Personally I’m not against ASIC mining, not at all. But the danger — from a crypto / decentralized perspective — is that all those ASIC miners are kinda centralized in those mining farms. It would be great if mining could be limited to one machine per IP, or whatever limitation you can think off… just to remove the concept of 1000 miners on one location.

I’m still hoping for a revival of mining at home. Looking at my own house, I see plenty of machines that are online or connected to the power supply 24/7. Why not have those serve as a mining device, no matter how small, or maybe for staking (if you want to throw in that PoW vs PoS discussion).

Now, about the Monero hard fork, am actually amazed how well it worked out. Even though Monero is not that same beast as Bitcoin. To some extend this hard fork reminded me of Sia, which also changed algorithm to avoid ASIC.

However, they launched their own specialized hardware aimed at Sia mining. That’s a bit the danger of this all, as there will always be someone from the inside profiting from an algo change. Every hard fork has a community aspect, a technological aspect and a direct financial and economical aspect to it.