Just the opposite. If your data is centralized, you can lose your data in any of these scenarios:

- A government or the storage company reads your files and shut downs your access to the data beacause of some policy (hello, Google Docs)
- The storage company changes the pricing terms on the fly asking you to pay more to keep accessing it (hello, Crahsplan), or simply shuts down due to bankruptcy
- A technical failure in the bridge or connection to the storage company
- A hacker access the storage company and destroys your data

In a de-centralized network like Sia this is impossible:
- Each particular host can't read your files, as it has access to incomplete fragments of it, and even if several of them were compromised, your data is encrypted
- A large number of hosts can go offline and you'll still have access to the data. Each file is distributed among 30 host, and you only need 10 of them to download the file. Hosts are spread worldwide

If Cryptopia has their wallets with the software updated to the last release, all should be good. The version 1.3.0 that is compatible with the fork was released 6 months ago.

However, keeping your coins at an exchange is a terrible idea in general. Exchanges can crash, can be hacked, can run away with the money, and in all those scenarios you'll lose your coins. Just remember how many exchanges have crashed in the past, even the huge ones. Just remember what happened with MtGox, that back in time was the biggest exchange.

I honestly recommend you to keep all your coins in wallets that you control, not only Sia

Very important reminder:

On block 135.000 (in about 5 days) there will be a hard fork in order to implement the new hashing difficulty algorithm. This was planned 6 months ago.

Be sure to update to version 1.3.0 if you haven't done it yet. Prior versions will not accept the new blocks and so will not sync anymore with the network.

Download the latest version here: https://sia.tech/apps/

If you need indications of how to update, follow this article of the Wiki: https://siawiki.tech/client/updating_the_interface

This is the announcement of David Vorik, lead developer, on the official Discord:






My pleasure  

Looks like for some reason you are targeting Sia in general and me in particular... Do you really think this is worth of your time?

My goals in this Sia thread are helping users with issues, offering information to users that ask for it (always citing the source, so they can confirm every piece of information) and clarifying complex aspects that are usually misunderstood. Have you asked yourself if all the two-sentences hate messages you are posting here are being useful to any user?

At the end of the day, the only thing that matters in BitcoinTalk are the posts that are helpful for other people. The rest are just ignored. That is the only thing that makes crypto communities grow healthy, and that is the sole reason cryptos get more capitalization every day: because we are open and we have the amazing tradition of helping each other.

Do you think this is even good for you? Coming to this Bitcointalk thread every day just to post another defamation, convinced that by doing that you can damage my reputation (I don't know how you could, if you don't offer any proof of what you say) or Sia's reputation, is just the opposite of what everybody would consider a mentally healthy attitude.

Are you doing this because you think this is a way as good as any other to grow your Activity or Post count to apply for a signature campaign? Take in mind no signature campaign will accept an account which his whole history are 2-sentences posts full of hating (that's what your current history looks like).

I am sad for you. Looks like you are totally salty probably because you bought Sia when it was at his max valuation in July. I am sorry, man, but each one of us is the only responsible of our investment decisions. If you feel you are done with Sia, I honestly recommend you to sell your Sia and move on: there are plenty of other cryptos out there that can be interesting for you. If you keep doing this you are only damaging yourself.

Besides, no matter what you, or anyone else does: I am not going to stop helping people, to stop answering questions... and of course I am not going to stop shilling about my website https://siastats.info LOL 

Currently the mining network of Sia is about 250-300TH/s. Unless you are the owner of a huge GPU farm, your chances of finding a block solo-mining are minimal.

There are 5 big mining pools in Sia, each one with different payout schemes, fees and other variables. Take a look at them: https://siastats.info/pools_list.html. For instance, both Siamining, Luxor and F2pool are PPS, what means you'll get payouts even if the pools does not find blocks. Luxor has a very low fee of 0.3% that is paid as a donation to Sia developers.


ASICs (Obelisk SC1) are not yet released. They are expected to ship on June of next year or earlier if the manufacturing is accomplished sooner. But there is still time for GPU mining.

There is only one full client available, the official Sia-UI. If you are using an HDD for the Sia installation instead of a SSD, it can take several days to sync. There is a workaround to reduce the syncing time to just a few hours of blockchain validation: manually downloading it (AKA bootstrapping). Follow the instructions here: https://siawiki.tech/daemon/bootstrapping_the_blockchain

Alternatively, if you just need right now an address for cold storage, you can use this wallet generator made by one of the Core developers: https://github.com/avahowell/sia-coldstorage/releases You will not be able to send coins from this wallet, only receive them, but you can later import the wallet recovery seed into the full Sia-UI for moving your funds whenever you need it

Data is stored in a network of  currently 900+ hosts around the globe offering their free hard disk space and getting compensated for that with Siacoins. Currently they are offering overall 3500TB of storage.



More data at: https://siastats.info/hosts_map.html and https://siastats.info/hosts_network.html

Each file you upload to Sia is split in chunks and distributed among 30 hosts with a redundancy of 3x.

