or redesign it for better performance. Depending on the intentions of the developers, it may be a simple increase in the size of the blocks, etc.

In this case we would be talking about a Hard Fork because, as mentioned above, it would be implementing unique and important features to the code of this Cryptocurrency, resulting in the absolute incompatibility of the ASIC equipment with the mining process of Monero, leaving obsolete any attempt to centralize with these equipment.

Is DeepOnion protected against ASIC equipment?

As of the writing of this article, DeepOnion does not have any kind of protection against mining ASIC, but with the arrival of VoteCentral in the next week this could change since, if the users agree and give their vote, it could be implement a good protection against this unfair and monopolizing form of mining, further democratizing this cryptocurrency and making it stronger.