Obelisk

Basics

• Founded in 2017
• Nebulous-owned hardware maker Obelisk sold $15 million worth of Sia miners, roughly 6,000 machines, before it ceased sales this month (7-2019).
• Obelisk tried making a Grin ASIC miner but cancelled (7-2019).

Blocking other ASIC companies from mining on Sia

• CoinDesk has reported (10-2018) on the Sia trying to block other ASIC companies except its own Obelisk:

"David Vorick, founder and CEO of Nebulous told CoinDesk that Sia will soon move to enact a software change meant to block certain types of specialized mining hardware from the platform, allowing hardware manufactured by Nebulous subsidiary Obelisk to remain one of the only ways to collect the blockchain’s lucrative cryptocurrency rewards.

“Sia’s decided to fork to obsolete or brick the Innosilicon and Bitmain hardware,” Vorick said, referring to Obelisk’s rival manufacturers of application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) mining equipment for Siacoin.

Still, Vorick portrayed the code change as a near-unanimous decision taken by the community, and this Reddit thread – the closest thing to an official vote that was held in the community – appears to show broad support for the decision. The sentiments expressed represent a change from January, when another proposal to similarly fork Siacoin failed.

During those months of back-and-forth, some community members appeared just as concerned about Nebulous’ consolidation of power as they were about Bitmain or Innosilicon (the latter, Vorick made clear, is the “monopoly” he has in mind).

Meanwhile, some in the community saw a fork as amounting to a bailout of Obelisk by Nebulous – a way to turn back the clock on production delays, political rifts and threats of legal action. Obelisk missed its June 30 target for shipping the first batch of ASICs by weeks, leading to threats of legal action from at least two parties, as CoinDesk reported in August. The Reddit post containing the proposal argues, however, that it “seeks to protect the community members who invested in Obelisk ASIC units,” not the company itself.

Vorick said that Innosilicon controls 37.5 percent of the network’s total mining power through its own mining operation. The company also sells ASICs to other miners. Since they “have the only rig capable of competing,” Vorick wrote, Innosilicon is able to charge an estimated 100 percent markup on this hardware.

Speaking to CoinDesk, he described the method behind the so-called Sia kill switch, or the software change to disable hardware which the fork will activate: “Basically blake2b [Sia’s hash algorithm] is a circuit, and we added just a tiny extension in a clever place that you wouldn’t just naively think to add that extension. So basically we made our circuit just very slightly more complex in a very sort of random way, and this is something that we do not expect anyone else to have anticipated.”

As a result, as soon as the network’s nodes adopt the upgrade, chips designed to run the unaltered blake2b algorithm will be useless for mining Siacoin."

Team

• Zach Herbert, Obelisk’s VP of operations