In their recent update, the Sia team has announced that they will be shipping their first official ASIC the first two weeks of July. This is for batch 1; batch 2 will be shipped a couple of weeks later.

Sia Coin is used by Sia Tech, a decentralized P2P storage network. The latest is the most appealing for people who appreciate privacy and data safety. The mined coins can be either used in the network or sold in exchangers for cash/other cryptos.

What to Expect from the Obelisk SC1

Most of you know what happened to Sia ASIC mining – the delay of Obelisk and the introduction of the Antminer A3 that took everyone by surprise. Most people don’t know what to expect from the Obelisk – there is a lot of negativity and bias on the forums, which is why I would like to talk about this topic here.

Let’s start by briefly reviewing everything we know so far – this will be the most interesting for those of you who have not been paying too much attention to Sia ASIC back when this all happened.

A Brief History of SIA ASIC Mining (Skip if you already familiar with it)

Sia coin originally could be mined by renting your free HDD space to the decentralized network. GPU mining was possible too, though it has never been too profitable.

Then, a year ago, the team behind Sia Tech has announced the pre sale of the first ASIC for Sia coin – the Obelisk SC1.

Back in the day, the miner only existed in blueprints. There were only estimates on its hashrate, power consumption and shipping date. That being said, anyone willing to get that miner had to preorder it, pay $ 2500 USD in advance and then wait about a year while the developers hire more people, create the first prototypes and basically take the ASIC from a blueprint all the way to mass production.

Obelisk SC1 ASIC Miner 3

Obelisk SC1 ASIC Miner

Several hundreds people have decided to take the risk and support the creation of the first Sia Coin ASIC. This is understandable because the reward was quite high too – it’s very profitable to be among the first people who own the first ASICs in a network.

It all made sense until January of this year when Bitmain has announced their first Blake(2b) ASIC (the algorithm behind Sia Coin). The Antminer A3 is more efficient than the Obelisk and the units were shipped to customers in a span of 10 days! No need to wait a year to get the miner.

The first people who have got their Antminers A3 were enjoying about $400 USD profit per day (in Sia currency, of course).

Basically, people who have purchased the Antminer A3 have reaped everything the people who have preordered the Obelisk were aiming for. Now that the network hashrate is high, the Antminer A3 is no longer profitable since it mines $ 80 USD worth SIA every month and consumes $ 128 USD in electricity. Will Obelisk miners be profitable once they reach their owners? I doubt it!

What happened raises a lot of questions and I will be focusing on two that I believe are the most relevant.

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Question #1: Can Sia Tech be Trusted?

There is something that makes people doubt whether Sia Tech is a trustworthy company. In the past months, Sia has been labeled as a company with lack of professionalism or even as scammers. The reason is simple.

During the pre-order week, Sia advertised the Obelisk SC1 to hash about 800 GH/s or more. Then, in January, Sia posts an update and says that the SC1 will be hashing about 550 GH/s, which was about 40% less than what the Antminer A3 was delivering.

Later in May, Sia Tech has clarified that the 550 GH/s mark is the lowest mark and that in reality, the Obelisk should be able to hash way higher. Every board of the miner has 30 chips, each of which is clocked at ~300 MHz. They have added that

Basically, by overclocking the chips, they might get way better performance. That’s something we do to our GPUs and I’ve seen people overclocking certain ASICs too. In addition to that, the author of the official update claims that their chips work even faster when heated to 85-100 C, which coincidentally is the normal operational temperature of the device.

So to answer the question – can we trust Sia Tech when future ASICs will be released? If they manage to get the SC1 to hash as announced during the pre-sale, I’d say that there is no reason to not trust those guys. After all, people were aware of the risks by preordering an ASIC that would take one year to be designed, manufactured and shipped.

Now, what if Sia’s intentions were good and they deliver as promised, though despite that, the end result was disastrous for their customers? In other words…

Obelisk SC1 ASIC Miner Boards 2

Obelisk SC1 ASIC Miner Boards

Question #2: Is it the Obelisk SC1 Outdated?

This topic might be interesting for those of you who have preordered your Obelisks, as well as for those of you who have Antminers A3 ASICs. Our takeaway from this will also affect our final conclusion: did Sia Tech screw their customers over?

Simply put, if we plan on immediately selling any coins we mine then yes, the Obelisk SC1 is definitely a piece of expensive junk.

On the other hand, if you mine to hold (“hodl”) then you might want to think twice before posting your SC1 on ebay once you receive it.

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The cloud storage market is anticipated to hit the $88 billion mark in 2020. If Sia Tech manages to capture a fraction of that market, the price of the coin will explode. To put things into perspective, as for today, the amount of generated Sia tokens is around $18 million per year. A quarter of a percent of that market share would make the coin price skyrocket.

This is a quick ROI calculation based on price history with current reward/dificulty at 800 Gh/z mining hashrate

Results looks pretty good to me

Another factor that should positively affect the coin price is that block reward size is decreasing. It is estimated that block reward should go from 140000 SC per block down to ~ 30000 SC per block by mid 2020.

