See http://www.gridresearchcorp.com/gridcoin/

Cool! Now is a good time to offer up more space. Smaller hosts start to fill up and there's a been a big increase in activity on the network lately. Prices have gone up as well. So, i seems a good time to make some extra bucks by hosting up more space. I think I'll jack my host up to 5 TB as well.

Yes, you can just move the entire installation directory. Close Sia first though. Oh, and you can also symlink just the host directory if you wanted to. Or, you can run siad with the --sia-directory parameter (see siad help).

Correct. There is also a redundancy on top of it all (x6 I think). Each file is split into 24 pieces x 6, so 144 pieced in total distributed across 24 hosts at minimum. Hosts are selected based on price (cheapest have the highest probability of being selected).

Power outages are usually short (hours) and should not be a problem. Persistent downtime each day is a problem.

But, if you have a power outage at the exact time renters check your host for files, you may be out of luck (for just those files, mind you).

No at present. The file contract is set for a fixed period and cannot be changed.

A fixed IP? No.

There is no way for you to know *what* you are hosting.

Files are encrypted before they are uploaded to hosts. Each host receives only a small part of a file. So, although you may be hosting parts of an illegal file you will never be hosting it in its entirety and certainly never with any knowledge.

Currently, Sia does not inform you about the exact price. What happens is this:

Sia contacts available hosts and asks for price
If price is ok, and host is available, a file contract is negotiated
The file contract is noted on the blockchain and Siacoins go out of your wallet
Uploading starts

This is done many, many times for each file as its cut into little pieces that are spread across multiple (20+ hosts).

Think of the estimated price as an average; eventually with enough uploads you'll converge towards this average price although sometimes you'll pay less and sometimes more than the estimated price.

Hope that makes sense

darwin is the zip for Mac. You want to download the Sia-v0.4.8-beta-windows-amd64.zip file.

Primarily, yes. If you have many files uploaded through Sia, I would also back up the /renters directory occasionally since if you loose the .sia files you also loose access to your content on the cloud.

I would hang on for a couple of days until the official 0.5.0 version is released. The available version is a Release Candidate that is rather buggy.

No, he doesn't have a point, because he made no point.

I am not a Sia dev but it is hard to take his comments seriously. He makes some hand-waving claims that Sia is prone to Sybil attacks, without proper analysis of how. He then concludes that Sia is therefore a provable scam, which demonstrates that he is incapable of logical deduction. For me, taking anything else in his post serious is therefore an impossibility.

In order to make these claims, you need some demonstrable proof of your assertions. I am not saying a Sybil attack can't be done, but I disagree with simply taking it for granted.

He moves on to some legal justifications for why Sia will be limited to ISP user clients which are simply not true. There is no reason why a commercial entity could not provide storage on the Sia network, even if they host illegal content, as long as they take steps to remove illegal content and block nefarious users. Dropbox does it. Google does it. Why can't Sia storage providers? Just because there is no central authority, that does not mean there can't be policing and enforcement of the rule of law.

In that case you should update your v0.5.0 API documentation. In the section /renter/upload/{siapath} [POST] it states:


Source: https://github.com/NebulousLabs/Sia/blob/master/doc/API.md

My interpretation was that 'duration' therefore is customizable to any number of blocks.

Right, currently you need a backup of both your wallet and the /renter directory (where all the .sia files are).


In v0.5.0 coming soon you will be able to set your own period. So, you could increase the default 6,000 blocks to something much higher.

Running the client regularly, however, ensures the redundancy of your files on the network. As hosts come and go, redundancy naturally drops and the client is set to automatically repair files. If you don't run the client you loose redundancy and in the worst case your files become irretrievable.


There is a Gnome shell extension that sort of does this. Eventually, I would expect other OSs to follow suit. What you are asking for is all possible with the Sia API.


As the number of participating hosts grow the need for redundancy falls. Basically, down to x1.5 with about 50 hosts I think.



ShapeShift does not currently support Siacoin. I have asked them N times to consider it, but I guess they receive hundreds of requests like that per day.


Absolutely! I'm sure there are 3rd parties working on this as we speak (type).

All great suggestions me think!!

Right :-)

Sia: Still no mining pool ^TM

I think its an interesting proposition: be able to set a discount for organizations your support. It would require some changes to the protocol for sure. The simplest 'fix' would be to change the hosting charge on the fly as preferred IPs connect. But this would mess up the host selection algorithm; when uploading hosts are heavily biased by cost, so cheaper hosts are preferred before more expensive hosts.

I guess that as we see Sia being developed, there will be more options to configure and use Sia per-user-preferences. Currently, we're locked into a bunch of defaults, but I'm sure adjustable parameters will be opened up for customization gradually in the future. Whether we see this is up to the devs, but I like the idea.

On this:


you could configure your firewall to be open on port 9982 only to known IPs (i.e. those you want to support). That way, no one else could upload to your host.

This does seem rather pointless though, since data that is uploaded is currently made 6x redundant on the Sia network. Also, files are split in pieces and distributed across hosts. This is all to ensure that even if a significant number of hosts go down data is still safe

Meaning, your preferred partner still have to upload to multiple other hosts besides yours. In fact, your host may not even be selected by the Sia client running on your preferred partners computer as host selection is random, though weighted by published price.

I think that what you are requesting is not really compatible with the Sia protocol and if enforced would reduced the networks reliability overall.

If you wanted to support just one uploader, you would be better simply using rscync etc.

Would be useful yes. Mind you, he still didn't answer my first reply. Seems he went cold.

Also, BSM, are you looking a full-time job specifically in Scandinavia, or something small/temp?

Old news. He was soliciting beta testers on reddit more than 3 months ago.