Where have you read that? A lot of people is coming here with the exact same two questions. I am wondering if maybe someone is spreading FUD elsewhere about Sia not being developed anymore or not being functional...

Scroll up 5 posts to my previous post and you'll find answers. Sia is indeed very actively developed, you can check last week's report in that previous post or the GitHub. Currently the Sia network consists on 3.4 petabytes of storage distributed among 850+ hosts, of which 105TB are currently in use https://www.siastats.info/hosts_network.html . I am personally storing almost 1TB of files on Sia. There is a scoreboard where users can voluntarily submit their logs to promote "a competition" to be the top uploader: https://rankings.sia.tech/index.html so as you can see real users, real people, are using the Sia storage.


Oh, no... Amazon S3 indeed charges for downloading data: depending on the mirror, between $10-$20/Tb https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ Compare this with what Sia costs: 13 cents per TB for uploads and 10 cents per TB for downloads: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ This is 100x less currently

Final costumer products might have apparently "free download" but in the end as you say there are caps. Enterprise clients don't have access to free plans and pay outrageous bandwidth costs on any traditional storage solution

Two weeks ago an arrangement was made with the RNDR so they'll use the Sia storage network for storing their rendering projects of their project. Aside that, the team is right now focused now on increasing the reliability and scalability of the project, so I don't think it is the moment for marketing. I guess that will come next year.


This question has been answered 2 or 3 times in the last 2 pages of this thread, please next time check the last pages before posting. It is actively being developed, this is a report of the very last week's progress:

<<Development update for week of November 5, 2017
The Sia team has contributed to 6 repositories since Sunday Nov. 5th.  Most of the heavy development work was focused around the new writeaheadlog and pages repos.  Chris led that effort with over 4,000 lines of new code committed and merged.  Keep up the good work Chris!

Luke has made excellent progress integrating the new writeaheadlog and pagemanager (pages repo) into the Sia codebase.  Development is ongoing and must be completed before 1.3.1RC2 is released.

David spoke over the weekend at ScalingBitcoin 2017, you can view his talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=8352&v=3pd6xHjLbhs

Luke, David, and Ava continue to make incredible progress in the backlog of Pull Requests and Issues.  Across the 6 repos updated this week 9 PRs have been merged, 15 issues closed and many more labeled, reviewed, and commented on.  This week also marked the first full week the Sia team had an on-call person who was available via Discord for community questions, code reviews, and general Sia discussion.  Thanks to mtlynch for the on-call suggestion!>>

Aside that, the service has been working for 2 years and currently the storage network consists on 3.3 Petabytes of available storage across more than 850 hosts. It holds 105TB of data. This is the growth of the file contracts in the last 6 months:



If you need more figures about Sia, check https://siastats.info

If the "siacoin company" (Nebulous) is out of business, why on the GitHub repo of the project the authors have merged 9 pull requests, and closed 15 issues among other coding activity?   Just the new developer hired one month ago (Chris) added 4000 lines of code this week

<<Development update for week of November 5, 2017
The Sia team has contributed to 6 repositories since Sunday Nov. 5th.  Most of the heavy development work was focused around the new writeaheadlog and pages repos.  Chris led that effort with over 4,000 lines of new code committed and merged.  Keep up the good work Chris!

Luke has made excellent progress integrating the new writeaheadlog and pagemanager (pages repo) into the Sia codebase.  Development is ongoing and must be completed before 1.3.1RC2 is released.

David spoke over the weekend at ScalingBitcoin 2017, you can view his talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=8352&v=3pd6xHjLbhs

Luke, David, and Ava continue to make incredible progress in the backlog of Pull Requests and Issues.  Across the 6 repos updated this week 9 PRs have been merged, 15 issues closed and many more labeled, reviewed, and commented on.  This week also marked the first full week the Sia team had an on-call person who was available via Discord for community questions, code reviews, and general Sia discussion.  Thanks to mtlynch for the on-call suggestion!>>

And that assertion is based on?

Maybe in the fact that the number of hosts in the network has increased a 30% in the last 2 months?



Perhaps in the fact that the number of active file contracts has increased 3x in the last 6 months?



