https://obelisk.tech
Sia is releasing a 28nm, full-custom ASIC. This ASIC will be a complete package, similar to an antminer. You will receive a mining box that includes chips, power supplies, etc. The miner will require minimal setup, and minimal knowledge of hardware or components to operate.
The miner is in early development already. We have begun the process of chip design, hardware design, and supply chain management. We have had conversations with previous ASIC manufacturers, and we have been warned about delays, unexpected costs, and myriads of pitfalls that throw off estimations. For this reason, we have set a conservative shipping date of June 2018. If the miners are ready sooner, they will be shipped sooner. If all goes well (and it rarely does, especially for first time manufacturers), we could see the miners shipping before March 2018.
Following the presale, we will be posting a development roadmap on our website that includes all the major steps of development. We will be crossing off steps in the roadmap as we complete them, which will allow the community to follow our progress, have visibility into delays, and will be able to see the places where we are ahead of or behind schedule.
The estimated hashrate is 100 GH/s. We will not know the exact hashrate until later in the development process, however we have confidence that 100 GH/s is a low bar to hit. We may end up shipping miners with a much higher hashrate, and will continue updating the estimated hashrate as we get more accurate estimates for how the chips will perform.
The price of the unit is going to be $2499. Chip manufacturing is expensive, supply chains are expensive, and there are a lot of single-time costs that go into making miners. Future batches will likely have lower prices, however they will also ship later.
We will be selling the miners for Bitcoin. We expect the sale volume to be very large (in the tens of millions of dollars), and we feared that the Sia cryptocurrency would not have enough liquidity to handle all of that volume, resulting in the price rising quickly as people scramble to buy Siacoin for the ASIC, and then the price falling quickly as we convert the Siacoin to USD. This is the worst of both worlds - participants buy the siacoin at a premium, and then we sell them at a discount. Bitcoin has much, much deeper liquidity, and we can sell large volume of Bitcoin quickly without moving the price too much.
We reserve the right to deny purchases for any reason. If we suspect a scam, a false address, etc., we may deny your purchase. That said, it's our intention to allow everybody to purchase a miner. We will allow people to make bulk purchases of miners, however we will not allow bulk buyers to push out smaller buyers.
If we deny your purchase, the full amount you sent us will be returned in Bitcoin. We will return the full amount regardless of price fluctuations, and will not compensate if Bitcoin has lost value. We will not convert your bitcoin to USD unless we approve your purchase.
If we approve your purchase, your coins will be marked for conversion to USD. We will not convert your coins unless the value of the coins is within 5% of the purchase price at the moment of sale. If the price of Bitcoin drops before we make the conversion, we will ask you to send more coins to make up the difference. If you cannot or refuse to, we will deny your purchase and return your coins to you. If the price of Bitcoin increases before we make the conversion, we will not return the difference, we will keep the gains. It will take time to process orders. We are a small team and we are expecting to get thousands of orders. We will be converting the Bitcoin to USD as fast as possible to minimize the chance of price fluctuations, but it may take several days nonetheless.
If, for some reason, we decide to refund after we have converted the coins to USD, you will be refunded the USD value of your purchase sent in Bitcoin. We may charge a small fee for the cost of conversion, however it will not exceed our own losses resulting from converting from Bitcoin to USD and then back.
The sale and shipment of ASICs on the Sia network is going to dramatically increase the hashrate. When considering how much revenue you may get from a unit, please take into account the fact that we are selling enough units to potentially 10x or 100x the difficulty. If another ASIC manufacturer decides to start selling Sia ASICs, the hashrate may go up by more than just the number of units we sell. Please also consider that the block reward is decreasing. Today, the block reward is about 189,000 siacoins per block. By June 2018, our ship date, the block reward is going to be closer to 135,000 siacoins per block, decreasing by 1 siacoin per block (or 4320 siacoins per month).
The presale will be open for 7 days. There is no rush - people who buy on the fourth day will receive the same treatment as people who buy on the first day. The sale will not close early, and while we reserve the right to deny purchases, we have chosen not to put a cap on the number of units sold. We may pre-sell additional batches before the first batch ships. The first batch will have priority when we begin shipping, and if the later batches will be shipping shortly after, those later batches will be sold at a higher price. People who buy in on the first batch will receive both price preference and shipping date preference as a reward for taking on the most risk.
Obelisk is the company that will be producing these chips. Obelisk is a fully owned subsidiary of Nebulous Inc. Nebulous is the company that employs all of the Sia core developers.
Obelisk has plans for growth in the future. None of these plans are finalized as we are primarily focusing on shipping this miner, but potential future products include:
A 16nm or 14nm ASIC for Sia
A mining card costing under $1000 that you can put into a GPU slot
ASICs for other PoW cryptocurrencies
Finally, we plan to introduce decentralized mining pools into the Sia ecosystem before we ship the miners. Hosts will have the option of running their own mining pool, and then miners can detect the hosts by checking the blockchain and the peer network, forming payment channel contracts with them and participating in fully decentralized mining. This should help alleviate the pool centralization that is seen in most PoW cryptocurrencies.
We are very excited about our new company, and hope that you share in our excitement. Feel free to ask any questions.
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