It is not a "problem" by itself, it just takes very long time to validate each block on the blockchain. If you use a SSD instead of a HDD it will take less than one day in total. Also, once version 1.3 is finally released the initial sync time will be greatly reduced.

As you have been syncing for 5 days I would just leave it a bit more of time to finish. There is an alternative solution, called "bootstapping": you download the blockchain file (consensus.db) from a reliable source so once you open again the client it just have to validate the chain, but not download it. It still will require several hours or even a full day, but it is less time than downloading the blockchain from the scratch. Follow these instructions: https://siawiki.tech/daemon/bootstrapping_the_blockchain

Well, don't use 5W HDDs then    There are plenty of 1-2W HDDs out there (5400rpm), and of course is more efficient to use HDDs of a capacity higher than 1Tb. And cheaper. Actually, best price per TB is achieved in 3Tb and 4Tb HDDs, and they consume the same energy as one of 1Tb

Nothing unusual here, BIP141 is the second part of the Segwit2x plan. After locking BIP91, we are in a grace period of 330 blocks where every miner should adopt BIP141 as well, or their mined blocks could be rejected

Consider BIP91 as a mere signal of commitment and BIP141 as the proper activation of Segwit. BIP91 is harmless by itself, is just a voting among miners to know their intentions. If only a few mining pools activate BIP141 directly, by August 1st, once UASF triggers, there would be a chain split. BIP91 is simply a "ok, do we all (80%+) agree on activating BIP141 now and a 2Mb block increase in 3 months?"

At this precise moment we are at block #115,239. Last blocks, starting at 100.000, take very long as they were almost full (it is when Sia gained a lot of visibility)

If you ever need to sync again, or you are a new user, I strongly encourage you to manually download the consensus file ("bootstrapping") instead of leaving the client to do it automatically: https://siawiki.tech/daemon/bootstrapping_the_blockchain


"Selling" your free disk space has been a feature available since Day 1

Offering your disk space is called "hosting" or "farming" (In opposition to "mining"). You set up your own pricing, but you have to be competitive in order to get file contracts. Top hosts target to $1-2/Tb/month.

If have access to cheap HDDs, under certain scales and setups you could make ROI in less than a year. Right now the network is still underused, but the usage is growing fast, so probably in half year or 1 year good hosts will be able to host dozens of Terabytes an be profitable. Of course you'll still need cheap hardware (24/7 server-like infrastructure) and good bandwidth. But the advantages, compared to mining, is that electricity costs are minimal and there is not a increase in difficulty over time: if you remain competitive, you keep getting contracts

You are right, any big actor like Alphabet could acquire StoreJ. Or they could make their own StoreJ copy. But while that would give them a cheaper cloud storage product, it would be still a centralized solution. In StoreJ, everything is centralized in their servers: renters buy StoreJ some space and then the StoreJ servers distribute the data among hosts. They have control over the data and if they disappear for some reason, the whole network and data would vanish with them.

In Sia, tomorrow the developers team can disappear, even their HQ can be nuked, and still the data, the network and users would remain functional forever. We could also get rid of devs if they become evil, assemble a new team, or simply leave the project unattended in the current state and still, it will work forever.

Decentralization - that is the real power of Sia, and there is not any other solution like this out there

 
What do you mean, you don't want to pay for a storage service? Sia is a marketplace of storage: hosts offer their hard drives and renters that need storage pay for that disk space. Hosts pay for the disks, the hardware, the bandwidth, the electricity... What is wrong with hosts being paid for that?


Cloud storage is currently a multi-billion business that has grown exponentially in recent years and is expected to keep that trend in the next years due to new demand from areas as artificial intelligence, IoT collected data and so. AWS, Microsoft, Google and IBM might have the current monopoly, but in first place they are centralized, and so they can decide to delete your data, share it with governments or just vanish. Secondly, Sia is considerably cheaper than those services. The cheapest of them is Amazon S3 at $23$/Tb/month, while Sia network is currently asking for less than $5/Tb/month

As indicated in the link of justAgame, there is no final number: block reward decreases over time, but once it reaches 30.000SC in 2020, it will be that reward forever. Coins in circulation will not necessarily increase over time forever, as Proof-of-Burn mechanics will soon be implemented for fosts (so Sia might even be deflationary in the future).

About the limit of single files, the bigger the better! Actually, Sia handles more gracefully few huge files than a ton of small files. Very small files should be uploaded in a compressed folder, as anything bellow 40Mb is treated as a file of 40Mb. The current upper limit for renter's uploads is estimated to be 5Tb (more than that might result in instability of the client). However, updates in the next 6 months will increase that limit to 40Tb.


I guess I answered you too with my previous paragraph ;-)

Correct!. The seed is everything you require to access your coins in the future even in a different computer

When you mine a "share", it means you found a hash very close to solve the block, but not good enough. Depending on the difficulty of the coin and the threshold the pool stablish as good to consider a hash as a share, you can have plenty of shares every minute or just a few every hour. It doesn't matter, as pools will pay you according to the proportional number of shares you are submitting. Just check after 1 or 2 days that the rewards you are receiving corresponds more or less to what a mining calculator gives you. If it doesn't fit in a +/-20% of what you expect, just change to a different pool



Ohhh!!!!! So you were not an speculator after all! You were a mere troll shilling for a other coins!!!!    That is so cute........

It always amazes me how different are the goals and the concerns of a user vs a speculator. For users, it doesn't matter if they finally publish that update today (BTW, buddy, it is still 1pm on the US East Coast, where devs are located  ) or next week. The product is already working and has been working for 2 years, the number of hosts have duplicated in the last month, the amount of stored data has grown a 75% in the last month.