Maybe in other figures like more than 13000 daily transactions on the network, more than 103TB of stored data, more than 3.3 Petabytes of available storage on the network? (https://www.siastats.info/index.html)

Or is based perhaps on the fact that later this month or on early December we will have a new version increasing dramatically the reliability and speed for renters? Or because of features on the roadmap like file sharing or media streaming? Or because of the new integrations with Duplicati and Minio? Or because of the arrangement with RNDR network to use Sia to save their data? Or because Core devs hired a new developer last month? Or because the development of Obelisk ASICs is advancing greatly (6x more speed than the original promise) ensuring the Sia network will be safe from GPU pool attacks next year?

- Just download the official client here: https://sia.tech/apps/
- Wait until is synchronized with the blockchain (it will take several hours)
- Create a wallet
- Send coins to an address generated by the wallet (each time you click on receive, a new address will be shown. Don't worry, all of them point to your balance)

The Minebox (the hardware is HP, but the company Minebox GmbH is independent) started shipping the batch 1 a few weeks ago!

They upgraded the hardware for free to preorders to the new Gen10 Microserver of HP (originally they announced it using the Gen8), and costumers so far are reporting everything is good: https://twitter.com/BTCGuardian/status/924924232131403777 & https://twitter.com/mineboxHQ/status/918576120299180032. The feature of offering the free space for hosting in Sia is not yet active, but they expect to have it ready by December in a OS update.

All units of batch 1 were sold and they have no date yet for batch 2, but I would sign up if you are interested on purchasing a unit (looks like they will offer an smaller and cheaper 4TB unit for what I see): https://minebox.io/

Go to the Terminal and type That will destroy your current wallet and generate a new one with a new seed. Obviously if you had funds on the old one you won't be able to recover them without the old seed...

That is not correct. Currently the minimal is just 2000SC. It is called Collateral, and actually is one of the biggest advantages of Sia compared to the rest of the similar projects. Hosts offer a collateral as a guarantee that they will keep the files during the whole contract with an uptime of about 97%, or otherwise they will lose that collateral. If they are good hosts, all that collateral is recovered.

Without collateral, hosts could just drop the files without any penalty and use their HDDs for other purposes. So collateral is an essential component for making Sia trustless.

Yes, Sia is one of the few crypto projects that can brag it has a working product, and actually it has been working for the last 2 years. Currently the storage network is 3.3 Petabytes big with 100TB being used. You can download the client and start uploading your files or offering your some disk space and be paid for that. This chart shows the growth of the used storage network:




The ICO was over 3 years and half ago...  It was not for Siacoins, but for the second asset of the network, the SiaFunds. 1130 were sold at 0.5BTC ($192 at that time). Siacoins were never offered in an ICO: it is a mined coin, and developer team only pre-mined 100 blocks.


The co-founder worked for a while on IBM. All of them were MIT students. At this points all of them have experience on the field... because Sia is already a working product 

It is on the roadmap, but it is not a priority for the next upates.

Why are you concerned? Has anything bad really significative happened to Sia recently? No. Have you been reading lately the news around Sia?

Let's recap the last months:

- Today Obelisk (subsidiary of Nebulous, the company of core developers) has announced an ASIC for Decred. While it does not affect directly Sia, at will inject more money into Nebulous, securing the future of Sia. Moreover, the SC1 ASIC for Sia has announce they will triple the hashing rates. This means GPU mining will be totally out of the mining scene in Sia, securing much more the network. https://blog.sia.tech/november-obelisk-update-4216c77a5356

- Early this week RNDR announced they will use the Sia network for storing the rendering works of their network: https://medium.com/@rendertoken/rndr-sia-edc39df03c31

- Last month a new developer was hired for the Sia team

- Last month, Luxor developers launched a mining pool that pays the fees to the core developers, further increasing their sustainability (miners, consider joining Luxor: http://mining.luxor.tech/)

- Last month 3 services that use the Sia storage layer were released, including Pixeldrain and SiaCDN

- Core developers are progressing on version 1.3.1 of the client: they are rewriting almost all the code for renters, what will increase considerably the speed and reliability of uploading files to Sia. The version 1.4 that includes a redesign of the UI and file sharing most probably will not be ready this month, but actually 1.3.1 is going to include some features that were originally planned for 1.4

- Luxor developers are making huge advancements in the new Explorer code. That means that a full blockchain explorer and a Lite client are closer than ever

- Check the roadmap: https://trello.com/b/Io1dDyuI/sia-public-roadmap Take a look of all the features to be implemented in the next 18 months.

