Bitcoin Forum

Monero, a leading privacy-centric cryptocurrency, has undergone a hard fork in recent days – producing a new Monero chain in addition to the now renamed ‘Monero Classic’. The fork was initiated to protect Monero against mining centralization, as Bitmain had developed ASIC units purpose-built for mining XMR tokens.
Monero Announces Network Upgrade
On the 28th of March, Monero announced that it had scheduled a major upgrade for April 6th – which would see network undergo a hard fork.

The official announcement gave two primary outcomes that it intended to achieve through the fork. “First, a PoW tweak to curb any potential threat of ASIC and preserved ASIC resistance, and “Second, the minimum ring size is bumped to 7.” Monero’s expansion in minimum ring size was executed in order to strengthen the privacy afforded by XMR.

It was revealed last month that Bitmain had developed a new ASIC product specifically developed to mine Monero, creating a perceived urgency to fork among developers.

Read more https://news.bitcoin.com/asic-resistance-increasingly-hot-topic-in-crypto-as-monero-forks

Monero developers tried to avoid the two chains and they hoped that the chain with original algorithm will eventually die, but some people didn't agree so they decided to maintain the original chain and call it Monero Classic. By the way, there is no info about the forked coin Monero Classic on official website of Monero.
I have mixed feelings about it but first of all, Monero Classic folks don't look credible to me, secondly, I like Monero's argumentation and I agree with them that ASICs would cause centralization.

I'll be glad to see all ASICs on Monero Classic chain. Let it mine this shitcoin and not to affect Monero and other cryptonight coins.

I suspect there is not much organic opposition. And I'm not seeing much interest in this ANN thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3269220.0;all). Bitmain has an interest in pointing some ASICs at it; they could even be behind the whole effort. They don't want people to keep bricking their ASICs, though I'm sure they've already covered overheads by mining with X3s and then selling them. I guess anyone who bought an X3 and doesn't want to mine BCN or AEON has this now.


Did Siacoin ever fork to brick Bitmain A3 miners? How did that work out?

The Monero development team cannot fork everytime there is an Asic threat on the horizon. They have to think of the long term solution and embrace Asic mining at some point in the future, I reckon.

Monero will not become as big as bitcoin if their developers hard fork every 6 months and change consensus rules on a whim like they did.