Yesterday morning the developers of Silicoin announced a hard fork for their blockchain and a move from their testnet coin tSIT to their mainnet coin SIT. This has been understood to be on the way for some, although the original roadmap had more phases in between. But up until now the Silicoin farming community had been given the impression that the coins they farmed during the testnet phases would be mapped 1:1 for final blockchain SIT. This will not be happening, barring a reversal from the developers, and instead tSIT holders will be given SIT at a 10:1 tSIT:SIT ratio. And people are pissed.
First off, a disclosure. I have 100 tSIT that I won in a giveaway on the Chia Forks Trader discord. I don’t care about them, and I hadn’t really thought about them until yesterday, but I guess I am technically personally affected by this change. But not as affected as some farmers who apparently spent up to $1000 USD (probably Tether) buying tSIT because of the promise that they would stay good through the phase changes.
This is nuts. Normally this blog is not financial advice, but I do feel comfortable advising that anyone putting $1000 into something called “test Silly coins” is taking an extreme risk and should consider that money spent, not invested. Please, if any readers here are considering dumping a significant amount of real money that they might into random Chia Forks please don’t.
However, those that did put their real money into this are very upset by this decision with one farmer on the Silicoin discord claiming he had spoken to his lawyer and that this amounted to fraud. I don’t think that’s true, I don’t think there is anything illegal about changing a roadmap and I do not believe the Silicoin team signed anything promising users of their testnet full 1:1 coin exchange in the future. I do, however, think that they did make claims that they are no longer standing behind. I do not think they should have made this choice as it will seriously affect their ability to generate community trust in the future, but it was their choice to make.
At the end of the day what we are doing here is akin to gambling, and should be treated as such. There is a good chance that any penny you put into this ecosystem will disappear tomorrow. It is more likely with Chia Forks than it is with Chia, and more likely with Chia than it is with Ethereum or Bitcoin, but even the big ones have a risk to disappear any time for a variety of reasons. You could lose everything, and you should act accordingly.
