So... most of the last version upgrade is terribly positive. More new and important features. A more stable and quicker IMHO GUI wallet. Subadresses, multisig, and so on.
But the big NEWS is the tweak to render current ASICS useless.
And we are seeing the insane drop in hashrate, and crazy rise in mining profitability.
But here in the SPECULATION thread I do not see much speculation as to what this means price wise for Monero. I can't really figure it out myself. So many moving parts... So far there's been a little drop in price. I imagine Jihan want's to revenge sell... and he might have a warchest to do that with, though I doubt he kept more than he sold. Then there are the forks. Not a direct relationship, but related at least.
What do you guys think. Way less hashpower hitting the network, yet so much more decentralized. Web miners suddenly more profitable.
I think ASIC resistance is a positive thing for the project... but what does this do to the price?
I'd expect the massive dumping already happened (XMR ~ 50% of last month's high)
ASIC resistance is a goal of the project - price I'd expect to be a stable growth now, without meteoric rises hopefully attracting too much speculation.
Massive drop in hash shows that all the jscript miners really haven't deployed any updates. Similar situation appears to be true with botnet miners and ASIC miners, for now.
I think the previous mining is mainly done by the ASIC. There are still about 850MH/s mining the XMO
Mining was mainly done by ASIC because GPUs miners rather chose other coins. Now they are flocking back to Monero. And hash rate will soon go back to close where it was. Those 850MH/s will just do what they want to do. They are getting replaced as we speak.
It is a combination of both. The profitability had gone well below the historic range which means given current prices CPUs and GPUs would likely never push up the hash rate that high (ignoring slow Moore's Law-type improvements), only ASICs.
I would like to know what your thoughts on the git question you had posed now that we see the hash results? Are you happy with the result or would you still make an argument for ASICs in the future? I'm looking forward to a analysis of the hashrate as it progresses and a comprehensive aggregate of the probabilities of which percentage was indeed botnets as I expect they should be continuing to migrate back to the dominate chain (By which I mean the DEV supported chain).
ArticMine's analysis is pretty convincing that it was mostly ASICs. Botnets have been around forever and have never pushed profitability that low. Probably because they are constrained by available zombie machines (there are not tens of millions readily available for mining). It also doesn't make a whole lot of sense for botnets to end up quickly on the ASIC-friendly fork. They would have to be running their own pool/node, and not update it despite losing money, and most botnets we've seen have just used public pools (in which case they would stop mining altogether if not updated, not switch to the the ASIC-friendly fork).
As far as the GitHub ASIC-friendly question, it is still very much a hypothetical whether an ASIC-friendly approach could work and result in a competitive ASIC market, regardless of the algorithm. I'm personally somewhat doubtful on it, given the current realities of how chips are designed and manufactured. Perhaps there is a possibility of some sort of open source ASIC, but I don't know enough about the fabrication process to have an opinion on it.
@explorer, thanks for the heads up about the non-removed post. Not sure what happened, I did click delete on it.