Sia Completes Hard Fork as Bricked Miners Form Rival Blockchain

The distributed storage blockchain network Sia has successfully completed a planned hard fork, changing its consensus rules in a way that prevents some specialized hardware from mining on the network.

"All is working normally now," David Vorick, founder and CEO of Nebulous, the for-profit company behind the Sia network, told CoinDesk on Thursday.

The fork, planned for the previous day, was set to take place at block 179,000 in the Sia chain, but miners found themselves stuck at block 178,999 for hours because, as Vorick wrote in a community forum Wednesday evening, an error in the code meant that miners "Will need to mine at least one block at full difficulty before the adjustment kicks in. This may take anywhere from 6 to 48 hours."

Following the fork the Sia network had far fewer miners.

Nebulous had a trick up its sleeve, however: a kill switch that would enable the company to change the Sia algorithm in a way that would disable other miners, but let Obelisk miners keep running.

As has happened with other controversial hard forks - most notably ethereum's following the DAO theft - part of the community has decided to continue using the old Sia protocol.

The group has also published a "Declaration of Independence." Sia Classic miners kept finding blocks without interruption, even as the "Main," Nebulous-endorsed chain stalled briefly.

Sia Classic "Has very low community support," Vorick said.

"They say they believe in the vision though, and that they wish to have a collaborative relationship with the main chain. If Sia Classic does get support, then we are happy to engage them collaboratively. But so far we've seen little evidence of actual support outside of Sia Classic employees."

Vorick characterized the fork as a success for the Sia community.