That was a great opportunity! I'm quite pissed I missed the fun action... There's still plenty of cheap XMR to be had though. I'm guessing XMR will hover at around 202-205 the rest of the day.

You'll better inquire with the developers for the details you need. You can reach them at #siatalk on freenode or through Slack: https://siatalk.slack.com/messages/dev/, or wait for their reply here...

Thanks for your interest!
I do not mine myself, but here are some resources to get you started:

The Sia developers have released a CPU miner, which runs "in-wallet".

There is also a GPU miner, here:
https://github.com/NebulousLabs/Sia-GPU-Miner

Binaries here:
https://github.com/NebulousLabs/Sia-GPU-Miner/releases

They say the GPU miner has some bugs, and the miner can only mine on a single GPU at a time. You can run multiple miner instances for more processors.

Chat with miners on Slack:
https://siatalk.slack.com/messages/mining/details/

+1

I think this is crucial for adoption. The network as a whole needs to stabilize before nitpicking on app details.

6 blocks have been mined in the last 24 hours. So the wait is more like 3 months at this rate... Not taking into account the fact that hashrate is still dropping.

Combined with a decreasing hash rate:

Hash rate (last 1000 blocks)   343.893958 GH/s
Hash rate (last 100 blocks)   183.919383 GH/s
Hash rate (last 25 blocks)   129.552348 GH/s

Will the difficulty be automatically reduced to take this into account? After all, we still want 10 min blocks. I had to wait ~3 hours for my funds to arrive into my wallet.

Are miners leaving?

Interval between blocks a few days ago was 10-15 min.

Here are timestamps of last 5 blocks
18131  Sep 22, 2015 at 3:35pm (UTC)
18132  Sep 22, 2015 at 4:35pm (UTC)
18133  Sep 22, 2015 at 5:10pm (UTC)
18134  Sep 22, 2015 at 4:28pm (UTC)
18135  Sep 22, 2015 at 5:59pm (UTC)

Was block 18133 mined before 18134 and 18132? Is that even possible?

Intervals between blocks (ignoring 18134) is now > 1 hour.

Last block was mined > 2 1/2 hours ago.

What's going on?

All releases can be downloaded here:
https://github.com/NebulousLabs/Sia/releases

Question:
In the Sia-UI, under Files - > New File there is the option ".sia file"

What is the format of this file? Is it documented anywhere?

I think I misunderstood what you meant by anonymity. To me, anonymity implies that ones identity is hidden. You refer to the contents of files. The content of files are impossible to read, assuming the Sia devs implemented the cryptography correctly... So, your files are safe and readable only by you, no doubt.

However, your identity is not necessarily a secret. Your activity on the network is public on the Sia blockchain, and your IP address is known by all participating nodes. Thus, a nefarious 3rd party could operate 'honey pot' hosts in order to track uploaders. So, I don't think you can expect to remain anonymous on the Sia network, i.e. in the sense that your identity is protected. It remains to be seen, whether someone could go from an IP address to proving that you have uploaded a particular file. I mentioned comparison of the Merkel root hash in my other reply to you as one possibility. File size is another possibility, although that would not be definite proof. Both of these possibilities assume the tracker already has an identical copy of your file (e.g. which may be the case if you are uploading copyrighted content).

The blockchain contains a public record of your File Contracts, which contain information on the size of files and their Merkel root hash. I have only a rudimentary understanding of how to compute this hash, but assuming someone else has an identical copy of the file you are uplading to the Sia network, then I assume they could compute the Merkel root hash on their file as well and compare against your File Contract. Thus, if you are distributing a copyrighted file, and uploading this unaltered, then yes someone could discover that. Would be nice if someone could confirm this, or tell me wrong.

Also, ISO images tend to cluster around certain sizes and may not be difficult to spot in the blockchain overall.


I don't think the size of the file can be deduced from your bandwidth consumption alone, as the file is duplicated through the Sia network. I'm not sure where, and when, this duplication takes place, i.e. are files duplicated from the initial receiving hosts onwards to other hosts, or only from renter to hosts? The Sia White Paper does not detail this.

In any case, they won't know what you sent as the data is encrypted, unless they have a way of comparing the Merkel root hash and filesize indicated in your File Contract on the blockchain.


I am tempted to agree, though there are many things I don't yet fully understand about how Sia works.

Can you elaborate on how SIA (or: Sia?) provides anonymity to hosters and/or renters?

What I understand of SIA thus far is that hosted files are split and encrypted. But this is not the same as anonymity.

The list of hosts, with their IPs, is publicly accessible. Similarly, I understand transactions on the blockchain are transparent. Thus, transactions on the blockchain are pseudanonymous, not strictly anonymous.

