Several members of the Sia community were concerned that Bitmain had become the new ASIC manufacturer. The company unexpectedly announced the release of the A3, designed specifically for the extraction of Siacoin. There were some brief discussions about the possibility of introducing a Sia plug that would prohibit ASIC equipment from affecting the network. It seems that these plans have now been dismissed, and nothing will happen to prevent the use of ASIC miners on the network. NO SIA FORK FOR PREVENTION ASIC MINING It's obvious that the introduction of ASIC hardware specifically for Sia will have some interesting consequences. After all, these machines are much more powerful than most consumer devices on the market, like now. If several dozen A3 miners get into the network at the same time, this will introduce some big changes to the Sia network as a whole. The total hashing power will increase exponentially, which will lead to a higher production complexity, which will cause small miners to enter the corner. Recently, an open letter was published by several long-term members of the Xia community expressing their concern about this development. They suggested that developers implement a fork of the code to ensure that the intelligent ASIC technology will never be possible for Siacoin. The developers took into account all these observations and eventually decided not to fork the code. This is an interesting decision, and it will continue to make the debate move forward. At a recent average level, the team explained why they do not see problems with the miners of Siacoin ASIC. In fact, the team was in favor of seeing ASIC equipment for the Sia network. It seems that the hardware and the increased hashrat are considered positive events for this altcoyin. With a large number of ASIC miners there is a lower chance of suffering from an attack of 51%, which is always good. This does not mean that we will not see that the centralized efforts in the field of mining are related to this. The fact that Bitmain has presented its equipment for mining Sia without prior warning is also considered quite controversial. The company has a very strong track record when it comes to bitkoynov and even mining. At the same time, Bitmain was a "bad actor" due to the blocking of Bitcoin network updates, Bitcoin Cash support and the Antbleed fiasco. It is obvious that any participation of this company will be criticized for many reasons. However, its hardware is in great demand. In the case of Sia, we now have two different ASIC devices competing with each other. There is Obelisk SC1, which was created by the command itself, and Bitmain Antminer A3. While developers can easily nullify the impact of A3 through a soft plug, they are not going to do it right now. If the equipment proves to be a catalyst for attacking the Sia network, this situation may change. This indicates that the developers are somewhat concerned, but not in a preemptive manner. Taking this course of action, Sia developers will need to come up with a way to keep Bitmain under control. This is much easier said than done, for obvious reasons. The option to unlock the code and reset the hardware Bitmain is still an option. In addition, the A3 miners will be redirected to pools such as Luxor and Siamining, and not to the pools associated with Bitmain. Moreover, other ASIC manufacturers will be interested in developing competitive mining equipment. Source: themerkle.com