- Do you want to check more statistics about the usage and the health of the network? check https://siastats.info : all of them show growth in adoption and a healthy network.

I ask you again: has anything bad happened to Sia? No. Has anything relevant happened that could change our trust in the project. Yes, but all of them in the good direction.

What is going on then? Altcoins are in a blood bath because everybody wants to buy Bitcoins ahead of the forks, so they have to sell their alts. And you are comparing Sia with another coin that has increased its value 7x in the current year. By no means you can use Bitcoin as a reference for the value of other cryptos. I am shocked some investors in cryptos are not able to understand this.

Some investors might be panicking, but yet the project is stronger than ever.

When a host misses the uptime requirement of about 97%, its collateral is currently being burnt. Additionally, in a future update Proof of Burn mechanics will be introduced for hosts: they'll have to burn a part of their profits for proving they are legit (and so avoiding Sybil attacks).

It is not possible to predict how many coins will be burnt, as it will depend on how much storage space is being used. But if the network usage is big enough, PoB could counteract the mining coin supply and make Siacoin deflationary.

Almost 5x growth in the number of file contracts in the last 6 months. Source: https://www.siastats.info/active_contracts.html

If Sia is dead, then it looks like the corpse is making a lot of noise!. Some people would even say there is a party inside the coffin  

Apparently the people of RNDR have a different opinion about the matter: https://medium.com/@rendertoken/rndr-sia-edc39df03c31

The RNDR developers just announced their network of decentralized rendering will use the Sia storage network to save their rendering works data in a decentralized, cheap, encrypted and highly available fashion.

Because, you know, no one needs decentralized, cheap, encrypted and highly available storage nowadays...

Support your claims of "the information seen and heard is just a lie" or it will be legit anyone calls you liar and FUDster from now.

The advantage of a transparent project as Sia is that anyone can validate all the data presented. Check for example my last posts: every piece of data is backed by a link. Which are your sources?

The only thing probably dead is the judgment skills of some people. Evaluating the status of a project by the price charts vs Bitcoin is a nosense, as Bitcoin has increased by 7x its value in the current year. It is like stating that you are driving backwards in a highway just because a faster car passed you by. If you compare the price vs FIAT, the value of SC has been moving in the range of 0.35-0.5 cents of dollar for several months.

But still, evaluating a project just by a price chart is dumb, and the biggest mistake of "investors" of the cryptosphere. Have you ever seen a Wall Street investor just looking stock charts exclusively and not quarterly reports, operational milestones and so of the companies he invests in?.

I posted this yesterday here, lets recap some facts:

<<Siacoin and the Sia network are working and healthy: Only yesterday 811 new contracts were formed for 2TB of new data stored on the network: https://siastats.info/new_contracts.html.

14414 new transactions on the network yesterday: https://siastats.info/transactions.html

Yesterday we reached a new yearly record of active contracts, with a total of 71472 https://siastats.info/active_contracts.html

6 Pull Requests have been merged to the main code on the last 7 days: https://github.com/NebulousLabs/Sia/pulse . 24 merged Pull Requests and 90 closed Issues in the last month. This public progress report was made by the CEO of Nebulous and Core developer David Vorik 4 days ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/siacoin/comments/78nr20/development_and_progress_update/

"Has anyone used the services of SIa project" you ask, @savetytdpbl? With more than 95TB of storage usage, 3.2PetaBytes of offered storage (https://siastats.info/hosts_network.html) and more than 300TB of used storage in the history of Sia (https://siastats.info/total_contracts.html), I would say: Obviously yes, and very successfully so far>>

Quote me on December or whenever you wish. If you really think that the value the coin will have on December has any relevance, you don't understand anything about Sia or the cryptoshere in general. Sia has an ambitious roadmap for the next 18 months. Let the core developers fulfill it and then come back to see where Siacoin is in terms of value

The latest expected shipping date will be June of next year, but it can happen sooner if they have the product ready earlier.

