Secret ASICs for the People: Obelisk Reveals Plan to Fight Big Miners

The age-old idiom may be particularly relevant for David Vorick, the co-founder of the Sia blockchain, whose new project aims to fight powerful crypto mining chip manufacturers by bringing competition to the sector.

That project, called Launchpad, expects teams developing new cryptocurrencies to hire Obelisk to design a custom proof-of-work algorithm as well as the ASIC hardware that works on that algorithm - all in secret.

Shortly before the coin launches, Obelisk will turn the ASICs over to the team behind the cryptocurrency, who will distribute the hardware to the community so that no one party controls too much mining power, and so that most of the mining power is held by small players.

While a significant number of groups have gone to war with ASIC manufacturers, suggesting changes to their cryptocurrenciess algorithms to render ASICs useless, others, like Vorick, believe all those attempts are doomed to fail.

"You're going to end up with ASICs on your network," Vorick said in an interview.

There's ample evidence for his position: in recent months, ASICs have been developed for ethereum's and zcash's mining algorithms, both of which were initially thought to be ASIC-resistant.

The contention is that ASICs raise the barriers to entry to mining, and as such, can lead to a concentration of control in fewer hands.

No entity - not even Obelisk - will control more than 20 percent of the mining power on these new networks, although ASIC distribution choices are ultimately up to the team.

That said, there is a kind of trade-off in that cryptocurrency teams will have to put a considerable amount of trust in Obelisk, or rather two people that work at Obelisk - Vorick himself and the company's lead chip developer.

For one, Obelisk will open source the algorithm and ASIC hardware design once the network goes live.