Siacoin (SC) Takes Decision to Brick Bitmain’s ASIC

Siacoin (SC) will change its mining algorithm, in effect bricking the ASIC produced by Bitmain and Innosilicon, as announced by project founder David Vorick in a recent blog post.

For months, the Siacoin community was involved in sometimes heated discussions, especially on the subject of the ASIC-production operation of Vorick, the Obelisk series of miners for Siacoin and Decred. The argument against Obelisk was that it would make the project too centralized.

However, Vorick believes the economy of ASIC competition has, in fact, centralized Siacoin mining with Innosilicon rigs, which produce around 37% of blocks.

The decision to change the code to be compatible only with Obelisk - a series of rigs envisioned by Nebulous, the parent company of Siacoin - is aiming to offset the initial costs of production. A large part of the community has also paid upfront to reduce the influence of competing ASICs, which were launched without warning.

At one point, the decision was to leave the matter as is and not fork the coin, but in the end, Siacoin would go through a hard fork that would disable most of the existing machines. The Bitmain ASIC was created in parallel with Obelisk, appearing without announcement and changing the potential returns for the new rigs, which were already well under development. According to Vorick, the involvement of Bitmain threatened to turn the initial investment in chip design into a direct loss.

The news of a hard fork served to awaken the SC market price, which started off at $0.0062 as of 10:00 UTC on October 1 and went on to reach $0.0067, adding a net 6.6% in 24 hours.  SC has been on the mend in the past week, moving upward from around $0.0058.

The coin has long been expected to start climbing, and the news of the hard fork may trigger renewed interest.

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