The shoe has dropped! Monero’s second algorithm upgrade has been confirmed

In March 2018, @fluffypony posted on Twitter that he had confirmed through reliable sources that Monero's ASIC miners had begun mass production. In order to combat the centralization of ASIC miners, the Monero core development team will fight against ASIC miners by changing their mining algorithm.

On April 6, 2018, Monero successfully forked at a height of 1546200, and the network was successfully upgraded, making all ASIC miners only able to mine other forked coins. After the upgrade, the total network computing power dropped from 1200M to 400M. The computing power change is shown in the figure

The specific changes to the algorithm can be seen here (click here to learn more), and in summary:

1. The entire change only involves about 500 lines of code, which are some minor changes and do not change the core part of the algorithm. Therefore, the rumors that the new algorithm cannot be mined with the CPU or cannot be mined with video memory below 3G are all rumors!

2. The specific upgrade block height is not included in this pull request, which means the upgrade time has not been determined yet

3. This change will make ASIC miners ineffective again (if any), and may make it more difficult to develop new ASICs

Based on the experience of the last upgrade, miners only need to update their mining software to the latest version before the upgrade time, and ensure that the mining pool is also the latest version, so that they can migrate smoothly.

The difficulty has started to rise in early September. It is expected that the difficulty will drop slightly after this upgrade. Please stay tuned and don't turn off your computer.

The following are the progress of several major mining software in response to this upgrade:

xmrig: Under development, see the branch here (click here to learn more), not yet fully tested

xmr-stak: No news yet

claymore: No activity at the moment

Test mining pool:

http://killallasics.moneroworld.com

It is expected that CNv2 support will be launched tomorrow . If you want to test new mining software, you can use this mining pool

Before the code was merged, some developers have done some basic performance testing, see the link (click here to learn more).

Compared with the previous version, the modified module has been tested on Vega56, 470, 570 and other commonly used graphics cards, and the performance is above 90%. Considering that there is no optimization for graphics cards, it is expected that the computing power will not change much from the previous version after stabilization, so the computing power of the entire network will not change much.

At the same time, I also compiled the latest version of xmrig code and did some tests. The results for CPU i7-7700HQ are as follows: