Hello Steemians,
SIA just made a big announcement today on Twitter :
You can see the original tweet : HERE
(I do think decentralized cloud storage is a great opportunity for all of us, and i own siacoins myself)
I have mixed feelings about this news, since they already have an ongoing partnership with IBM regarding the Minebox.
MINEBOX
I was impressed when SIA announced the Minebox in a partnership with IBM that will build the hardware : HERE
This box is adding value to the coin itself and the way it should be used makes perfect sense.
Afterall you buy a minebox, you use it partially to host your own files on the SIA network, and use some remaining free space to rent and earn some coins back.
This hardware makes sense, and i think it's a great partnership/idea.
This should help the SIA network growth.
Now, on the other hand we have ASIC mining coming ...
OBELISK SC 1
The Obelisk SC 1 is a sign of a partnership with some chip manufacturer, so it seems a good news for SIA at first sight.
My two cents : IBM might build the chips.
ASIC mining is not a really good news from my point of view.
Remember the good old days when it was still possible to mine scrypt coins with some graphic cards ?
Those days are long gone...
All the scrypt coins are now (more or less) in the hands of big companies that are building facilities full of ASIC mining gear.
That's pretty much the contrary of 'decentralized' ...
The second hand ASIC mining gear you can find on the internet are outdated for most of them, and will never get any decent ROI.
ASICS will kill GPU mining fast, then a majority of those chips will be bought and used by a small pack of people who will manage to get the vast majority of new generated coins.
Are they gonna sell those coins on the market or are they gonna use the SIA network to actually spend those coins to host files ?
I am betting ASIC miners will just use the ASICS to sell coins, to make profit, while never use the SIA network to actually host files which 'might' have a negative impact (mostly pricing related) on the ones that wants to buy coins to actually use the service, no ?
This is not really a problem for scrypt coins are they are not allowing people to actually host files, right, so the most you can get, the better.
ASICS
When you are done mining with a CPU, Hard Drive, or a GPU card (which has not been overclocked like crazy of course) you can sell them back, as long as they are still functional ...
Once your ASICs are not relevant anymore, because some other guy can buy more than you, and the difficulty skyrocketed, the only remaining choice is to throw those ASICS away, nobody will buy them, as the ROI will be ridiculous.
Well ... It's king of too early to give an advice on the matter since no prices or hashes capacity has been announced, but what do you guys think ?
Cheers,