@smooth. How much is the projected reduction in hashpower once we do our own hard fork to kill ASICs mining? Monero lost 2/3.
Also, remember last year's surprising sudden increase in Aeon's hash power? It was not botnets, it was Bitmain testing their miners! Why didn't we foresee it?? hehe
Monero has lost about 80-85%. I don't know how much AEON will lose. Obviously it is a much smaller coin so less attractive to very large miners (who would just drive up the difficulty against themself). Still likely some of AEON hash rate is ASICs, after all some of the products explicitly advertise CryptoNight-Lite support, they would have to at least 'tested' that.
What are the Monero development team's thoughts on when ASICs, or more specifically Bitmain, started entering the Cryptonote mining space? Do you reckon that it might be longer than 3 months including testing?
Bitmain might have started mining XMR on November 2017 while tests started on July of the same year.
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/hashrate-xmr.htmlSome of those hash rate change are likely natural, due to price changes.
The best indicator is probably to look at profitability or some variant thereof. We can see that starting in early 2018 or possibly late 2017, profitability started a decline to lows not seen since 2016. That was probably due to ASICs starting to capture most of the hash rate, though when they started at a low hash rate share is impossible to say.
Here an analysis from Monero core team member ArticMine.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/8al8tm/considering_that_a_sizeable_amount_must_have_not/dwzxdj6/