Protecting Obelisk sees Sia (SC) ending up in a blockchain split – new project is born: SiaClassic
Members of the Sia community will continue the development of the original block chain once the hard fork announced for October 31 is completed. SiaClassic Foundation, a non-profit organization, has been created to support this initiative.
As published on Medium, the official launch of the nonprofit Foundation took place last Thursday, October 11, with an “organizational structure that will promote transparency in funding, governance and development.”
The communiqué, entitled “SiaClassic: Declaration of Independence,” is signed by Scott Ellis, who is listed as the chairman of the Board of Directors. Although it is indicated that the organization will be made up of other bodies, such as the Board of Directors, the Supervisory Board and the Advisory Board, no mention is made of the identity of the rest of the directors. It is also reported that the Foundation will begin operations on Monday, October 15, when it adopts its new statutes.
Ellis pointed out that the idea of the SiaClassic Foundation arose from the decision of the core team of the original project, to re-establish the proof of work for Sia. Hardfork, he said, leaves many community members at risk of losing thousands of dollars in mining hardware.
On the 1st of October, the leaders of the Sia project, a distributed storage platform, informed the community of their decision to carry out a hardfork on their network in order to block the ASIC mining equipment of Bitmain and Innosilicon. As announced, the measure seeks to break the oligopoly they hold over the computing power of the Sia network, after learning that Bitmain spent months mining siacoin in secret.
However, Ellis assures that such a decision does not take into account the best interests of the community, and on the contrary is detrimental to Sia’s miners. In his opinion, most of the miners in the Sia network do not belong to medium and large-scale mining operations; on the contrary, they have operations of two or three teams.
“Sia’s pending fork is treating all owners of any Bitmain or Innosilicion ASIC in the same way,” says the statement and states that “it is reasonable to conclude that Nebulous (Sia’s parent company) has chosen to punish the entire community for actively supporting its currency.
Some members of the Sia community reacted with skepticism on the Reddit social network to the announcement of the new SiaClassic Foundation. User Wolfotage stressed the seriousness of the problem of centralization of mining in the Sia network, which led to the decision to perform the hardfork. As he said, currently “a single server farm is mining in a group that controls a significant portion of the hash rate. What makes this dangerous is the fact that the farm in question is also a manufacturer. This single entity, he said, accounts for more than 45% of the current hash rate.
Other users stressed that the proposals put forward by the project SiaClassic are general and applicable to any project. It should be noted that, so far, none of the most important developers of Sia has publicly expressed their support for this new project. Also, the team behind the Sia Classic project has not yet been announced on its official website.
What is the reason to prevent ASICs to mine on Sia blockchain?
Sia has their own subsidiary for ASIC mining equipment production called Obelisk. The move to ban the ASICs from other manufacturers is a clear protectionism from Sia developers as their product got beaten in the free market.
