Invesd Magazine – Cryptocurrency, Fintech, Blockchain
Cloud storage company Sia might shock its competitors Dropbox, Microsoft and Google Drive in the long term. Following the trend of Airbnb and Uber, Sia makes an easy and safe way to share decentralised data storage on the Internet. Sia’s main target are enterprise users. As a storage provider, everyone can earn a monthly income by sharing cloud storage. Sia is simply an object store for the future!
SIA Is
“a network for remotely storing data. Typically called ‘cloud storage’, the core feature is that you can put data on the network and it will be available from anywhere in the world at a later date. Putting data onto a network means that someone else – a ‘host’ – is going to be storing the data, and is going to be responsible for returning the data when requested. Several key assumptions are made about the network.” – David Vorick
Facts & Statistics – 20.08.2016
| Total Coins | 17.60 billion siacoins |
|---|---|
| Difficulty | 9,409 TH |
| Estimated Hashrate | 14,957 GH/s |
| Maturity Timestamp | 11:08, Aug 20, 2016 |
| Active File Contracts | 6,721 |
| Total File Contract Cost | 21,142,422 siacoins |
| Total File Contract Size | 26.776787163674 TB |
| Successful Storage Proofs | 67,490 |
Idea
of Sia’s is definitely one of the best out there right now. To explain an idea easier, a video is better than an article. That’s why David Vorick created a new short introduction video for everyone. Take a look!
The mission!
“The long term goal is to be the backbone storage layer of the Internet. All long term storage will be performed on Sia. Movies and music will be streamed from Sia. Images will be embedded from Sia. Businesses will use Siatech as a backend for cloud storage. Sia intends to replace Bittorrent, Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, Microsoft OneDrive, and all backend cloud storage services. We intend to fully disrupt a many billion dollar industry.” – David Vorick
Next goals & milestones
- October 2016: Amazon S3 API Compatibility
Team
Main developer and CEO David Vorrick
Co-founder at Nebulous Inc. Luke Champine
Nebulous Inc. is the parent company. They support Sia.tech from the beginning and Luke Champine is working mainly on Sia’s networking code.
Full time core developers
Jordan (https://www.reddit.com/u/voidingwarranties)
John (https://www.reddit.com/u/fighterjet-biceps)
Interns
John (https://www.reddit.com/u/droghio)
Jane (https://www.reddit.com/u/mnsl)
The team keeps their users updated all the time. Every question is answered promptly, such that problems can be solved on time.
Branding
WEBSITE / LOGO & INFORMATION
FORUM
Marketing
On marketing, they are behind quite a few other cryptocurrency projects. Recently, Siacoin got a considerable amount of momentum on the exchange platform “Poloniex”. A lot of people researched Sia and liked the idea and concept behind it, which is reflected by a big rise of the price in the last couple of months. Note that there is still not much public presentation and marketing on going, for example, via Facebook or Twitter.
PRICE INCREASE
Usability
End user: The wallet is easy to use. Download the wallet, double click and wait until its running. Siacoin loves simplicity!
Disadvantage we found: Synchronizing the wallet (block heights) takes ages right now. – 21.08.2016
We think the team is aware of this delay and they will fix this soon. Right now it just takes a lot of time (days) to set up a new account or use a new device for your account.
Host: As a host, it is not that easy to use compared with an end user. For a new host, it’s hard to quickly find out how everything works. Especially on Linux system, advanced technical skills are required. But, don’t worry they made a good job of detailed guidelines on Linux Ubuntu systems.
SIA’s User Interface
Integrated Terminal Inside The Sia Wallet
SIA’s Hosting Concept
Security
“Sia is able to safely store data on a network, which has the above properties. There are three core strategies employed by Sia to ensure the safety of data. The first is encryption, which serves to protect the privacy of the data even when the hosts are trying to view the data. All data on Sia is encrypted before it is ever sent over the network, and it is only decrypted after it has been downloaded. The hosts will never be able to view decrypted data. The second strategy is redundancy. Data is not given to one or two or three hosts, but instead a myriad of hosts.
Using erasure coding techniques such as Reed-Solomon coding, a high reliability can be achieved even without a high redundancy. The final strategy is to align the incentives of the hosts by paying them only if they store the data, but also by guaranteeing that they will get paid for storing the data, even if the renter is not online to make the payment. This can be achieved using a file contract, and a file contract can be achieved using a blockchain.” – David Vorick
Scalability
What scalability means on the Sia network?
Sia doesn’t try to do trustless decentralized storage, and instead tries to do trust-minimal decentralized storage. Users achieve minimal-trust data by giving data to many hosts but only requiring that a few of them are available. The hosts get paid for storing users’ data for a long time, and they get penalized for losing the data. Sia makes sure that the incentives are properly aligned, and after aligning the incentives Sia make sure that it’s still tolerant to loss.
- The idea of a trust sphere
- The relationships
- The improvement options
2. Decrease the size of contracts
3. Decrease the number of relationships per trust sphere
4. Increase the number of humans per trust sphere
5. Make relationships semi-permanent and renewable
– David Vorick
More about the scalability here – Scalability
Interested in Sia? Website / Facebook / Twitter / Forum / Github / Blockchain Explorer
SIA DONATIONS WELCOME: 6c7a838c0a62e3eae472f2057d75905b8d2411291725dfeaad65bdf1559798e7d0073cf27752
AND BTC: 364AAbViSKKs1A5Sfmvr3FNVAZS8BErXSr
THE BREAKDOWN
Idea - 92%
Team - 93%
Branding - 84%
Marketing - 81%
Usability - 88%
Security - 94%
Scalability - 77%
87%
Our Score
Sia is growing quickly over the last couple of months. David Vorick is doing a great job as a main developer. All blog posts are really enjoyable and it is easy to feel the philosophy of Sia! Decentralization is everything! Cloud is the future - connected with revolutionary new technologies, Sia can definitly break out as one of the first cryptocurrencies for real-world use! The combined idea (Blockchain & Cloud storage) could shock a lot of big-market competitiors in the near future!
Seems to me that rating could be 88% if you take out the secondary things that can easily be improved (Branding, Marketing, Usability, and Security).
I am one of those people who researched SiaCoin and, liking what I saw, bought some.
I didn’t see mention in this article of my only real concern, and that is scalability. I suspect issues will arise when adoption reaches a certain threshold and I’d like to know the team is at least ahead of the curve enough to know they need to be working on that right now.
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Its such as you read my thoughts! You seem to understand so much about this, like you wrote the e book in it or something. I feel that you simply can do with some p.c. to pressure the message home a bit, however other than that, that is great blog. A fantastic read. I’ll definitely be back.