So what would happen to the initial price of Sia once ASICS are released into the wild both short-term and long-term?
Once things get centralized towards the big miners, I fear that prices are going to tank given the huge influx of coins being released. Yeah things will taper off once difficulty increases but that won't be for awhile. The only public response from Taek on how it effects prices in his response to another Reddit poster seems to be that "inflation" is lower than other coins, which doesn't inspire much confidence. I interpret it as either a "nobody knows" or "it will be fine in the long-run".
Anybody familiar with how prices were like when ASICS were first released on the market with Bitcoin and Litecoin?
Maybe a history lesson would help.
It's a good question... What affect WILL ASICS have to the price of Sia?
Of course it's hard to say definitively what will happen to the price of any alt coin; crypto currency is such a new asset class, it's all uncharted territory. Anyone who says otherwise is fooling himself...
That being said and at the risk of stating the obvious, there are only THREE (3) coins to currently have devoted ASIC miners: Bitcoin, Dash and Litecoin.
All three coins EXPLODED in price after ASICs were added to their blockchain... They continue to rise in price now, even as their 1st and 2nd generation ASICs are updated and replaced with more powerful machines.
As the Freakinomics guys would point out, "correlation does not mean causation", and umbrellas don't make it rain. Just because those three coins exploded in price after ASICs were introduced to their blockchain, doesn't (necessarily) mean that asics on a network MAKE the price of a coin go up... (tho they may help).
Companies like Baikal, Antminer, Zeus, Pinidea etc. STARTED producing asics for those algo BECAUSE they were winning coins in the first place. The ASICs didn't hurt their price, and it's possible they helped by strengthening the coins infrastructures, heigthening security etc.
While the big money players seem to be dominating BTC hash (see Bitfury's Blockbox), I don't think the same can be said for Dash and Litecoin; at least not yet.
As for what ASICs mean for Sia coin... well, I think this'll in the very least raise awareness for Sia among people like us... I for one was rather unfamiliar with Sia Coin prior to the announcement... My opinion of Sia, and outlook wfor its future has drastically changed this week. I gotta think I'm not alone..
Asics will also help build out their data storage infrastructure... tho I admit, I'm not really sure how all that works.
TLDR : I think these Asics are an indication Sia will soon be valued similar to larger market cap alt coins already thriving in the data storage crypto coin sector. look to those coins for a near term price indication.