Sia Foundation#
The Sia network hardforked at beginning of 2021 to implement the Sia Foundation: a new non-profit entity led by Luke Champine that builds and supports distributed cloud storage infrastructure, with a specific focus on the Sia storage platform.
This fork activated at a block height 298,000 which happened on February 3rd 2021.
If you want to know more about Sia Foundation, check out Introduction to Sia and Skynet.
Communication#
Official way to communicate with The Sia Foundation is through the Sia Forum. Not discord, reddit or twitter. The Sia Forum is the right place to post your suggestions and be sure that they will be considered and receive an official response. You can also find Luke’s launch post here.
Sia Foundation Tracker#
The Sia Foundation Tracker is a 3rd-party web app that tracks incoming and outgoing transactions to the Sia Foundation’s block subsidy addresses. Built and maintained by Sia Central.
“The Sia Foundation is a non-profit corporation that maintains, improves, and promotes the Sia distributed storage network. It was founded in 2020 and is funded by a perpetual subsidy built into the Sia protocol. All code, research, educational materials, and other products of the Foundation’s work will be made available to the public free of charge and under open-source licenses.” – Sia Foundation
Fork that introduced Sia Foundation#
The Sia Foundation proposal
Proposal: The Sia Foundation from r/siacoin
What is the hard fork?
Hard fork is event when new version of software is released and it has different “rules”. It results in two seperate blockchains, where one is being used by those who do not update and continue using old version. And the new blockchain that is using the new version. In this case, Sia is forking to introduce changes to the block reward. Up to the point in time before its activation, both blockchains have identical history. It is as if someone duplicated it. If you held for example 1000 SC before, you will now have 1000 SC (which are actually 1000 SCC) on legacy blockchain and 1000 SC on the new one. But they are not the same, community usually gives them different tickers to distinguish them, like SC and SCC. Does it mean you will have double the amount of SC? No. You will have twice the coins, but each set of coins is on a seperate network and all new transactions can only be on one chain. Let’s look at one good example from Sia’s own history. The fork in 2018 resulted in two chains: Sia (after update, used by versions 1.3.7 and higher, let’s call it SC after its currency) and the legacy one (used by those who didn’t update, which was called SCC(there were also other forks, but they're not important here)). If you had SC before the fork, when the network split happened, you had same history (seed, blocks, addresses, transactions) on both blockchains, but after that moment, each blockchain went own way. That means you had same amount of different coins that weren’t compatible with each other – if you made transaction with SCC after the fork or mined coins on SCC chain, they would only exist on SCC blockchain, not on Sia. And vice versa.Since this fork was well accepted by vast majority of the communitythere is no legacy chain expected to survive. You can still access your legacy coins if you use the old wallet software at any point in future, but there will be no one who continues using it. In other words, it will(in all likelyhood) be worthless.
Written by: Danger & Covalent, Last Edit: October 26, 2021