Conspiracy theories?
I wonder if this is a side effect or is the patch actually crippling Monero mining rigs on purpose?
If you read the forums, a lot of folks using BTc miners found that updating their firmware had a noticeable effect on the hash rate, unfortunately its a requirement as it contains bug fixes and other patches.
Without the updates they won't hash at all due to subtle changes in the BTc algorithm.
As a data point I tried installing the 2018 rollup on my ancient netbook (4GB DDR3, 1.66G dual core) and it did seem slightly slower but haven't yet tried anything processor intensive.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
