Sia announces Hard Fork as a response on Bitmain ASIC

After almost a year of dicussion within the community, Sia has finally continued with Fork, in order to kick Bitmain and Innosilicoin equipment out of the game. According to this, only miner who use Obelisk hardware will be able to mine on Sia network.

Cofounder of the Sia project, David Vorick, has announced this news on October 1st:

"Sia is forking today to reprimand the current ASIC monopoly for the damage it did to the Sia community, to make whole the supporters of Sia’s community ASIC project, and to send a clear message to all future Sia ASIC manufacturers: we will not tolerate an abusive ASIC monopoly."

The damage, which Vorick mentions, is referred to the moves of Bitmain and Innosilicon about manufacturing ASIC mining hardware. These actions were, supposedly, making things harder for investments of Siacoin community.

Continuing with Fork, only miners with Obelisk equipment, which is manufactured by core company of Siacoin, Nebulous, will be able to mine Siacoin. In reflection to the other Forks, and their relation to ASIC monopoly, Siacoin does not want to ban ASIC mining. Instead, the company wants to protect its investments in development of Obelisk mining hardware. About this, Vorick said:

"We believe that embracing an ASIC monopoly is better than resisting ASICs altogether. That said, we don’t believe that a cryptocurrency needs to embrace a parasitic or abusive ASIC monopoly.

Based on arguments Vorick has given us, we believe that the Sia is swaping one monopoly for the other - her own. However, Siacoin team made clear that no one is forced to accept Hard Fork. Nebulous can only give us a new code with reseted POW to try and embolden users to update the software. According to Vorick, al those who don't want to accept Hard Fork can continue on using the old Blockchain software. This could lead to infamous splitting situation, which we already saw happen with Ethereum and Ethereum Classic.