Sia Tech has announced an ASIC miner for SiaCoin, the currency behind their blockchain based decentralized cloud storage platform Sia
Obelisk
After posting a tweet yesterday teasing "Obelisk. Coming soon.", they followed up today with the above image and basically no supporting information.
David Vorick - Sia Developer, said in a slack post that he plans to publish a blog about Obelisk on Friday.
As for now, while there is very little actual information, there is much speculation and quite a lot of flux in the value of SC.
PRICE FLUX
Ups, and downs.
Leading into the 19th
As you can see, the tweet on the 19th caused quite an upward push, sending SC from around 630 satoshi to a ceiling of 838 satoshi.
Often times in this super volatile cryptoconomy a vague mention of "something" coming from any given dev is enough to push prices up.
Prior to the twitter tease SC had already been trending upward since about the 1st of June, but it spiked significantly after the soft announcement.
Sell on the news
After today's tweet unveiling that Obelisk is a piece of ASIC hardware, it's another story. When I started writing this article SC was at it's floor, 666 satoshi. (hell yeah- sup Lucifer) Since I write slow, It's no longer quite as dramatic looking and has started to rebound a bit, hovering around 710 satoshi at time of writing.
Overall, a large downward push, flooring out at about half of the total gains from the day before. It's hard to say what will happen from here, but let's explore a bit of what we know.
What is Sia?
Sia is an open source blockchain based decentralized cloud storage platform. Basically Dropbox, but instead of your stuff being held on servers owned by a company, your files are split apart, encrypted, and stored redundantly on all kinds of host servers across the decentralized blockchain network. No one controls your stuff, it's secure, and you hold the keys.
SiaCoin(SC) is the currency that fuels the service. Users can both earn SC by renting out their harddrive space to be used as storage by others, or pay SC to store their files on the network. Sia boasts a storage fee that is 10x cheaper than competitors, and the low cost of storing files on Sia's network is one of its major selling points.
It's still quite early in development, and while it's useable as intended it is not heavily used at the moment. Devs say they are working to improve various functionalities such as creating dynamic price adjustments so service costs can stay fixed against the fluctuating value of the coin.
To sum it up, Sia is a seemingly great alternative to centralized and more costly cloud storage services, but it hasn't grown up quite yet.
What's an ASIC?
An ASIC. or application-specific integrated circuit, is basically a microchip that's specifically designed to process one kind of thing. BTC ASICs came around first, and had the ability to dwarf the hashrate of existing GPUs while staying more power efficient. Nowadays BTC mining farms are built on ASIC technology, and other SHA-256 based coins can be mined on ASIC hardware as well.
ASICs are sold often times as essentially little compact PCs ready to plug in, set up and mine. They also come in USB dongles. At the time of this article it seems that the prebuilt units are quite hard to come by, and are selling for a premium used.
As of now there is no ASIC chip designed for mining SC. Once this releases it's safe to assume that the total mining hashrate of SC will go up tremendously.
To sum it up, an ASIC is a magical computer that mines way better than your crappy computer.
What could ASIC mining mean for the future of Sia?
This is where the wild speculation comes in. There are people who think that this is bad for Sia, that it will drive prices down by increasing circulating supply, or create a huge gap in mining competition.
One key point that there does seem to be some division on is whether or not this will help to decentralize the Chinese mining monopoly, or simply lead to huge warehouses full of ASIC miners swallowing up most of the block rewards. I'm leaning toward the latter, although a scenario where the Obelisk is affordable and efficient enough for solo miners to keep pace would be pretty cool.
Overall though, this seems to me like a good thing long term. Despite the contention that this is an odd move so early on in overall development, there are many positive possibilities that stem from this.
Firstly, it indicates the possibility of a partnership/ long term contract with a chip manufacturer. This would be good for the value of the company, probably the currency, and could potentially lead towards blockchain devs producing proprietary mining hardware as a more common practice, increasing the value of the cryptospace overall. Imagine if chip manufacturers were bidding on contracts to develop ASIC hardware for high value blockchains!
It could make the platform more accessible in general, by lowering the hardware gate to get into mining. SC is still a pretty minable coin with a decent gaming rig. I can mine around 100 per day passively on my i7/970, but that's down from the nearly 250/day I was mining a month ago. If Obelisk is affordable, and the SC price remains stable or rises, the ASIC could prove a profitable entry point into the Sia service. Futhermore it could be a great entry into cryptocurrency in general, possibly providing a means to turn tangible profit as a solo miner.
What do you think?
Is it too early for dedicated hardware? Should Sia have waited until the hash difficulty was higher and focused on other projects first? Do you think the value of Sia shows promise long term, and is this a good step?
Sia holders like myself, are you more or less excited for Sia's future after this news, what do you think will come of Friday's details?
I hope some smarter people than myself weigh in!
if you wanna read more:
sia website: https://sia.tech/
twitter: https://twitter.com/SiaTechHQ
slack: https://siatalk.slack.com
sia wallet: 1840c14ca9875a5efa439539d61b9b19d871c0d8e4434dbbf506ee128518efa85779d976e072
-gurudeva