Sia Hard Fork to Resist ASICs, What Will Happen to Miners?

After nearly a year of discussion in the community, Sia finally decided to execute a hard fork to resist ASIC mining machines from Bitmain and Innosilicoin. After the hard fork, only miners using Obelisk hardware devices will be able to mine in the blockchain network.

Resisting ASIC Miners

Sia co-founder David Vorick announced the news on Medium on October 1:

Sia will fork today to counteract the harm done to the Sia community by the current ASIC monopoly, and to send a clear signal to all future Sia ASIC manufacturers that we will not tolerate ASIC abuse and monopoly behavior.

The harm Vorick is referring to comes from ASIC mining hardware manufacturers, which are said to have affected the investments of Siacoin community members.

Securing the Obelisk Miner

After the hard fork, only Obelisk miners manufactured by Nebulous, Sia's parent company, will be able to mine Siacoin. Unlike other hard forks that resist ASIC monopoly, Sia's goal is not to prevent ASIC mining.

Instead, the company appears to be interested in protecting its investment in Obelisk mining hardware. Vorick said:

We believe that accepting an ASIC monopoly is better than resisting ASICs altogether. That is, we do not believe a cryptocurrency needs to rely on others or abuse an ASIC monopoly.

The balance between hard forks and decentralization

Once Vorick’s comments were published, critics pointed out that Sia was simply trading one monopoly for another — an attempt to establish an internal monopoly. This is the main reason why the hard fork debate has been delayed.

However, the Sia team responded that it would not force users to accept this hard fork. Nebulous would only update the code for PoW reset and encourage users to upgrade.

Vorick said that those who oppose the hard fork can continue to use the old blockchain code. This situation may lead to a network split, and Ethereum and ETC are the best examples.

SC stated in a blog post that Sia will release hard fork code in v1.3.6 , the current version v1.3.5

The article believes that the existing ASIC is a malicious monopoly, a high-profit monopoly, and is unequal. They decided to prevent other ASIC mining machine monopolies. They suggested that other manufacturers use Obelisk's secret circuit extension, and they can control the monopoly through this design.

Where are the miners going?

The mainstream mining machines that can mine SC include Xindong X11, Antminer A3, etc. Recently, STU-U has also released STU-U2. If SC is upgraded, these mining machines will not be able to mine SC. So what else can these mining machines mine besides SC? In theory, all Blake2B algorithm currencies can be mined, but there are basically no other Blake2B algorithm currencies except SC.

Currently, there is only one SC fork, Hyperspace (https://hspace.app/). Hyperspace also provides distributed storage, with a total of about 15.4 billion (less than half of the total SC), of which 3 billion is locked by the team for 3 years, and 3.5 billion has been airdropped to SC holders at a ratio of 10:1. However, Hyperspace has not yet been listed on any exchange.

How to mine Hyperspace?

In theory, Hyperspace mining is the same as SC mining, using the same mining machines and software. Currently, some mining pools support Hyperspace mining. You can refer to here: https://hspace.app/mining