A Hard Fork On Monero Has Unusually Resulted In Four Branches Of Its Blockchain

Monero (XMR) which is one of the cryptocurrencies that focus on privacy recently was recently forked as part of a plan to make the process of mining the digital asset more democratic. However, the hard fork unusually resulted in the creation of four Monero blockchain branches and thus four cryptocurrencies with each claiming to be the original Monero.

Monero is one of the special coins in the market especially because it was not made as a clone of Bitcoin's original codebase. It was created in April 2014 through a codebase called the Cryptonote protocol which was created by a cryptographer called Nicolas van Saberhagen.

The Monero developers and community decided to carry out the hard fork in response to the recent announcement of the upcoming Antminer X3 which can hash the Cryptonight mining protocol. There are also other ASICs that have the capacity to process the mining algorithm of Cryptonight. The idea was to use the fork so that the machines would become useless against the Monero network. However, this led to the blockchain being split into four sections that rely on the original codebase version, meaning there were four resulting cryptocurrencies.

Monero developers believe that there are advantages and disadvantages associated with being on either side of the proverbial coin when it comes to ASIC mining. Their argument is that it is better to explore both options by creating equal opportunities for development.

The forks have been named Monero Classic (XMC), Monero O (XMZ), and Monero Original (XMO). The Monero Classic team is from Singapore and they revealed in a statement that the decision to fork Monero was rushed and that the original code should not have been changed. Meanwhile, the lead developer for Monero O claims that carrying out a fork on the protocol to avoid ASICs does not result in a consensus. The developer also added that the proof-of-work system introduced by Satoshi (Bitcoin founder) is the only system that can achieve a decentralized consensus.

The recent fork has attracted a lot of criticism and there have been rumors that the forks might not be stable enough to make it into the long-run. Additionally, there have been questions as to which is the original coin that is usable. Also, there is the question of whether or not the holders of the original Monero will be credited with the three extra cryptocurrencies that resulted from the fork.