Sia Blog

The problem with decentralized systems that don't include a currency component is that there's no extrinsic incentive to contribute anything to the network, only to consume.

BitTorrent suffers from this problem; they even have a term for it: leeching. It's managed to survive despite this purely off of the generosity and goodwill of a community of dedicated users, but if BitTorrent were to ever have its eternal September moment I suspect the problem would quickly be felt rather acutely.

With other systems like decentralized cloud storage[1] or decentralized DNS[2] where (unlike with BitTorrent) there are no inherent practical limits on how many resources a single user can consume, the consequences of not including a currency component would be even more severe.

As for the "no recourse" problem, that's inherent to the very idea of self-sovereignty. Yes it's a weakness with decentralized systems, but it's also their greatest strength.

[1]: https://sia.tech/

[2]: https://handshake.org/

The Sia Foundation | REMOTE | https://sia.tech

Sia is a distributed cloud storage platform. It's an open marketplace that allows anyone to rent out their storage capacity, enforced by smart contracts. Storing data on Sia is cheaper than the traditional cloud, as well as being more secure (encrypted, no vendor lock-in, no single point of failure) and more performant (download from 30+ storage hosts in parallel, like a torrent).

The network has been running smoothly and quietly for around 6 years now, with steadily increasing usage. We're good at making stuff that works. We're not so good at hyping up our product and gaining developer mindshare. That's why we're hiring a Developer Evangelist. Come help us make Sia the leading platform in cloud storage!

Oh yeah, we're also hiring a frontend developer to make nice websites and UIs.

Apply here: https://siafoundation.homerun.co

Full disclosure, I am the founder of Sia, which of course is my favorite and I do believe is far ahead of all the other platforms at this time. https://sia.tech

There is also Storj, MaidSafe, Filecoin, Swarm, and sort-of-but-not-quite IPFS.

Storj and Sia are the front runners for private data like family photos, computer backups, etc. I don't really consider Storj to be decentralized here though.

Swarm I know less about, but I believe their focus is more on file sharing. IPFS is closer to a replacement for http and BitTorrent (both), great for high-demand files or files that are being explicitly hosted on a web server but not so much private data. I think they plan to upgrade this with Filecoin.

MaidSafe is 10 years old and still in alpha. They have huge ambitions but I think too huge, they don't seem capable of publishing things.

The people behind sia coin believe differently [0] and after reading that I'm more inclined to believe them.

The short version is that since "commodity" hardware can mine many things, you can't gauge how much power there could possibly be. Someone with 100,000 GPUs could turn their whole system to your coin and have over 50% of the hashing power for a day, then go back to whatever else the day after.

With ASICs, the devices can't be used for anything other than that specific coin, so to "save up" your hashing power to sneak in a day that you can get majority hashing power would be stupid. You'd have to be giving up the income from them while you waited.

The article explains it much better than I can, I really recommend it.

[0] https://blog.sia.tech/choosing-asics-for-sia-b318505b5b51?gi=43997fdbccfc

Sia [1] could be even cheaper, coming out at $1.10 for a TB [2]. Although this price might not be forever, and I'm still not sure about the reliability.

In theory it should be more reliable, as it's decentralised and your data gets split among multiple servers around the world. The question remains what if the Sia network itself stops being profitable and people all exit at the same time. Although the same could be said for Amazon?

Sia will actually soon be adding a backend to Minio too [3].

The only thing that has stopped me using Sia is you have to have the blockchain running on the machine.

1. https://sia.tech

2. https://siastats.info/storage_pricing

3. https://blog.sia.tech/introducing-s3-style-file-sharing-for-sia-through-the-new-minio-integration-bb880af2366a

The Sia Foundation | Technical Writer, Developer Evangelist | USA, Remote | Full-time | https://sia.tech
The Sia Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to maintaining and improving the Sia decentralized storage network.

We believe in a future where users own their data. That means no walled gardens, no vendor lock-in, and no single provider that can spy on you or hold your files hostage. Sia enables this future by allowing peers to buy and sell cloud storage directly in a trustless marketplace. We value privacy, high performance, and robust engineering.

Learn more and apply at:

Technical Writer: https://siafoundation.homerun.co/technical-writer

Developer Evangelist (USA Remote): https://siafoundation.homerun.co/developer-evangelist