A hard fork of privacy-centric cryptocurrency monero executed this morning, but the success of the roll-out is still unclear.
At block number 1546000 (08.20 UTC on Friday), the software upgrade of the cryptocurrency went live, according to data from blox.minexmr.com. Due to the controversial nature of the upgrade, the monero community have gathered on social media to observe its levels of adoption.
While monero hard forks are frequent, the current upgrade introduces a new consensus algorithm intended to protect the network from the emergence of ASIC mining hardware.
Announced by hardware supplier Bitmain last month, monero’s rejection of the ASICs has led to several competing cryptocurrencies, including monero classic and monero original, that intend to preserve the former ASIC compatible software.
As such, the monero community is observing the hashrate, or speed of which the cryptocurrency is mined, in an attempt to gauge adoption.
Fluctuations in hashrate have caused some panic on the monero subreddit, however, core developer “hyc” told CoinDesk, it will be “a couple hours for us to see how the network overall hash rate settles out.”
Additionally, monero enthusiasts are observing the former chain and compiling lists of mining pools that have yet to upgrade.
The new upgrade will also increase monero’s ring size from 5 to 7, in an attempt to increase the robustness of the privacy tool, and protect against a deanonymization vector introduced by a further monero competitor, moneroV.
Hyc told CoinDesk:
“Most of us are still holding our breath”
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