No one can predict what the price of Siacoin will be once released, but these are some factors to take in mind:

- A huge misconception of several users is thinking that the ASICs will increase the amount of mined coins every day. That's not true: the algorithm of Sia (and every other coin) adjust the difficulty of mining to the amount of hashing power on the network. The same amount of coins will be mined every day, but 70% or more of them will go to ASIC owners instead of the current GPU miners

- Most of mining is right now done by GPU dual-miners. Dual miners don't look for the Sia in the long term and most of the times don't even know what Sia is: they just mine Ether and as a side they mine some Siacoins they sell immediately for the extra profit of their mining operation. Obelisk owners are mainly long-term supporters of the project, so probably they are prone to hold their gains rather than sell them immediately. So there is a chance that after the release the selling volume will decrease

- There is no clear economic theory that explains it, but in the past every coin for which an ASIC was developed saw a rise in the price, once released. It happened with Bitcoin, it happened with script coins and it happened with Dash. It could be because becoming the network considerably more safe, it generates more trust on investors. It could be because the value of the coin gets linked to the cost of all the hardware that is securing the network.

@Rogermoon, why are you posting the same exact message that was posted by another user 10 days ago? Do you have any specific interest generating a negative feelings towards Sia? Very interesting to see so many accounts with low score hanging around with negativity so suddenly bellow the original message you copied:


And if anyone  has still doubts about the developers making or not progresses, take a look a the new proposed changes posted last Friday:

Jute Merging Algorithm: https://gist.github.com/DavidVorick/20a1f9f47fa56390039144d7f8dec074
New Database: https://gist.github.com/DavidVorick/520e0dcc2458902f29ac163750c3f84d
Renter Propsal: https://gist.github.com/DavidVorick/d9f70ea668a8104ee8f42d2dc6d3164b
Fee Market Mechanics Proposal: https://gist.github.com/DavidVorick/ba17fb7db50b9270d1c2131ff425422b

Please guys, do the community of cryptos the favor of reading a bit more about a coin before making so bold assertions, or you could be called FUDsters all across the boards of bitcointalk for trying to spread some lies without any proof supporing you

Siacoin and the Sia network are working and healthy: Only yesterday 811 new contracts were formed for 2TB of new data stored on the network: https://siastats.info/new_contracts.html.

14414 new transactions on the  network yesterday: https://siastats.info/transactions.html

Yesterday we reached a new yearly record of active contracts, with a total of 71472 https://siastats.info/active_contracts.html

6 Pull Requests have been merged to the main code on the last 7 days: https://github.com/NebulousLabs/Sia/pulse . 24 merged Pull Requests and 90 closed Issues in the last month. This public progress report was made by the CEO of Nebulous and Core developer David Vorik 4 days ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/siacoin/comments/78nr20/development_and_progress_update/

"Has anyone used the services of SIa project" you ask, @savetytdpbl? With more than 95TB of storage usage, 3.2PetaBytes of offered storage (https://siastats.info/hosts_network.html) and more than 300TB of used storage in the history of Sia (https://siastats.info/total_contracts.html), I would say: Obviously yes, and very successfully so far

So please guys, don't do this thing again. It is not cool making that kind of statements that can be proven false in less than 1 minute with one quick search at the available resources for the Sia community

I think you are still confusing what "the company" and "the network" are. Siacoins are the instrument for paying storage contracts on the Sia network. And Siacoin is a mined coin, what means that you are not buying the new coins to Nebulous ("the company" of the devs), but to a miner. The inflation of the coin is the mechanism to provide miners an incentive to keep securing the blockchain. In other words, Nebulous Inc does not take any benefit from the inflation. Moreover, Sia was not a premined coin by the devs.

The instrument that incentivizes the developers to keep working on Sia are the SiaFunds, the second asset of the network, that pays their holders a proportional part of the 3.9% of fees on every file contract formed on the network. Thus, developers get profit only if the cloud storage network of Sia gains massive adoption. And if that happens, the value of Sia will rise too, in order to accommodate all the demand of Sia storage, that can be paid only with Siacoins. So as you see, the interests of developers ("the company") and investors are aligned.

Minebox is not an ASIC or "mining" gear. It is a Network Attached Storage that automatically backsup your data to the Sia network, and the remaining storage is offered to host other's data, getting some SC. You will get some SC, but I don't think you'll ever make ROI with it, specially as the 16TB version you are checking is overpriced in my opinion. It is however an excellent solution for people that have a huge amount of data to save and don't have already a NAS at home.

If you are only interested on the profits, its is still possible to make ROI of your disks if you assemble your own hosting computer, but definitely not with Minebox.

If you are interested on ASICs, there is one being developed right now: https://obelisk.tech/


Thanks a lot. It is my pleasure servicing the community