The Reed-Solomon algorithm of data distribution ensures that even if only 10 of those hosts are online, your files will be still available for you to download.

As hosts risk Siacoins in what is called collateral, they are de-incentivized to drop the files.

Some changes are being made to the APIs currently, but the resulting APIs will always be backwards compatible with old applications.


The supply is infinite to incentivize miners securing the network forever. However the block reward is smaller over time and it will reach a minimum of 30KS/block. The inflation, for that reason, will be smaller and smaller. For instance, inflation rate today is 23% but it will be 3-4% in 2020. You can check the numbers here: https://siastats.info/supply_inflation.html

Also consider that in a future update Proof of Burn mechanics will be introduced for hosts to prove their legitimacy. So the more network usage, more burnt coins. At some point, if the network is big enough, the coin could be deflationary. Also, millions (or billions) will be locked in file contracts as the network keeps growing

The transactions go from unconfirmed to confirmed in the Sia UI after being included in a block. Blocks are generated on average every 10 minutes, but sometimes a block can take 30 minutes or more (in the same sense, it can take as few as a few seconds).

You can check if the transaction has been included in a block by pasting the hash of the TX on the "hash" field of Sia's Explorer: http://explore.sia.tech/ Once included in a block, the particular policies of each exchange may make your funds not being available after a number of extra blocks (comfirmations). Generally, it will be credited after 6 blocks (one hour).

Probably by now your transaction has been already credited by Bittrex

I think you are missing some points here.

• The storage pricing does not correlate with the value of the coin: hosts select their own pricing and they adjust it to fixed dollar values. For example, during the price rally of May-June, even if the coin went up 50x, the storage pricing remained under $2/TB/month. Currently the price is $1/TB/month (https://siastats.info/storage_pricing.html). If a company buys Sia on the go instead of provisioning a large amount for the following years, they will be paying the same amount in fiat all the time
• Final users are not the target of Sia. The goal is that storage providers (new ones or current ones that embrace Sia) use Sia as their storage layer. That way, they can offer storage plans paid by fixed fiat rates, while they do all the Sia conversion behind the scenes. Siacdn.com for instance uses this model
• The pricing is the biggest reason to adopt Sia. Currently Sia storage is $1/TB/month. AmazonS3 is $23/Tb/month. Bandwidth costs are 100x cheaper in Sia. No traditional storage provider can compete with that, because they want to make huge profits with the overhead costs (small wonder AWS ahs those figures of benefits), while in a storage marketplace like Sia, hosts compete for cheaper rates, having very small margins (while still profitable). Big companies paying thousands of dollars per month in storage can greatly reduce their bills with Sia once is ready for the prime time.
• Traditional storage solutions do not include native encryption and decentralization. No government can shut-down your data in Sia. No storage company can spy your data in Sia because it is decentralized and no individual host has access to enough data to reconstruct the files

Almost every coin out there is inflationary.

There is no limit in the supply of the coins, as a way to ensure miners will be always incentivized to secure the network. The block reward is decreasing on every block until it reaches a minimum of 30KS. You can check the expected Supply and Inflation rates here: https://siastats.info/supply_inflation.html resulting from mining activity

In top of that, in a future update hosts will be required to burn some coins to prove their legitimacy. The amount of coins that will be burnt can't be predicted, but it will more as hosts join the network and storage usage increases. At some point, it is possible that with enough network usage, the coin can become deflationary.

That question was already answered a few posts bellow the original question:

The initial sync of the blockchain takes very long if you are using a HDD. On a SSD it takes less than 8 hours.

You can greatly accelerate the process by manually downloading an updated image of the blockchain (AKA bootstrapping). Check the instructions here: https://siawiki.tech/daemon/bootstrapping_the_blockchain

In the future, if you need fast answers check in the official Discord (https://discordapp.com/invite/sia) and the official reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/siacoin/) as they are the only official channels. Devs and most of the community do not check Bitcointalk

Yes, you need to port-forward the ports 9981 and 9982 in your router and allow their traffic in the firewall of your hosting computer. The minimal collateral budget required is 2000SC, but if you plan to host large amounts of data you will need much, much more. You select your own pricing, including the collateral per TB per month you offer as a guarantee you will keep the files during all the time with the required uptime. The more collateral, the better score (and so more chances to be selected as a host by a renter).


Check this guide if you want to be a host (offer your disks): https://siawiki.tech/host/using_the_ui_for_hosting

or this other one if you want to be a renter (pay for saving your data on the Sia cloud): https://siawiki.tech/renter/using_the_ui_for_renting


At some point I had almost 1TB of data stored on the Sia network. I am also a host, so receiving compensation for offering storage. There is a ranking of renters that voluntarily decide to share their logs of used space to compete to be the top uploader: https://rankings.sia.tech/ So as you see real people is using Sia. Also check the usage of the network https://siastats.info/hosts_network.html (105 TB used in a network of almost 3500 TB) and this map of the host's network:



So as you can see, Sia is already a working product with a working network (and it has been working for more than 2 years).

