Topic: Lets talk about Sia's Obelisk - page 2. (Read 3229 times)

Well, since Siacoin has its own hash type, that no other coin uses, I can say they aren't trying to overtake other mining companies, since it would only work on their coin.  Maybe they are trying to create a permanent presence to their coin by selling ASIC's that would not be able to be pointed to another coin at any time.  

Or I heard another possibility.  Since Sia is a blockchain for Storage, and their Roadmap "Goal" is to compete with places like Azure/Google/Amazon for cloud storage solutions, that possibly the "ASIC Miners" could actually be HDD storage centres, where they may pay "Mining" fees for connecting storage points all over the globe and pay people in mining fees for keeping their cloud alive.  

I am in no way attached to Sia, so I have no idea, guess we should know what its all about by tomorrow.  

As a quick recap:
Proof of Work provides a cryptographic assurance that a certain amount of money needs to be spent to create an alternate history. Therefore, any attack (double-spend or otherwise) using alternate histories must minimally have a payoff that is larger than the cost to create that alternate history (even if you already have 100% of the hashrate).
The original history is being continuously extended by the network. A successful alternate history requires having more hashrate than the rest of the network combined. So the barrier for creating alternate histories is higher than just being able to afford the electricity, you also need access to billions of dollars of hardware.
Specialized hardware is both faster and more energy efficient than standard hardware, by so many orders of magnitude that at least in Bitcoin and other ASIC mined coins, using ASICs is the only practical means to build an alternate history.
ASICs are very expensive, and inherently useful exclusively for mining that particular coin. So if the ASIC is not mining, it’s just wasted money, and it’s a LOT of wasted money. This makes it unlikely that a meaningful number of ASICs exist today which are not actively mining, simply because its so expensive for them to exist and then do nothing. For ASIC mined coins only, this allows us to worry less about how expensive it is to build an alternate history and instead focus more on who owns the existing hashrate — that hashrate likely represents all practical hashrate that can be applied to attack the network.
For ASIC mined coins only, there is a very large amount of hardware that is useful exclusively for mining a particular coin. If the value of that coin falls, the value of the hardware necessarily falls with it. Performing attacks that could shake market confidence, scare away users, or otherwise affect the price of the coin ends up being a lot more expensive for the owner of the hashrate than just the money spent on electricity — they also have to consider the losses they incurred when the value of their hardware dropped.

Refresh their Twitter page?