The Sia Core Team is doing an AMA on Reddit and Slack today, June 14th:
https://www.reddit.com/r/siacoin/comments/4o1tu4/we_are_the_sia_core_team_aua/

Get your questions answered from the developers themselves!

Remember Ripple:
http://www.bitcoinx.com/major-alt-coin-ripple-crashes-as-co-founder-announces-9-billion-xrp-dump/

Lets move the Slack channels to the Polo trollbox shall we?

Red is so sexy.

Not really. Hosts are currently not selected based on their bandwidth, so you should get the same number of contracts regardless.


Up to ~500Mb ram if you're running just a host. Some CPU but not excessive. Mostly during IBD and startup.

Next version are addressing RAM and CPU usage so this will be brought down soon.


You might earn about 50 - 100 Siacoins / GB in the current market. There is limited uploading going on, due to renter limitations (again, being worked on by developers).

You probably will not earn a lot on Sia in today's market. Your disks will most likely not fill up. Earnings might pay your electricity. You will support the network, development and get some experience that might be valuable to you when Sia starts running full steam.

Important about running a host: you receive your earnings only at the end of a storage contract (usually 6 weeks). So, you want to keep your host running at least for that amount of time.

Does, or will, Lisk use Sia (sia.tech) as a storage backend like Crypti does?

I think it is fair to say that, in its current form, Sia is not ready for real-world use. First off, there are synchronization issues, excessive RAM usage and very limited scaleability.

Synchronization issues have largely been fixed in the 0.5.2 release candidate that came out today. The other problems are being worked on too.

What you describe is, therefore, the expected performance of Sia. There are no real surprises here.

I in no way intend to say your report is misleading. I think it represents a valid snapshot of how Sia is performing right now. But, Sia is in beta, its a work-in-progress with many known issues and both demand and supply is restrained because of these known issues. So, just as you cannot judge the soup before it has been cooked, wait for your judgement of Sia until the product is ready for real-world use.

What you mention about the cost of storage on Sia is a consequence of all this. What you have is a protocol that does not quite scale, and a reference implementation that is slow and heavy on system resources. As a consequence, not many are uploading content to the Sia network right now. In fact, the developers have asked users to refrain from uploading large amounts of content.

So, with low demand comes of course low supply (of storage). Some of the remaining storage providers are very cheap, others expensive. Most importantly, the low numbers of storage providers increase the amount of redundancy you need to guarantee that files are retrievable. Currently, that redundancy sits at x6, meaning each file you uploaded is duplicated 6 times over! Also, there is not much of a choice available when it comes to selecting which hosts you upload to, as each file has to be split among ~20 hosts. When the number of hosts climb above 100, redundancy can be decreased to x1.5. With an increasing number of hosts then, storage supply will grow, competition among hosts stiffen and prices therefore drop.

Apparently inspired by the name of an Egyptian god. According to Wikipedia, Sia (the god) was created from the blood spilled as Atum (another Egyptian deity) cut his own penis.

There have been some arguments about Sia's correct pronunciation. Most people seem to pronounce like "See-a", hence jokes like "See ya" on the forum while the developers insist it should be pronounced "Say-a" like in Japanese "sayōnara" ("goodbye").

So, yeah, funny I can agree with. Catchy too.

Its mine and should be taken with a (large) grain of salt. It is a bold assumption that total network storage will hit 1 Exabyte by year end. I think the potential is there, but a lot hinges on development of the protocol itself which is by far a done job.

The estimate further takes into account payment for storage alone, and not speculative elements that may drive the coin price much higher of course.

But lets just all guess for fun and don't take my estimate as any advice to invest etc etc :-)

We should all direct people to either the Forum (preferable) or Slack.

Impromptu prepared block reward and net coin supply charts here: http://imgur.com/a/OocoU

Correct, perpetual block reward: 30,000 Siacoins after block 270,000.

Added in edit:

Correct. The other way to acquire Siacoins, besides mining or buying, is to rent out storage space: you set your own price minus a 3.9% tax that goes to Siafund holders (10,000 Siafunds issued; devs/founders possess about 9,000 of those, and ~1,000 were distributed in a crowd-sale to fund initial development).

I asked the author of the Go miner (@allujuppa) on Slack, and he said:

"no, there is not, it's the same opencl code. and the differences in the rest is marginal compared to the time spent in executing the opencl kernel"

Lets do the numbers:

There is, as of today, exactly 10 billion (10000*10^6) Siacoins in circulation.