The initial sync of the blockchain takes very long if you are using a HDD. On a SSD it takes less than 8 hours.

You can greatly accelerate the process by manually downloading an updated image of the blockchain (AKA bootstrapping). Check the instructions here: https://siawiki.tech/daemon/bootstrapping_the_blockchain

Great!   

Just take in mind three things:

- The chunk size of files uploaded to Sia is 40MB. This means that if you upload a file smaller than that, Sia will consider it still 40MB. If you plan to upload thousands of MP3 files that can be problematic because your allowance will get exhausted faster. In general Sia treats better a small number of big files than a huge number of tiny ones. So maybe you can try to compress those files in zip folders before uploading then!

- Keep frequent backups of the metadata folders (in Mac located at $HOME/Library/Application Support/Sia-UI/sia/ , in Windows at Users\<user>\appdata\roaming\Sia-UI\sia\ ), as if something goes wrong and they get corrupted, you might lose access to your files. The ability of recovering all your files by only using your wallet's seed is on the roadmap and they have done great progress in the code for that feature recently (probably it will be on 1.4, at the beginning of next year), but until is enabled, better be mindful of this backuping.

- Open the Sia and unlock the wallet every once in a while (at least once every 4-6 weeks) so the client request the auto-renewal of contracts with your hosts. The contracts are 3 months long, and your client will issue renewal requests after the 6th week

And of course... Enjoy the cheapest cloud storage solution you will find out there!!! No one can beat $1 per Terabyte and month 

I think you are wrong. I follow up both the Reddit and the Discord and the Core Devs have not announced any date for the release of the new version yet.

Next version will be 1.3.1, not 1.4

They are currently testing all the improvements (UI revamp, renter's experience revamp, wallet auto-unlock) before merging them in the main branch. But prior to the release, they will have to test the version RC2 with beta-testers, and that has not happened yet. So I find very improbable 1.3.1 will be released to the general public on November. Most probably on early December


Almost everybody refers the Sia price in Satoshis, and I agree with you it is a huge mistake, because you can not compare the value of a coin with another coin that has increased its value 10x in the last year.

As I like to explain it, is like driving in a highway and claiming you are actually driving backwards just because a faster car has passed you by. A nosense.

A UI overhaul is currently being worked on. Most probably it will be ready in the 1.3.1 update (December)


No, the balance will update automatically. If you made a transfer and it is not on your balance yet it could be due to delays on the side of the exchange (if that is the case) or because your client is not yet synchronized with the network. Let us know if you have problems.


You need first to make an allowance (click on the "make allowance" button of the UI) and then wait until your client makes contracts with 50 hosts (it will take one hour or less). If you need more details about using the UI for renting, check out this article of the Wiki: https://siawiki.tech/renter/using_the_ui_for_renting . The wiki is actually linked on the website, as well as an official guide (shorter than the Wiki one)on the FAQ. More clarity on the process is part of the UI overhaul I mentioned before.

Take in mind "normal" users are not expected to use the client in the endgame of Sia. While final users could use the Sia client, Sia is meant to be an enterprise-level solution. Enterprises have IT departments that don't even touch a UI for almost any task, just command lines.

Sia is also meant to be used by storage providing services (like Dropbox-like companies) as their storage backend. This means final users will not touch directly the Sia network, but instead use the app of each company, and don't even need to buy Siacoins to purchase storage: they'll pay in fiat and the apps will do everything behind the scenes.

Just wanted to share with you guys the new addition I made to SiaStats: live, analytical and interactive maps of Sia network hosts and storage distribution. You can check for instance which countries are hosting more data or which ones have more storage space available: https://siastats.info/hosts_map.html  

No problem! :-)

The best way probably is going to be deleting the current wallet. Go to the Terminal tab and type "wallet init-seed --force". It will ask you for your seed, and after scanning the blockchain for some minutes (or even one hour or so) it will be done and the client will be associated with that old seed.

It is better to have the client fully sync before doing this

Hi. In August 2015 a network upgrade made incompatible the old wallet system based on a file, being only compatible the seed-based wallets. Your seed should be still compatible, no other upgrades has been done with the seed system to the best of my knowledge.

Check that the sequence of words of the seed is complete (do all the words make sense in English? is any character missing in the words?). If you are copy/pasting the seed check you are not adding extra spaces at the begging or the end of the sequence, no break likes in the middle.

Lastly, did you created a previous wallet in your new client and now you are trying to unlock your previous seed? If that is the case, that is not how Sia works: you can only have one wallet/seed associated with Sia, so if you created a new wallet already, Sia is expecting you to introduce the seed of that wallet, not a different seed. There are commands for nuking the current wallet of the client and load a new one, and for sweeping the funds for an old wallet into the new one, but let us know first what have you done so far for providing better help