David Vorick, CEO of Nebulous, which operates Siacoin and a new subsidiary, Obelisk, describes what he's discovered in his exploration of the mining industry, including why he's decided that specialized chips like ASICs are preferable to generalized chips like GPUs, even if they tend to bring out mining centralization. He also describes Obelisk's new service, Launchpad,which secures exclusive deals to create a custom proof-of-work algorithm for a coin and also the mining equipment for it, in exchange for being the only miner on the market at launch or for a period. He explains why he thinks proof of work is the only really viable type of consensus algorithm and doesn't even see any other potentially workable ones on the horizon. Plus, he has some sharp criticisms of Bitmain and claims that several groups were secretly mining Monero, though he can't reveal how he knows.  

David Vorick: https://twitter.com/DavidVorick

https://medium.com/@davidvorick

Siacoin: http://sia.tech

Blog.sia.tech

Obelisk: https://obelisk.tech

Blog.obelisk.tech

David on why Siacoin chose ASICs: https://medium.com/obelisk-blog/choosing-asics-for-sia-4b11695df051

David's long post about the state of cryptocurrency mining: https://blog.sia.tech/the-state-of-cryptocurrency-mining-538004a37f9b

Announcement about Obelisk:

https://medium.com/obelisk-blog/introducing-obelisk-launchpad-b78756eaa74c

Zooko's recap of his conversation with Jihan Wu, CEO of Bitmain: https://forum.z.cash/t/so-i-had-a-videochat-with-jihan-wu/29379

Bitmain's tweets being transparent (account currently disabled): https://twitter.com/BITMAINtech/status/1001376036985028608

Bitmain's blog post about being transparent: https://blog.bitmain.com/en/antiminer-z9-mini-shipments-experiment-radical-transparency/

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