Response to Sia/Obelisk and Bitmain's State of Crypto Currency Mining

At this point, I assume everyone who mines or is interested in mining has probably already read the Sia blog post regarding to state of the crypto currency mining and likely Bitmain’s response to it. Seeing the reaction to people that read this has me a bit dismayed—are they reading the same article that I am?   

First a group of developers for Sia decide to make Obelisk to produce an ASIC because “we felt that coin devs in general had a very poor view into the mining world, and that the best way to understand it would be to get our hands dirty and bring a miner to market.” Now, reading their initial post to r/siacoin announcing their presale--  there is no mention of this being a primarily learning experience so they can gain insight into the mining world. Beyond this, they make the great claim that they’ve learned a lot but they can’t share it all but of course they have some information on key topics that can help the cryptocurrency community.  

The post brings in relevant current information about Equihash, Ethash, and Cryptonight that have been bandied about quiet a bit lately and is likely known by anyone paying attention even if you aren’t bringing an ASIC to market. They make sure to mention though that they had plans for both Ethash and Equihash but just could never find the funding. They are still able to get people to buy the pre-sale of their current DCR1/SC1 miners still going for shipping starting in September though so I am curious as to if they even tried or all their funding sources they used previously dried up while they were learning and making a mess of things.  

Next they talk about Monero’s “secret ASICs” and their unnamed sources that claim there has been nearly a year of running before anyone even noticed. The difficulty for XMR has dropped a little more than 50% since their fork. But, they make sure to not blame any particular entity for this. I imagine there probably were ASICs on the XMR network (and all other CryptoNight coins). But they leave out the detail that there were also supposedly tons of botnet nodes also mining which would have been kicked off the network and likely prevented from rejoining based on new restrictions also implemented by the larger pools. 

General information regarding how manufacturing works and the people that sell the tools in a gold rush are typically the ones that make it big, how fast it takes to go from idea to physical product, and how economies of scale work. Of course, in addition they hear numerous rumors about how Bitmain plays dirty. It seems like this where the large portion of the Obelisk team’s learning happened. I don’t understand how you can justify taking people’s money when you don’t know these things and have gotten your plan straightened out and had contingency plans in case something fell through. Yet they share that one of their setbacks with manufacturing cost them over $2 million. They are also pretty careful to say they have no evidence that Bitmain played a part and question whether they should even include it in their post… That moral quandary surely didn’t err towards fact-based writing and was included.  

They estimate mining farm overhead with some genuinely interesting detail, how most startups fail and discussion on how impressive Bitmain is and not blaming them for anything. 

It all comes off as a lot of excuses as to why they failed to get a product to market timely and a reorigination of why they got into ASIC manufacturing. While all the same reading as a concession letter to the victor in a race where their opponent probably didn’t even know they were competing against. 

After their post gaining traction Bitmain does of course respond with valid points that there are a large number of companies in China they can do business with and it is a conspiracy theory. Talking about the A3 and how many units they produce and sell—they mention they purposely limited the amount each customer can buy and they have done that for new models in the future as well (e3, z9, etc). While all that is accurate it would definitely ease their customer’s minds if they had a public road map of their product releases and the sizes of each batch so people can make informed decisions about their purchases.  

There are issues all around in Crypto currency, instead of blaming others take ownership for items you can control and do better. In this case, I am not sure what is worse—Obelisk doing their entire venture to learn how mining works (with customer’s money) or that they are incompetent and still doing a presale nearly a year after they started while not shipping a single product.   

BTC: 3EEcFFx3vqkrP3ML7Be1wW1nkXUFNp1inw 

BCH: 1J7FRmy9Byo5mKYKPbRvnWN6p86E1qpkmh