My A3 Siacoin (SC) miner story
The past week or so has been quite hectic for me. Was trying to chase after the A3 miner that mines Siacoin, after my friend, Bonus told me about it on 18th of Jan. Apparently, Bitmain released their new A3 miner out of the sudden. Stunning the whole Sia community. And they were really PISSED. Coz Sia also have their own miner - under Obelisk. Which is supposed to be released in June 2018 for the first batch (pre- sales started like 1 year before the expected release- which was a big NO for me). And 6 weeks later for the 2nd batch. Even got a petition to soft fork Sia’s blockchain to make A3 obsolete. But it didn’t go through in the end as I feel Sia community are very very compassionate. They cancelled the intention at the end. And even welcomed the A3 miners as a part of their community.
Anyway, abit about Siacoin (SC). So, I am quite a fan about their project. It is supposed to be a decentralized private cloud where you can upload your files via the use of a smart contract. You data is distributed among host who are ‘sell’ their extra storage space for SC, and Sia holds the payment in escrow until the contract is finished. The best part is, it's only a tenth of the traditional storage cost like dropbox, google drive, onedrive and so on. The previous companies that did something similar in regards to cloud storage were filecoin and storj - both did fantastic.
So back to my A3 story. Unfortunately for me. I wasn’t in time to buy the A3 from Bitmain website. Coz the news took my by surprise. And I did not prepare any bitcoin cash (BCH) to buy them. I managed to order, added the A3 to my cart and was given only 30 minutes to finalize the purchase. However, as I did not prepare any BCH before this, I had to change some coin in the exchange (decided to use Qryptos exchange as I had some BTC there). Which cost me a bomb as I did spot exchange. Upon withdrawal, I was so disappointed to find out that Qryptos requires 1 full working day for the withdrawal to be completed. WTF. So I ended up seeing my cart being cancelled as the 30 minutes payment window closed. :sob. My friend Bonus managed to get 1 though.
The miner arrived on 23rd of Jan which was amazingly fast. Bonus got his and start mining immediately. The results seemed promising enough when Bonus showed me the mining results. That night, some people was also selling their miners. Trying to make a quick buck. I decided to get in on the action as well (but had to pay more than expected- hopefully I would make an ROI soon). I bought a ready unit C.O.D (cash on delivery) at about 12 midnight that night itself. Within hours my miner was up as well. So far, it has been mining for 3 days. I only got OK results as more and more miners are being runned at the same time. Causing the difficulty to significantly increase.
Anyway, I do feel for the Sia community who bought the Obelisk miners. They had 2 major issues at that time.
- Why did the developers took so long (1 year) to release their own Obelisk miner? It cost ~$2500 for the miner that will come 1 year later. Lots of comments about if you put $2500 in certain alts, like Ripple or NEM, you would have made a small fortune. It's now selling it's 2nd batch at a cheaper price than the 1st batch at only US$1599. First batch haven't arrived.
- They acted like Nokia. One of the many reasons why Nokia died last time was, they always like to announce something early. And release very very late. In that period of time, many other competitors have already came out with something similar, if not better. True enough, Bitmain came out with their own. :facepalm. It’s like the story of the opportunist who drank the glass of water while realist, optimist and pessimist was arguing over it. :triple facepalm.
Triple Facepalm
Long story short, I hope for a few things.
- SC developers delivers what they promised.
- Bitmain to stop selling rigs. It really screws up the difficulty. They are known to be quite aggressive and has zero empathy towards their customers or other mining community for that matter.
- SC price to go up. At the time of writing, it’s at US$0.03809.
- My A3 to not die on me for the next 8 months.
My take on this whole fiasco. I suddenly realised I am a customer of a really big asshole. Who are not bothered about their own customers or the customers surrounding them. They are only out for profits. I prolly would decline to be a customer for Bitmain in the near future.