Can mining and holding Sia coin be a good idea? Probably, yes. A risky one too, though risk and cryptocurrencies are close related anyway.

Obelisk SC1 ASIC Miner Boards 3

Obelisk SC1 ASIC Miner Boards test

In Conclusion

While what happened is bad news for those users who want to mine and immediately sell their coins, the situation might not be as grim for those of you who are mining to hold.

For some reason I believe that people will be getting their Obelisks in time in some weeks. Yeah, the device is definitely not going to make you any money in the short run, though it might pay off in a year or two. In fact, it might bring you way more profit than we can imagine now.

Once again, we are talking about a risk that Obelisk owners can decide to take – to spend money on electricity bills and hoard Sia coins or try to resell their units to those who are willing to take risks. What is your take on this? Have you preordered the Obelisk SC1 back in 2017?

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UPDATE: Yesterday I’ve received an email from SIA where they’ve shared some more details on the Obelisk SC1, as well as their thoughts on the Antminer A3.
In brief, they expect the SC1 to be at least twice more power-efficient than the Antminer A3.According to them, both miners output around 800 GH/s, though the SC1 pulls 500W from the wall while the A3 consumes 1183 W

UPDATE February 3 2018

Siacoin Hashrate and Dificulty

siacoin mining hashrate increase

siacoin mining dificulty

Antminer A3 current profitability vs when launched

Antminer A3 Mining Profitability

Antminer A3 Mining Profitability Update February 3

The Obelisk team also believes the SC1 will be even more power efficient than that, though this will be known in March when they will get test chips.

The first batch of SC1 miners should be shipped somewhere in May.

What is good is that SIA team seems quite transparent. For instance, they’ve shared how many Obelisk miners they’ve sold so far:

Batch 1: 2,963 DCR1 and 3,598 SC1 units sold
Batch 2: 1,350 DCR1 and 1,996 SC1 units sold

Some months ago, the devs of the Sia network have announced that their cryptocurrency is getting its own ASIC miner – the Obelisk SC1.

Hundreds of people have preordered their SC1 units and Sia promises that they will be sending the miners in some months. The SC1 is still under development and it still got to see mass production.

Things were going as expected until Bitmain announced that they’ve released their own Blake(2a) ASIC miner past Wednesday. They’ve said that the miner is fully functional and that it already saw mass production, meaning that people will get their miners shipped as soon as they buy it.

As if that was not enough surprise, Bitmain also promised to ship the units in only 10 days. If you ever purchased from Bitmain, you know that orders usually take about 3 months.

The first batch of the Antminer A3 has been sold in a matter of hours. The units retail for $2375 USD each. Here are the basic specs:

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We are talking about gigahashes per second here. Considering current network hashrate of 626.74 TH/s, 815 GH/s per ASIC unit is insane, imagine that one 6x GPU mining rig can get somewhere between 6000 Mh/s and 9000 Mh/s. If difficulty adjustment weren’t a thing, the ROI of an Antminer A3 would be 1 week.

Crazy fantasies aside, the miner still looks really profitable after taking the adjustments into account, provided Bitmain won’t sell too many units in a short period of time. According to the bitcointalk thread, between 10k and 15K devices have been sold. In theory, this should raise the network hashrate from ~640 Th/s to about ~8,500 Th/s, resulting in 20x difficulty increase.

Those are mere speculations though and we probably won’t be able to know how many miners have been sold until we see the difficulty rising.

Scam Alert

In their tweet, Bitmain have warned users that there is a scam website that replicates bitmain’s one. Here is what they write:

https://twitter.com/BITMAINtech/status/952238245760319493

If you look at the original tweet with the Facebook ad picture, you can see that the ‘n’ on ‘shop.bitmain.com’ has a tiny dash underneath it. It is not your screen being dirty – I’ve tried to wipe mine too until I’ve realized the ‘n’ is actually a different symbol. This is what Bitmain meant by “If you look closely the “n” in https://shop.bitmain.com/ is not actually the “n” it should be.”

A Word of Advice

When purchasing a product, I always try to look at reviews and opinions both from end users and big companies alike. In this case, SIA developers have expressed their opinion on Bitmain’s A3 miner. Make sure you read it here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/siacoin/comments/7r4spy/dev_team_thoughts_on_the_bitmain_a3/

Personally, I am not taking sides in this; I thought you would like to have as much info as possible before doing anything.

Here is yet another piece of information you’d want to be aware of. Eventually, some part of the mining community is not happy with the new Antminer so they’ve requested to Sia to soft fork the coin. According to one of their last tweets, Sia core team is considering this option: https://twitter.com/SiaTechHQ/status/955880534059741185

Make sure you follow their twitter to keep up to date with the latest decisions they make.

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About Sia

Siacoin is an altcoin that is employed in the Sia network as a local currency.

The network allows its users to store their data on the cloud.