The user ACP has explained it very well, but I'll go a bit more in depth. Sia coin is simply an instrument for paying those file contrats, the value of the coin is totally irrelevant for the users: hosts update and adjust their pricing to USD values, so in the end both renters and hosts pay and get paid the same amount, no matter if the coin value is 1 satoshi or 1 BTC.

The only people concerned here about oscillations in the price are the speculators: people that call themselves proudly "investors" that even convince themselves they are somehow helping the development of the coin, while in reality they just want to get some money fast and run away after. If I purchase one million Australian dollars because I expect a bump in the exchange rate, do I become an investor in the Australian economy? No, I just become an ass that wants to be rich. Speculators are not needed in any economy, not even in cryptos.

The price of the coin is just an indicator of the mood of a bunch of speculators. The only indicators of the health of a crypto are adoption and development of new code and side projects. We don't lack of those in Sia. What we have too many of these days are speculators that don't even understand how Sia works, unfortunately. If you are alarmed because the release of an incremental update is postponed one month you don't see the whole picture (and you show you don't have any idea about how software development works). If you are alarmed because the market value goes down (the same as 90% of the other coins) you don't see the whole picture.

But I don't know why I try to make you understand this. You are just a speculator after all, so you are only caring about your own benefits, of course. While you keep whining and playing to be a whale manipulating market feelings, I'll keep doing my thing: helping people here with technical questions 

What do you mean with "fix different prices"? The pricing for hosting storage is decided by each individual host. If the value of the token changes, hosts manually change the pricing to adjust it to dollar values. For example, top hosts are targeting at $1-2/Tb/month all the time

http://siahub.info is a database of hosts. if you click on the "Score" column title it will order the hosts according to their rank, so you can see what top hosts are pricing. Most of the new file contracts will go to the top 50 of them

Taek has indicated they'll release the final v1.3 next Tuesday if anything else happens. Devs are very busy with the pre-reserve process of the ASIC and they are polishing some minor issues that testers of the RC2 have found, so I don't blame them for missing the mark for one week.

Frankly I don't think any trend on the market value of the coin is related to a delay on the software release. Nothing personal against speculators and "investors", but from my experience, most of them don't understand how Sia works or even what a blockchain is... So I find difficult they care about releasing or not features as "file repair" or "host pruning" 

This gets even more interesting: so now there is not going to be dividend at all, just the vague promise that you will buy again the tokens the holders have.

And at what price will you buy them again? The original price? Original + interest? Which interest?

So essentially, the project is moving from "an investment that will give you an stable revenue over time" to a (tokenized) loan for your company with no guarantee of return... Why are you asking for loans here? Is no bank giving you loans, guys? ;-)


A.K.A. the project is dead. And that for the good of this community

The ROI will probably be good, but not so short as 3 weeks. More probably 2-3 months. You are probably missing 2 factors:

- 1 obelisk added to the network is nothing, but if 10.000 obelisks are added, the network size will go 5x approximately, and so the difficulty. Thus, profitability will be 5 times less than today's

- Today's block reward is 190000, but in one year it will be 135000

Of course, if more than 10000 ASICs are sold, other manufacturers get there before them or second batches are delivered (while they are promising 2nd batch will never be delivered during a window of 6 weeks) the calculations will change

For the problem you are having in the purchase, I recommend you getting into the Slack or the Reddit and ask there. A lot of people had that problem too yesterday, but I think it was solved.

One of the projects is from Fornax, called PixelDrain (http://pixeldra.in/) Right now it is not using Sia backend (but his own server instead), but he is working to implement Sia, accepting BTC for larger files, and implementing in the future video streaming. I can't disclose about the second project, sorry, it was a personal communication.


Nebulous Labs is formed by 4 full-time developers

When a file contract is failed by the host, the renter recovers his allowance, and what is burnt is the collateral that the host put upfront. The renter can't have also the collateral as a "compensation", as it would encourage evil renters to make huge contracts and then DDoS his own hosts to make a profit from the collateral collected. For that reason, lost collateral is burnt.


There are at least 2 projects I am aware(under construction) of services that will allow you to pay in BTC or PayPal and then upload your files. The services will do everything behind the scenes: buying Sia, making the contracts and so

Well, while individuals storing his files on Sia is awesome, the target of Sia for renting space are the big companies with tons of Tb's that are paying much higher prices than individuals (Amazon S3 asks for $23/Tb). Also from the hosting perspective, I think some minimal knowledge and implication is required: I don't see myself convincing my mother of keeping her computer on 24/7 for renting unused space...  

However, some independent devs are preparing front-ends and services for storing data on the Sia network in a more user-friendly way and without paying in SC

No block explorer with the ability to check an address's balance is available yet. Some independent devs are working on that.

In the meantime, just use the Sia client to check it

Devs do not check Bitcointalk, but are very active at the Slack and at the Reddit

Sia usually releases quarterly updates. v1.3 ("Capricorn") was meant for June, but probably due to overlap with the pre-sale of the Obelisk ASIC, it has been delayed a bit more than usual. However "Release Candidate 2" is already available for testing purposes (https://www.reddit.com/r/siacoin/comments/6jnqn8/sia_v130_beta_rc2_try_out_the_upcoming_release/?st=j4g60v1w&sh=8f6f95af), what means the final release will be very soon. Last week devs said most probably this week or the next one.

The roadmap actually states a an update for June ;-)