Sia is pretty much a decentralized dropbox. It works like this, you as a user have data you want to store. Other users of Sia have storage available, they are your hosts. You engage contracts with other users that host your data and pay them in Siacoins.
If you want to host other peoples data, at this point you have to own 50000 (which translates to about €30 or $33 at the time of writing) Siacoins for you to start hosting. You as a host determine your own rates of Siacoin. The price of bandwith, price per TB per month, collateral per TB per month and the maximum duration of the contract is up to the user. However if you are expensive of course you will have less contracts assigned to you. Your transferred data is always encrypted.
My main question is why anyone would go through the trouble of signing up for an exchange, transfer their FIAT money to that exchange, buy Siacoin, transfer it to their wallet and start Sia to buy hosting? Dropbox and alternatives let you do that all within a few clicks. Don't get me wrong I really really like the idea and would use it too, but at this moment there seems to be a bit of a gap between me pressing the download button and actually starting to use the programme.
Since it is all nicely decentralized your files would be distributed on several locations at the same time. But what if you sign a nice cheap contract with a certain host and he decides to quit and never turn on his equipment? Your data will be fine, you can get it from others. But your contract is still there, will another host pick up the cheap contract? A smart contract will run on the blockchain that only pays a host when they keep your file for the entire duration, so that means the host is less likely to just quit. But who then picks up the contract?
At this moment another problem is the starting of all this. The best hosts are geographically close to you but at this moment there aren't that many. So for this to work there would have to be a lot of hosts already running before users join. I for example have around 1.2TB of cloud storage in use on another platform and I am a heavy user, so at this point the network is not reliable enough for me to split all the data onto many hosts for reliability. I think Sia is a great idea, I really do. But I think adoption is still far away.
I've been running a Sia host for a few weeks and I have to say, STAY AWAY FROM IT. The software is buggy as hell. Or at least the latest (1.2.2) version is. I set it up with the default settings after buying the required SIA and a few weeks on, it has 2 contracts, it says the host is unreachable and it has started to deduct collateral from my account.
All of this makes no sense whatsoever. If it's unreachable how come it has 2 contracts? Why is it unreachable if I have not changed anything and other software connects to the net fine? Money is being taken from my walled but no explanation is given as to why and for what! If the money being deducted is for collateral, it;s being taken for GBs of data and I'm only hosting very few of kilobytes (2 contracts only). Then I noticed a few days latest it's still unreachable, sias has been deducted but it now has 4 contracts! WTF!!
It's mad how little testing they have done on this thing and they obviously have no experience in UX. I would not trust my files with them, which saddens me because I think it's a great concept. It's just very poorly implemented and the support is nill.
Isn't Pied Piper (company in Silicon Valley TV show), the same thing as Sia? Both a decentralized dropbox?
Yes, with the difference of Pied Piper having a product that works and Siacoin having some plans about something that sounds really good but doesn't work at all after years of development. I mean I don't blame the 4 man team and the 2 interns for the little progress, I'm just observing the facts.
Yes, same concept, except the fictional Silicon Valley team are way more talented than these guys.
For me Siacoin and Ethereum are the same thing, some diferences but in the end the same way.
@thebatchman thank for the informative post check my article inspired by you.
https://steemit.com/sia/@akshaybornare/sia-the-new-cloud-storage-system
Right now I try STORJ, maybe its better developped - I hope so. These services are so unknown, thats the problem. One should host a youtube 2.0 on the Storj infrastructure - or at least Steemit.
I think using those services combined with aws3 must be faster and more secure.
Sometimes even google, facebook etc. are very slow - depending on the location you are etc.
Plus decentral is more secure and private - and cheaper.
Plus the community could earn something from the traffic.
Than put the data on 100 pc's around the world and you should have a fast access, wether you are in Guinea Bissau, the Phillippines or in Sibiria.
If some of the local host fail, you could load it than anyway from somewhere else. As more people are joining, the more reliable nodes you would create, the more faster you can access the data.
You could upload popular content 100.000.000x so you would have allways the fastest connections.
After what I read Storj seems to be the best on the market, but pays very little.
The only problem I see is, if someone hack the system and makes you responsable for all the content you shared. Of cause you cant controll which data you host.