+1

I do not recall coming across this document, but then again I have not read through the entire thread yet. It should definitely be upfront there with links to website, FAQ etc.

Also, consider linking to the Reddit page:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Siacoin

I don't know who's running that, but it might lighten the load off this thread when newcomers have alternative forums to ask their questions.

I was thinking today of setting up a Sia Wiki, aka the Bitcoin Wiki. I know the Siacoin.com website is on Github, but it has the appearance of a company rather than a community site.

What are your thoughts on this?

This does not make sense. If the Sia network is to be used as cheap storage for businesses' massive storage requirements, where is that storage supposed to come from?

I assumed that Sia was about enabling unused storage on millions of devices around the world to be part of a massive network, which then entities with storage requirements could use.

Clearly, the millions of devices we're talking about belong to Average Joe and Jane. Thus, the client software must be dumb-proofed and simple enough to be used by a 'regular' person.

As a newcomer, I'll speak on behalf of a few of us.

Sure, Sia appears buggy. Sure, its beta. However, it is BETA, and not ALPHA. Remember how long GMail was beta? Quite some time... Beta typically implies working, yet potentially with some trouble  spots. Sia's issues are more than minor bugs. The usability bugs in Sia are apparently serious enough to render wallets for non-experts unusable and corrupting the databases, causing loss of money (yes, real money if you'd like) and time.

I've gathered this much that Sia is still a small community of developers and users. There are 33 hosts, a few repeat posters on this thread, and 28 subscribers to the Reddit forum... I can understand people getting upset when people criticize their baby. Yet, projects such as these can only move forward with continuous valuable feedback from new users. As a coder myself, I know the value of testing my software with new users. They have a (sad) tendency to click all the 'wrong' buttons and do everything in the 'wrong' order, hence revealing all the bugs in my software before even getting it to work once! This happened to me yesterday with Sia as I was unaware of the implications of killing the siad process after closing the GUI, hence corrupting my database and forcing me to resync. I *could* have figured this out in advance if I had heeded your advice above and read through this thread first. But seriously, do you expect every new user to skim through 111 pages of posts, before downloading and running a couple of binaries of BETA software? When was the last time you did that?

The Sia community should welcome criticism from newcomers, however harsh and unwarranted they may seem, as they reflect the user experience from a beginners standpoint. After all, if you can't make the newcomers happy, how can you ever expect the user base to grow?

Having said so, I understand your sentiment, and I understand Sia is work-in-progress. Yet, and I stress, the software is BETA and not ALPHA, which implies usability.

Sia seems a really, really cool project, and I've decided to jump into it and support it in these early phases. I will run a node/host, buy some Siacoin and help out new users by sharing my experiences as I learn. This is how you grow a community, not by effectively ostracizing them when their complaints are too harsh to handle.

I forgot to save the setting on the router... Seems 9982 was sufficient. I'll leave it at that unless others can confirm port 9981 needs to be forwarded as well.

Now, my IP also appears in the Hosts lists on the Sia Explorer page. Cool!

I noticed a myqnapcloud.com hostname in the list as well. Is anyone here running Sia on a QNAP NAS? I have one sitting with lots of space to spare and would like to run that as a host as well, if possible...

By the way: Can I change the default port from 9982 to something else, in case I want to run multiple hosts in a network with a shared IP?

Blockchain synchronization, however, is still extremely slow! I'm still just at block height 2033, after nearly 15 hours... Can anyone share a bootstrap chain?

Are those nodes that only offer space, or all nodes connected? I don't appear on that list. Is that because I'm not done syncing the blockchain yet?

I've been syncing for 10 hours now. I'm at block height 1976 (connected to 8 peers). Is it normally this slow?

Also, I cannot Announce my storage. I get the error message:
"Error 400 Bad request host address not reachable; ensure you have forwarded port 9982"

I have forwarded port 9982 on my router. Still doesn't work.

Is there an estimate of how many Sia nodes are currently running?

In your Sia folder, under /resources/app/Sia/consensus/

Can you elaborate? I ran the 0.4.2 GUI and after shutting down noticed siad still running. I killed the process and when the GUI is restarted get the error message "siad exited with code: 0"

How exactly does one go about shutting down siad "properly" (linux?) and is there a way to recover from these corruption issues?

Edit: I managed to remove the consensus file and start over. That seems to fix it.

Question: Where can I find a mining how-to? I downloaded Sia-UI-v0.4.2-beta-linux64.tar.gz which does not seem to include a miner. I've seen GUI screenshots with a Miner tab, which my GUI also is missing. How do I go about accessing the mining options in the GUI?