Monero’s [XMR] scheduled hard fork for March 2019 invites mixed reactions from Monero community

Monero [XMR], the thirteenth largest cryptocurrency by market cap, is up and ready for the next hard fork. According to a recent announcement made by the Monero team, the hard fork will occur on block #1788000 and will be taking place on 9 March, 2019.

Sech1, an XMR contributor posted on Reddit:

“<moneromooo> So, we’re forking in 4 weeks. Block 1788000. CNv4 still not finalized, but will be soon, hopefully. <moneromooo> So if you’re a merchant/exchange/etc, please plan this in time.”

The post further read that this fork will not be introducing any new features for Monero besides new notification and new block size algorithm. This was followed with a statement claiming that the testing of the fork “should” be easy as there are few changes introduced in the fork.

SamsungGalaxyPlayer, a Redditor explained the upcoming changes:

“Apparently this will be forked with the current 0.13 code, so very few. A couple default payment ID changes, new adaptive block size algorithm, new notifications, and the new mining algorithm. I don’t know when the 0.14 code will be used.”

This announcement was soon met with dissent from some of the members of the Monero community. This was mainly because the decision was first made by the developers in a private chat. In addition, the announcement about the postponement of the changes, which were initially proposed, to a later date not being discussed was also frowned upon by the members.

SamsungGalaxyPlayer said:

“Right, but this is very different. The Core Team decided to delay all the other features to an unknown time to push out the ASIC and block size changes earlier. This action was not discussed or known to the wider community until today, and this is the first time this sort of action has occurred in recent memory. Other upgrades followed a more well-known pattern before they were announced.”

To this, FluffyPonyza aka Riccardo Spagni, the lead developer of Monero said:

“I agree – this is wrong, and should be fixed.”

This, however, was soon criticized by another Redditor, Jamaisvu33, who asked what the action would be. The Redditor went on to say that the people of the Monero community have become “victim[s] to developers’ agendas, taking into consideration that the space is supposed to be decentralized.

FluffyPonyza responded:

“They should be “victim to the developer’s agendas” – if you don’t like what the 500+ contributors are doing, go hire different developers – but the developers shouldn’t have a decision forced on them. We had a good discussion in #monero-dev and we’ve found a good path forward that has resounding support from people who have contributed code.”