Obelisk Hardware Skyrockets In Selling Price After Sia Hard Fork

Kevin O'Brien

Prices for Obelisk mining rigs have skyrocketed over the past couple of days after the Sia hard fork.

A Tweet from Sia Tech on November 1st announced that the network had a successful hardfork at block 179,000. It asked people to update to the latest version of Sia in order to get access to the fork code.

A blog post from Sia lead developer David Vorick explained the fork was going through to brick out hardware from Bitmain and Innosilicon.

Obelisk miners, manufactured by Sia’s parent company Nebulous, are the only ones who are able to mine Siacoin now.

As a result, selling prices for Obelisk miners have jumped up in dramatic fashion in the days following the hard fork. Recent selling data from eBay had them selling at prices upwards of $5,000.


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A Booming Market

A Twitter user wrote back in September how the prices for SC1 miners were down from the Batch 1 price of $2,499 per unit. They characterized the swing as “the risk you take when pre-ordering” altcoin mining hardware.


Their follow up Tweet, pointing out how miners were now selling in the thousands of dollars, was an example of “how fast the tables can turn.”

Vorick wrote in the blog post how

“Obelisk built a tiny, secret extra circuit into the mining chip that would allow the Sia developers to perform a hard fork that breaks manufacturers without that extra circuit, but does not break the Obelisk machines.”

He encouraged all manufactures to build failsafes by adding secret extra circuits in order to have leverage to break an attacker’s hardware, even if these failsafes would “typically never be used.”

Obelisk Is Focused On Value

Some have expressed concern the hard fork is just fostering another monopoly. In his post, Vorick contended how Obelisk largely “went about ASIC development and manufacturing in the right way.”

He also wrote people still have the option to just use the old blockchain and reject the upgrade, and mused about a potential network split if “enough people rally around the old software.”