Sia receives $400k grant from INBlockchain for development of its cloud storage platform

More details: https://sia.tech/2017grant/

Just saw some talk about an RC4 (no timeline yet) but I will update the thread if I hear more info.

I think they (Nebulous Labs) were very surprised by the low volume of actual sales they had.  There are probably a myriad of reasons from focussing on the wrong market (they were marketing to SIA users rather than miners) to the long lead time and the overall current slide in the crypto market.

Personally I invested in SC last year and with the increase (before the current slide) I was able to pull out enough capital to expand my BTC miner pool, my GPU pool and buy Obelisks.  All while still holding about 1/2 my original investment in SC.  I will let the haters hate and take my increased income from my Sia involvement and enjoy.

RC3 came out yesterday.  Which was what I had said.  You are correct that these things can slip but in this case you are wrong.  Latest I heard was the plans are still for the formal release to be next week.

For those who purchased Obelisks, we received this update in email:

---

Presale Updates
Thank you so much for being one of the first to preorder the Obelisk SC1 miner. We received over 1,000 preorders, which has provided us with enough funding to pay for the bulk of the chip design costs. We are so grateful for your trust, and we will work tirelessly to ship your order by June 2018.
 
The 1,000 preorders give us enough funding for the chip design costs, but not enough funding to produce the chips and manufacture completed units. For that, we need to sell a minimum of 2,000 units – and that minimum gives us absolutely no breathing room.
 
We have therefore decided to extend the presale with a cap of 4,000 units. The presale will officially end when we receive payment for the 4,000th unit. We are confident that, by introducing a cap, we will pass the 2,000-unit minimum and gain some breathing room for unexpected obstacles or delays.
 
This extension of the sale does not affect the timeline. We still plan to ship by June 2018 at the latest, and the chip design project is running on schedule. We are still including with each unit a $250 coupon for future batches and a mining exclusivity period of 6 weeks.
 
Additionally, the cap at 4,000 units means that the expected per-unit mining reward during the 6-week exclusivity period will be about 200,000 SC.
 
We hope you understand our decision, and we look forward to hearing your questions and concerns. We recognize that, by ordering in the first week, you deserve some special treatment and recognition. We’ll be sending out exclusive Sia+Obelisk branded gear in the coming weeks. We'll also be increasing your per-unit coupons to $400.
 
As always, you can email hello@obelisk.tech and we will get back to you as soon as possible.
 
Best,
 
- Team Obelisk

I too have my 80THs at Toomim Bros and am very happy.  The bad news is that they too are at capacity.  I had pointed some people to them from another group and they mentioned this.  I confirmed it with Jonathon.  He said they had someone buy up all their remaining capacity.  He didn't mention how long it would be until they expanded other than it was planned.

Rick..

Agreed.  My quick numbers didn't take the GPU miners into account.  However I believe that the GPUs will quickly move to other more profitable coins once the ASICs come into play.  It won't take many ASICs to start influencing the return from GPUS (making them not competitive) and they can easily move to other coins.  This will make the numbers more closely model just a ASIC only mining environment.

Or said another way, the block finder reward is a listing on the Acclaim Board. 

You are correct that the original projections about return rate and SC monthly production was based on the estimated 10k ASICS produced.  With the new cap being at 4k, this means the initial monthly SC production is 2.5 times more. 

There is a bunch of assumptions in these numbers but with 2.5 times less ASICs, the difficulty will not be as high so each miner will produce more coin, etc.

Plus the original number didn't have a cap (it was only a 10k estimate).  If they had somehow sold twice as many, it would have been half as profitable.  As someone who purchased a couple, I am really happy with the 4k cap as it makes my purchase twice as profitable. 

It is actually limited to max buy size so that it isn't all one buyer.  Yesterday they said the single biggest buy was 50 units.  Most of the buyers are small single or several unit purchases.  I bought 2 which I think is pretty representative.

I stand corrected.  Latest today was this:
 RC3 tomorrow, and then v130 next week. Delays because a security issue was found

Why shouldn't I get my hopes up?  These guys have a great dev team and are producing a solid product based on a real world need.  Yes, I am biased, but that is because I researched what they are doing and put my money where my mouth is last year, back when the price averaged 40 satoshis or so.  This year I sold off a quarter of my SC holdings to purchase 2 Obelisks in the pre-sale.

It looks like they will be releasing a new release candidate for the upcoming v1.3 release today sometime.

They had hoped to get the release out by June (and did get the first release candidate out) but I suspect between all the Poloniex issues earlier in the month and the Obelisk excitement at the end of the month, things slipped a little.

The development team is very active on their slack and reddit.  Other forms of communication tends to be a bit more laggy.

I use this on Chrome on both my Macbook and my Windows machine.  Not sure what is wrong but the browser probably isn't the issue.

Check which version of gcc you are using.  I have found that there are a lot of packages out there that don't  compile with the latest gcc (5.x series) and you have to roll back to the 4.x versions.  I only compiled curecoind since I don't use the gui wallet and it compiled with gcc 5.4 so I never ran into a problem with it.

Rick..

For me, this was about diversification.  I currently have an S7, and R4 and 4 S9s.  I have 2 more S9s coming in August and 3 A741s that I am waiting for shipping on. . So by August I should hit about 100TH/s.

Yeah, they were responding in the middle of the night their time.  I ordered on the 13th, they confirmed payment on the 21st, so hopefully they will ship tomorrow.

How long did it take between order and now?  Mine hasn't shipped yet and I am curious how long I get to wait between paying for the order and them shipping.

Thanks,
Rick..

All I had email wise was the auto responder when you update your ticket.  I will add that after I wrote this, I got the following added to my ticket on their website.

For those interested in obelisk info, there is now a page on the sia wiki about it. 

https://siawiki.tech/development/obelisk