Is it really worthwhile to continue resisting ASIC and fork Monero again?

In April this year, Monero had a sensational fork, which made it very noticeable in the cryptocurrency circle. Hard forks are not uncommon, after all, the top cryptocurrency Bitcoin and the top competitor Ethereum have both experienced forks due to internal disagreements. But the hard fork of Monero is still amazing, because it split into four coins at once, and all four coins claim to be the "original Monero".

Currently, there are Monero Classic (XMC), Monero 0 (XMZ), Monero Original (XMO), and a second project called Monero Classic (XMC); these projects continue to run on version 11 of the Monero protocol. This means that they are all still compatible on a single network, using the same tokens — just with different names.

As an ongoing protocol upgrade process, Monero has formed a habit of hard forking every six months. Regardless of the turmoil of the last hard fork, the generous Monero community still upgraded again according to habit.

On November 30, they even live-broadcasted the entire hard fork on the Internet. The most notable feature of this upgrade is the introduction of the workload proof algorithm RandomX, which uses random code execution and memory focusing technology to resist ASIC.

Monero is really not fond of ASICs because its encryption algorithm was improved in a hard fork in April. This backwards-incompatible change made all existing ASIC mining hardware useless.

The Monero team believes that ASICs have a centralizing effect because only a few companies in the world are capable of manufacturing them. The risks posed by ASIC mining hardware seem to be the reason why the development and user communities have been agreeing to upgrade.

Can ASICs be resisted?

Bran Cohen, the author of the BitTorrent protocol, recently said that ASIC-resistant proof of work is a pipe dream and a very bad idea. Instead, it is better to accept SAIC because "when the inevitable failure occurs, ASIC resistance will only create more centralization in the solution process."

Even Vitalik Buterin has said something similar. He said that more and more people are beginning to agree that ASIC-resistant algorithms have a lifespan, and that ASIC resistance will ultimately make 51% attacks cheaper.