Sia Completes Hard Fork as Bricked Miners Form Rival Blockchain
The distributed cloud storage blockchain network Sia has successfully completed a planned hard fork, changing its consensus rules in a way that prevents some specialized hardware from mining on the network.
"All is working normally now," David Vorick, co-founder and CEO of Nebulous, the for-profit company behind the Sia network, told CoinDesk on Thursday.
The fork, planned for the previous day, was set to take place at block 179,000 in the Sia chain, but miners found themselves stuck at block 178,999 for hours because, as Vorick wrote in a community forum Wednesday evening, an error in the code meant that miners "will need to mine at least one block at full difficulty before the adjustment kicks in. This may take anywhere from 6 to 48 hours."
The block was found shortly before 6:00 a.m. ET. Following that block, the difficulty – a parameter that blockchains use to ensure that blocks are mined at fairly regular time intervals, whatever the total computing power of the network – dropped by around 98 percent, allowing miners to resume finding blocks every 10 minutes on average.
