My Obelisk Mining Update and SiaCoin: Possible Storage Solution For Steem?

          Below is the email update I received from Obelisk as a purchaser of a Batch1 DCR1 / SC1.

          The investment in my first ASIC was something that excited me as a GPU mining hobbyist and I was looking forward to the incredible projection of gains and being able to participate in securing the network.

          Formerly, I had mined a small amount of SC with Claymore Dual Miner and also invested in the minimum SC to host data for the SiaCoin cloud storage platform. To learn more, here is presentation by David Vorick at a Texas Bitcoin Conference which I thought was pretty good.

Updates from Obelisk

Obelisk Upgrade Board Sale Details
Dear Obelisk Customers,

We are excited to announce that we will be launching a new sale later today, Tuesday, December 4, 2018, in the late afternoon (Eastern Time). Below are the four items we will be offering:

1. Obelisk SC1 Hashing Board, Gen 1: $699
   Purchase a Siacoin Gen 1 hashing board, compatible with Batch 1 DCR1 or SC1 units. Incompatible with units from Batch 2-5. Estimated ship date: February-March 2019.

1. Obelisk SC1 Hashing Board, Gen 2: $1499
   Purchase a Siacoin Gen 2 hashing board, compatible with Batch 2-5 DCR1 or SC1 units. Incompatible with units from Batch 1. Estimated ship date: February-March 2019.

1. Obelisk DCR1-to-SC1 Paid Conversion: $1199
   Convert a Batch 2-5 DCR1 for a Batch 6 SC1. Estimated ship date: February-March 2019.

1. Obelisk DCR1 Buyback: +$300
   Obelisk will buy back your Batch 2-5 DCR1 unit for $300. You will still be entitled to receive compensation for missing the estimated shipping date, which is currently worth approximately $125.

Purchasing
You will be able to apply existing coupons to your orders, and we will also be crediting your accounts with the compensation for missing estimated delivery dates. All purchases must be made in Bitcoin. Please ensure you have Bitcoin available to spend, as unpaid orders will canceled after 8 hours.

Compatibility
SC1 boards are compatible with DCR1 or SC1 miners, but you cannot run both DCR1 and SC1 boards simultaneously. If you decide to place SC1 boards in a DCR1 chassis, you must run a firmware update. If desired, you can operate a unit with only one hashing board installed.

Logistics
The sale will take place through the Obelisk Customer Portal. For the first 24 hours, we will restrict the sale to existing Obelisk customers (those who purchased a unit in Batches 1-5 directly from Obelisk). After 24 hours, we will open the sale to the public, and anyone will be able to register for a new account on the portal and make purchases.

More Details
We will send an announcement later today when the sale opens that provides more details and links to a full FAQs document.

As always, please let us know if you have any questions. In addition to emailing, you can always reference our support center or join us on Discord.

Best,

– Team Obelisk
Copyright © 2018 Obelisk, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Decisions Decisions

          I was obviously going to get the SC1 upgrade boards to convert my DCR1 as it is currently not profitable to run for Decred. I ended up getting 3 boards using all my coupons and most of my credits from the mining compensation due to Obelisk's missed deadline.

This means that I can equip one batch 1 chassis with the maximum of three boards and another with two. As subsequent batches come online, difficulty will rise and profitability will taper off but I am happy as long as I am positive with electricity costs.

Picture of my setup.

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Why an I interested in SiaCoin?

Sia is a decentralized cloud storage platform that uses a blockchain to facilitate payments. On Sia you can rent storage, get paid to host files, mine Siacon, or contribute to the project! Existing cloud storage providers are centralized.

Source

          One thing that interests me is the functionality the devs plan to add to share Dropbox style links and also the video streaming capability. I think the latter could be useful for Steem for content creators to link their videos. I am not sure how this compared to Interplanetary file system (IPFS) but think it may be worth reviewing more deeply.

          Another thing is the prospect of image hosting for bloggers. Reviewing their roadmap, it does appear there is one issue that needs to be overcome and that is the minimum file size of 4 MB. I don't think simple or vector based images would take a lot of space so this could be a problem.

They also have a higher level roadmap that conveys some very ambitious goals such as competing with Amazon S3.

          All in all, I am a big fan of decentralized computing in general and look forward to this project developing. I do hold their utility token and may explore how SC could bolster Steem as a storage solution.

Thanks for reading!