Monero is one of the most famous privacy coins right now and the deep web has started to use more. This is one of the few coins that have real world use and isn't something that I would call a shitcoin.
There was a update that took place on the 18th of this month and it has brought drastic changes to the coin in terms of transaction size and fees.
The fork has decreased the transaction size from 18.5Kb(Average) to 3Kb. This has helped decrease the transaction costs to 2 cents from the previous high of 54.
This is definitely good news and reduced transaction fees will help in facilitating micro-payments. The team has also changed the consensus mechanism to be ASIC resistant.
ASICs or Application Specific Integrated Circuit miners are a thereat to decentralization in Crypto mining as they easily outperform GPUs and CPUs. ASICs are basically machines that are created to do mining and nothing else.
Bitmain had launched a very powerful ASIC just for coins like monero and that could threaten the network's decentralization therefore the update has made the network more ASIC resistant and let me emphasize on the "ASIC resistant" part.
NO PoW coin can be fully ASIC proof as the mining algorithm can be cracked and a ASIC miner can be developed. When someone says that a coin is ASIC resistant it means that there's no ASIC machine developed to mine that coin.
I'll do a full explanation about the ASICs in my next post...