What makes it different from Google Drive or Dropbox is the way files are handled. Instead of being stored in private servers, files are encrypted, duplicated, split into fragments and distributed all across a decentralized network. This allows you to store your files without the need to trust a third-party storage company.

Other users just like you store the encrypted fragments of your files and only you have the keys to decrypt and access your stuff.

Here is a detailed review of the company.

In Conclusion

I suppose it is too early to jump into conclusions. Some people are excited about the new A3 miner while others are not.

The only thing I am sure of is that Sia is a solid company that enjoys a steady growth in popularity. They offer a real product and I believe that their coin has good prospects. It might not be skyrocketing in price like, say, Ethereum but it is definitely a coin that is backed up by a real service which means that it might be a great idea to mine it by using the ASIC miner you can get.

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SIA is a cryptocoin based on SIA Storage – a decentralized cloud storage system that allows users to enjoy safe and 100% anonymous storage for a small fee. The system is based on decentralized nodes all around the world.

The storage service received many positive reviews so far and looks like it is becoming a decent alternative and rival to giants such as Amazon S3 and Dropbox.

Until not long ago, the only way to mine SIA coins was by either using a GPU rig or by renting HDD space to others via Minebox. It does make sense since the decentralized storage system relies on thousands of users from all around the globe who provide free HDD space.

However, not long ago SIA Tech released an ASIC for SIA coins.

Meet the Obelisk SC1

SIA Tech was a bit reserved about this ASIC miner. Therefore, no one knew exactly what it will be until Friday 23th. Even then, there is still little information about it and new info is being released every day.

What we know so far is that the Obelisk is a 28nm full custom ASIC that is being designed and will be manufactured by a third-party US-based semiconductor company. According to SIA Tech, it is a trustworthy company wit a 20-year track record in ASIC design. If that is true, then we might expect good quality hardware, opposed to those ASICS that are designed by enthusiasts.

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Hashrate and Price

Until Friday 23th, it was unclear about the hashrate and the price of the Obelisk. Now we know that the ASIC costs $2499 and can be preordered on their site.

The presale will start in 1 day (Wednesday, 2pm eastern time) and will last for one week.

Announcing the Obelisk Sia ASIC miner presale! Presale begins Wednesday at 2pm EST, will be open for 7 days. https://t.co/CgbwRKCsIc

— Sia Tech (@SiaTechHQ) June 23, 2017

The expected hashrate of the Obelisk is 100 GH/s, which means that with a block reward of 20M SC/DAY the monthly revenue will be of 60,000 SC. The revenue will be higher in the beginning and is expected to get to 60,000 SC/month when 10,000 Obelisks will be sold. This is expected to happen by June 2018.

SIA Tech claims that the power draw of the miner will be below the 500W mark. Combined with the expected hashrate of 100 GH/s, we get some impressive numbers. It is certain that once the Obelisk is released, there will be no room left for GPU SIA coin miners.

Finally, SIA Tech promised to introduce decentralized mining pools by the time the miners will be shipped. This will allow users to choose between solo and pool mining.

Shipment and Payment

While the presale starts in 1 day, the first ASIC shipments are expected to happen in June 2018. There might be delays since ASIC manufacturing isn’t something SIA did before, so personally I take the expected shipment date with a pinch of salt.

Just like most ASIC manufacturers, SIA Tech will only accept Bitcoin for their miners. They won’t accept SIA coin as payment since the relatively new coin does not have the liquidity it takes to handle such massive transactions in such a short period of time. Bitcoin does.

Package

According to SIA Tech, the miner package includes everything, even the power supply. They promise that the setup is minimal.

Controversy and Critics

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Now, there has been a lot of controversy regarding the release of the Obelisk SC1. You probably noticed the tension in the forums about this new ASIC. That was expected since ASCIS are rarely welcomed in the mining community to begin with. On the other hand, the introduction of ASICs was rather beneficial for the cryptocurrency world and it defined cryptomining as we know it today. This is why I prefer to stay away from any bias as much as possible when making my research about any specific ASIC.

People have been also complaining about SIA Tech only accepting Bitcoin as payment. The daily fluctuations of the cryptoccurency price greatly affect the final price of the ASIC and many users are not okay with that. Yesterday, SIA Tech officially acknowledged this issue and promised to compensate the loss if the price of the currency drops by up to 5%.

The main downside about the Obelisk SC1 is that it does not support any other algorithms except the one for SIA coin. Most popular ASICs can work with multiple coins that are based on the same algo, which gives them more versatility and lifespan. This is the only downside about the Obelisk SC1 that does make sense in my opinion.

In Conclusion

Whether the Obelisk SC1 will be a good ROI or not, it will definitely change the way SIA coin is mined and traded. I really hope that it will be for the best.

While the price of the Obelisk SC1 is rather impressive, the ASIC is expected to outperform any GPU rig. According to the official site, each ASIC chip performs as well as 100 GPU’s. I think that’s something to consider.

What do you think about this upcoming ASIC? Will it be worth the money? How will its release impact the SIA coin?

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