Sia Criticizes Ethereum Foundation over Centralized Control, but It Wants to Do the Same

On May 10, 2017, David Vorick, Sia’s co-founder, criticized the Ethereum Foundation for governing the Ethereum protocol, which led to some degree of power centralization on a supposedly decentralized platform. Interestingly, with Sia’s new proposal, Voric’s project seems to be heading towards the same path, and a hard fork is the best method to achieve this.

A Hard Fork Is the Only Way

Three years later, Luke Champine, another Sia co-founder, took to Reddit on September 8 to propose the creation of the Sia Foundation, a non-profit organization that would jump-start the protocol’s slow growth. With Champine as president, the foundation would oversee the improvements of the platform’s core software, rally for the coin’s adoption, enhance the security among other key pillars of the system that seeks to promote decentralized file storage.

However, to achieve its mandate, it needs funding, from a hard fork. For Champine, the hard fork would allow the blockchain’s native tokens, Siacoin, to be increased from 30,000 to 60,000. The extra coins will be held in a Foundation Fund. Twenty-five percent of the funds will go towards community-focused activities such as hackathons, bounties, and grants.

Apart from increasing the Siacoin supply, the process will introduce a yearly inflation of up to 10.4 percent. To cap the high inflation effects, the proposal introduces burning extra coins after the foundation has taken 5 percent of the total supply.

Although the discussion is still at an early stage, the Sia community proposes a complete disintegration of the foundation from Nebulous, the company behind the Sia blockchain, and Champine liquidating his stake on Nebulous to fully concentrate on Sia Foundation.

It’s Wrong for Ethereum but Right for Sia

Interestingly, the very same thing Sia wants to do is the same thing it accused Ethereum Foundation of some three years ago.

During this time, Vorick took to Medium to lay out the project’s ethos. In the post, the co-founder noted that the Ethereum Foundation “has taken full control of the protocol’s future, including the rights to make sweeping changes to things such as the consensus algorithm … [and] coin supply.”

Although it seemed like a bad thing, Sia may have realized it’s how to push the protocol forward.