The current value of 1 Siacoin is 0.00000008 bitcoin, or (rougly) 0.00003088 USD.

The market cap of Sia is thus: 0.00003088 * 10 billion = 308,800 USD.

Now, the value of Siacoin would rise because of two factors:

1) Hype
2) Demand for storage on the Sia network

Hype will always be of some unknown magnitude. It could double the price of 1 Siacoin, or increase it ten or even hundred-fold. I see no way to predict how much hype this coin will eventually receive.

So, the only thing we can say something about is #2, storage demand.

The storage demand will always be limited by the actual capacity of the network, which at present is ~25 TB. If we assume a net cost of 400 SC/GB/month, the current capacity can be spent with 25,600 GB * 400 SC/mo / 6 = 1,706,667 SC/month (the 6 is the current redundancy factor) or the equivalent of $52 USD per month. That's hardly a game changer...

Thus, in order for the valuation of Siacoin to go up, based on storage demand alone, the capacity of the network first needs to grow dramatically. As it does, the redundancy required to store files will drop to below 1.5, thus increasing true available storage even more.

In the near future, I predict that the price of Siacoins will increase solely due to hype rather than true demand. Sia currently has minimum marketing and public exposure. The number of participants is therefore low (and will remain low, until PR picks up). Still, with a modest number of "investors" (say 20) with reasonable funds to invest (say, a few bitcoins each) you could soon see the price go to 20 - 30 satoshis or higher.

As the technology matures, and proves itself stable, reliable and overall useful many will naturally hedge their bets and invest whatever they can muster into Siacoins. Then, the sky is the limit...

Your question assume a 3,000 fold increase in Siacoin valuation. With the current coin supply, that entails a future marketcap of more than 900 million USD. That would place Siacoin as the number 2 cryptocurrency in terms of marketcap (after bitcoin). The premise of Sia is to tap into the resources of many smaller to medium datacenters, that have capacity they would otherwise not be able to rent out without being out-competed by major actors in the storage markets (think Amazon, Dropbox etc). It would certainly require the participation of many datacenters and individuals to rent out space to justify a 900m USD marketcap. I don't know how realistic that is (because I don't have the numbers).

I personally think that, with time and significant improvements in the technology and orders-of-magnitude growth of the network, a 1,000 valuation increase is not unrealistic. I am absolutely convinced that there will be a significant valuation increase in the course of the next 6 - 12 months.

But, a lot of things could also go wrong:
1) Sia could be beaten to the "finish line" by a competitor that takes all the glory and hype
2) the technology could be proven vulnerable to certain attacks
3) the technology could be found to not scale sufficiently well to accomodate huge amounts of storage
4) there may not be market demand

As with all things in life, nothing in certain.

This should be quite simple to set-up.

Grab the exchange rate from http://siapulse.com/page/api, and update the host through the Sia API with /host[POST].

Could be implemented as a plugin, or just a shell script.

You only receive the coins when the file contracts expire. Renters pay when they upload, but hosts only get paid if they store the file for the agreed amount of time.

The default period is 6,000 blocks I think, which is about 6 weeks. So, you should start seeing coins transferring to your wallet about 6 weeks after you first started hosting files.

Renters that upload through the API are free to set their own contract period (I have mine default to 2,000 blocks, which is about 2 weeks).

The important thing as a host is to remember to keep your host turned on. If renters cannot verify you still have the files at the end of the contract period (because your machine is turned off), you will not receive the coins! In that case, the coins are refunded to the renter. Oh, and keep your wallet unlocked too!

Not sure if I follow. Does the DDNS work for your Synology box? If so, I assume the IP is the same for the Synology box and the computer running Sia. Or, the Synology DDNS does not work at all, even for your Synology box?

The developers have a plan for how to identify hosts. But for now, its all based on your IP which ideally should not change if you're a host.

Yes, you are identified on the network by your IP and it should be static too. If you change your IP, uploaders won't be able to confirm file contracts later and you will not be paid for used storage. Alternatively, use DynDNS and announce your host with a domain name.

Taek mention on Slack recently this may change in the future.

Taek: It might be an idea to put in Big Letters in the header post of this thread that there is an official forum elsewhere. The Forum also notifies the Slack members so answers will be answered sooner as well.

GNOME-Shell extension updated for Sia 0.5.1

https://github.com/pmknutsen/gnome-shell-sia

Sia v 0.5.x is now supported (note that support for 0.4x has been dropped due to changes in the API routes).

Automated backup now works a little better too, and the statistics in the drop-down menu have received a small overhaul.