Today I've been enjoying the April 6 2018 Monero Hardfork.
That's why today I turned my very low-end CPU miners on again.
It's now clear to me that the massive spike in monero mining difficulty was due to the Bitmain's ASIC miners. They were testing these machines (or perhaps, just mining for themselves since they were in an huge advantage) for months. Then, when they already had their profit, they sold the miners.
Monero dev team reacted quickly. It would hardfork, changing the algorithm and thus, making the ASIC Cryptonight miners irrelevant. It was a pretty quick response. The open source miners devs reacted fast as well. I saw no rant in the community, nor anyone wanting to cause a fork by keeping the old version.
One's concern could be that monero dev team acted very quickly, without consulting the community (the community seems fine and are heavily supporting the decision, however), in a very centralized way.
Such thing would be very different in the bitcoin community, where changes are always softforks (i.e, optional) and are proposed (using B.I.P.s), and debated for huge periods of time. That's why no such move is possible in bitcoin, and therefore, bitcoin will always be dominated by ASICs.
The difference is clear: centralized computing power versus centralized development.
Which one is the best? I really don't know. I don't think anyone really knows either. That's why I am glad that both Monero and Bitcoin exist so I can invest in both of them.
Both are very promising experiments.
The best path shall be known, the test of time shall give its answer.
What are your thoughts in this?