Sia network has finally completed its network hard fork. The distributed cloud storage blockchain was able to change its consensus rules in a way that no ASIC mining devices can be used to mine tokens from the network anymore.

The CEO of Nebulous, which has created the Sia Network, David Vorick, has affirmed that all is finally working normally now and that the ASIC miners have been bricked. The fork was planned to take place at the block 179,000 but an error in code made the miners stuck in the block 178,999 for hours. The bug was eventually ironed out.

Basically, the main reason for the change was to “brick” the ASIC miners which have been dominating the hash rate of the network. Bitmain and Innosilicon were the two main enemies of the network as they were deemed too powerful by the community and the company that manages the network.

After the fork, the Sia Network had far fewer miners than it had before the difficulty for mining blocks was lowered 98%, which made ASIC miners less useful and, therefore, worse ideas. By disabling specialized hardware, the Sia network was able to let the network become more decentralized because it bricked the big players away from the platform.

However, there is a trick. Only the hardware created by Obelisk, which is a subsidiary of Nebulous (which we have already affirmed that controls the network) will be useful for mining. Because of this, one could comment whether the decentralization argument wasn’t just talk.

Obelisk launched its ASIC miner in 2017 but Bitmain has beat the company, so it looks like some move from a company trying to protect its business instead of its community.

Vorick’s whole argument was that the development of other ASIC miners could be considered an attack on the “community”. So the company used a secret killswitch to change the protocol because “much of the community felt that the secret development of ASICs was an attack”.

Crypto companies like to say that they are all about community, but cases like this one simply make anyone question this concept. Was the decision made because Vorick felt his company has lost the edge on its own product? What does the “community” had to with that? Could not members from the “community” have bought miner too? Well, it looks like they did.

Vorick has considered the fork to be a success, though, as he estimates that 87% of the network’s computing power was from “community members” now.

Obviously, some people were not a bit happy about the fork. This is why Sia Classic was created. People who invested in Innosilicon software have felt left out of the “community” and accused Vorick of being a protectionist.

Just like Ethereum Classic, Sia Classic maintained the old protocol and has created its own foundation and social media forums. The group has went as far as to publish a Declaration of Independence.

Vorick has affirmed that the new coin has very low community support and stated that they have seen “little evidence” that there is support for the new token.

Another two groups have emerged: Sia Prime and Hyperspace. The first one intends to collaborate with Nebulous and the other to be an adversary, Vorick affirmed.

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