Data isn't stored in the blockchain. 

When a file is uploaded, 5 more copies are created on different nodes around the world.

For a total of 6 copies.

You can watch the #announcements channel at community.storj.io for more info on when payouts will happen.

If someone creates 500 Storjshare accounts, with different payout addresses, and they are coming from the same IP address.  Storj will not pay them.

Since you created one at home and at work, you will still get paid.  Assuming you have reached the correct number of gigabyte hours. 

  SJCX isn't used to buy storage from Storj.   Storj is starting with USD payments via credit card.  SJCX is used by Storj to pay farmers.  You, initially, can't even pay for storage with it.  Bitcoin is supposed to be offered next, and then later SJCX. 

    No.  But, the first phase of paying for storage should be any day now.  They obviously have to make sure it is solid before putting it out there.  The web interface for paying for storage looks to be done, and they've already taken some payment from public Heroku devs, since they are partnered with them.  So it is imminent.

It's recommended not to use Poloniex for your wallet.  Don't ask me why.  Join the Rocket Chat at community.storj.io and ask in the channel #sjcx about it.

Expiring contracts, data gets deleted.

Regarding payouts...

You are paid for three things.   

1.  Gigabyte hours.  This can be thought of 1 gigabyte of stored data + 1 hour of having it online = 1 gigabyte hour.  If you have 50 gigabytes, and you have your node up for 744 hours in a month, you would have 37,200 Gigabyte hours.   You must have at least 744 gigabyte hours to earn a payout.

2.  Downloaded shards.  This is the data you are storing.  Every time the person who stored that data, downloads it, you earn some money.

3.  Telemetry.  If you are sending telemetry, you earn some money for this.



  Right now, Storj is in the roll-out phase of the billing system.  Where Farmers will be paid all-the-time via micropayments.   However, this is not yet rolled out, and customers cannot yet purchase storage from Storj.

So Storj is paying the Farmers themselves.  The amount they are paying is low.   On average you will make between $1 and $10 for the month.

This is expected to rise when the billing system has finished rolling out.

Indeed.

I don't knock either technology, but they have differences and are aimed at different use case scenarios.

SIA is saddled with a blockchain.   Imagine you own a business and you have a SIA server that you backup your data to.   A fire happens, and you need to get a new set of servers up and running right away.  With SIA, you have to wait a LONG time to get the blockchain before you can begin to recover your data.  And even then, downloads can take awhile to show up.   It's not optimal.  If you are a business, you want to get back up and running immediately.  Not sometime in the next 2 days.

Storj is centralized.  Single pay portal.  No different than paying Microsoft or Amazon.  And that gives them a single point of failure.  They claim encryption makes them different, but encryption is managed on the client end (So you could do this yourself on any platform you would be developing for), and it isn't enforced, so farmers could be holding questionable content in the clear on their servers. 

Sia is truely P2P.  It has no central point of failure.  But it's a complete mystery how it works when it comes to paying for storage.  (I exaggerate, sort of.)  For an end user, it is complicated to understand.  If you want to budget out your storage, good luck on figuring out what you're paying now let-alone what you'll pay for the future storage.  It needs better documentation.  Before someone comes in and white knights the payment process, just know that it is difficult to grasp.  That's all I'm saying.

Storj is fast.  Unsaddled from a Blockchain, it can upload and download data at the maximum speed your pipe can handle.  This means you can recover data extremely quick.  This is very attractive for a data center or business that needs to move a lot of data up and down rapidly. 

Both products are functional and work well, today.  They both need more work and better documentation.  Storj's team is apparently larger than Sia's.  I believe Sia is three full time programmers.  Storj has 12 employees and I think all but 1 or 2 are programmers. 

In my opinion, Sia would be good as a low cost archival storage with long term assurances that your data is going to be there years from now.  (So long as you pay for it)  I would not use it for mission critical backups, but if you wanted to backup your film collection, it'd be a good choice.

Storj is kind of expensive for home users at $15 for 1tb of storage/transfer per month.  This is competitive for larger services like Azure and Amazon when you factor in geo-replication and high availability / rapid transfer.  But when Amazon gives home users unlimited storage for $60 a year.  Or Microsoft sells you 1tb plus Office 365 for $60 a year.   $15 a month for 1tb is too much.  Especially when you are paying for download bandwidth on top of it.  However, for businesses, Storj has a competitive price and a rapid transfer solution.  Appealing to certain niche businesses that need a lot of storage and utilize big pipes to move it around.

Note, these are just my opinions.  Do your own research.  Both products are fluid and subject to change.  Some very smart people are working on both and there are only so many hours in the day.  The issues I mentioned may (And in most cases should) be fixed before too long.  These are good products with good people behind them. 

If you didn't have 1gig stored over the course of 1 month (744 gb hours) you would not be paid. 

If you have trouble, you should go to community.storj.io and join the #storjshare channel.  People there will help you.

  There is no "mining" of SJCX.  All the coins are already minted.  You might mean Farming, which is the act of sharing your hard drive space to receive SJCX.   In which case, you should join the Storj community Rocket Chat at community.storj.io and ask questions there.

  They did an ICO.  That is what SJCX is. 

I wouldn't know, but is there some reason you don't want to synchronize your clock?

You should join the Rocket Chat at community.storj.io and hop into the #storjshare channel for help with that.  They've made two major version changes in the past couple of weeks, so there are some issues with the tools that are getting worked out. 

You're not investing in the company by purchasing Sia coins.  Sia coins don't gain value because the project takes off. 

Think about it.  You need to buy storage, so you buy some Sia coin.  You go to the Exchange and buy some coin.  You then pay the host for the storage.  The host sells the coin on the Exchange for bitcoin.  Price of SIA remains flat.  There are some middle men, as well, who take a percentage of the coins as part of an investment sale at the earlier stages of the project.

You might think that because Sia coins get locked up into contracts during the term of the storage purchase that this would raise prices.  But since storage is offered at a floating rate determined by the nodes, if the value increases they will ask for less coin, meaning less pickup.  If the rate decreases, they ask for more coin.  Effectively always keeping the value of Sia as close to zero as possible.  The only thing that raises the value is idiotic speculation that somehow Sia profits would go to Sia holders. 

It won't, because the node has an incentive to charge the least possible to get the most contracts filled, so the person with the smallest overhead can charge the least, and it's a race to the bottom.

Sia may be a good product, but the coin is dumb.

Are you asking why it is worth almost nothing?  Narrow market, limited use, too many coins in circulation.  Over time it should get better, because it is necessary for storage contracts, but they're a long way from here to there.  Check back in a year.

For future reference, what foreign characters are a problem?  Can they be reproduced here?

You guys need to stop.  You're writing children's story examples of how the economy works to try and get a point across to someone who wants to use Monopoly money as real currency, so long as the receiver "believes" that the money has value.  He won't.  It won't happen.  It's a waste of time.  Go back to the primary topic of discussion, please. 

That is x64, so it won't work on a Windows 8 win32 system.  Download the 32bit version instead.

Note, that it isn't a wallet.