I have nothing to say about the account ownership claim of this user. I also did not had initially any intention to step in, but as this user claims he did something he did not achieved (and brags about it), and he is using the same extortion practices he has used in the Sia community, now I have to step in to provide clarity and context to the situation.

I am a Sia third-party developer (not core) and moderator of the Sia Discord community. I am also the owner of the resources websites https://siastats.info and https://keops.cc



Importantly, the Sia software has been patched for almost 2 months against the Sybil attack this user intended to perform, and he did not provoked any damage to the user's files

Mr. Honarchian used to be the owner of Siaberry Inc., a business selling Raspberry Pi kits preconfigured to be Sia "hosts". Sia is a decentralized storage network where users offer the free space in their disks (hosts) to users that want to store files in the network. All data is encrypted and each file distributed among 30 hosts with a 3x redundancy scheme that ensures any 20 of them can go offline but yet the files will be available to download. A community member (not even a core developer) revealed in two blog posts the security vulnerabilities of the hardware (https://blog.spaceduck.io/siaberry-1/) and the dubious business practices of the company (https://blog.spaceduck.io/siaberry-2/).

Moved by vindication, he decided to perform a Sybil attack against the whole network, by deploying a large number of hosts that could collect enough redundant copies of the files. Afterwards he would disconnect the machines and provoke a data loss on users on November 5th. He started to extort the Sia community and core developers requesting a ransom of $5000. For those interested, this is a folder full of screenshots of his multiple threats and extortion attempts:
However, as soon as the community detected his intentions, it reacted (in less than 10 days): on September 6th Sia version 1.3.4 is released (https://www.reddit.com/r/siacoin/comments/9dlrik/sia_v134_has_been_released/), including a feature that avoided users to keep adding more of Honarchian's machines to their list of hosts. On October 16th, version 1.3.6 is released (https://www.reddit.com/r/siacoin/comments/9orvzw/sia_v136_is_ready_download_now/) including a feature that cancels contracts with hosts using the same subnetwork (and so, making users to stop using his hosts). On September 6th I release Decentralizer (https://keops.cc/decentralizer) a simple tool that geolocates hosts and cancels contracts with those sharing location. The tool can keep detecting and associating these hosts even if the attacker uses VPNs or changes their geolocation, thanks to the use of an online database on SiaStats, which is constantly monitoring the network of hosts.

The Sia network has been inmune for almost two months to his attack, but yet he kept his extortion and his plan of provoking data loss on those not updating their clients. He even started to threat to dox people, including myself because I developed this tool to neutralize the attack. Take a look also at his Medium article he linked in his first post, where after paragraphs of no-sense he ends up claiming he will stop if he is paid $5000 before November 5th. Finally, 3 days ago, on October 24th, his machines get turned off.The proof that his attack did not had any effect and the redundancy scheme worked is that even 3 days after the unplugging event, no Sia user has reported so far on any of the Sia communities a data loss event.

As Mr. Honarchian is now using the same extortion and doxing techniques in the BTC community, I think it is important everybody knows the recent past of this user.

Syncing takes less than 10 hours if you use SSD disks. However if you are using HDD disks (spinning mechanical disks) it can take many days or weeks, as the bottleneck is not the actual downloading but the validation of the blockchain, and that is  is I/O-intensive. In your case, I would try a manual download of the blockchain (aka bootstrapping): https://siasetup.info/consensus


Sia works as a marketplace of storage, so the price is determined by each host setting up their own pricing. Hosts compete among them reducing their pricing to improve their score and so the chances of being selected for contracts. You can check the current marketplace stats here: https://siastats.info/storage_pricing

As security measures, Sia uses the Twofish algorithm to encrypt all the data uploaded to hosts (only the renter is in possesion of the decryption key) and uses the Reed-Solomon data distribution algorithm to send redundant copies of the chunks of the files. The renter pays a 3x redundancy (already included in the pricing of the link above) and each file is chunked and sent to 30 different hosts: just any 10 of those 30 hosts are required to retrieve back the file (in other words, 2/3 of the hosts can go offline or lose the data, and yet the renter will have access to it)

Sorry, that is not going to be possible. You can transfer a host from Win to Win or from Linux to Linux, but not across OSs, because you need the host folders to be on the exact same absolute paths in the new system (https://siawiki.tech/client/transferring_the_client_to_a_different_computer) and the paths in Win and Linux distros are different...

Consider instead a mini-computer, barebone or so, like an Intel NUC (around $150 + whatever you spend in RAM and internal storage). Also if you have a bit more of budget, HP Microservers of 8th generation can be found sometimes on the used market at $300 and they are fantastic hosts in my opinion: ECC RAM, decent CPU, <50W of overall power consume and 4 bays for disks.

Or if you want to use a RPi nevertheless, create a new host on it and retire gently the current one: select "stop accepting contracts" and wait until your current contracts expire (usually 3 months, but you can check the timeline of all of them on https://siastats.info/navigator on the third tab of the search box)

SiaSetup is an extraordinary resource to learn about Hosting in Sia: http://siasetup.info/guides/hosting_on_sia

Developers are working on offline signing of transactions, what is a pre-requisite for hardware integration. In top of that, looks like they are working on the firmware integration for Ledger Nano. They expect the integration to be ready by the end of the year. Check this link, specially the answer from taek42, co-founder of Sia: https://www.reddit.com/r/siacoin/comments/8m2ad7/offline_signing_ledger_hardware_support_possible/


Why are we silent? Some of us, like me, because we are busy building infrastructure for the Sia network.

You have been bitching about Sia for more than 6 months. The price of Siacoin has increased more than 30x (USD compared) in the last 15 months or so, yet according to your recent comments that's not enough 

Siacoin is not a coin meant to make you, or anyone, rich: it is a utility coin meant to pay file storage in the Sia network. Do yourself a favor, liquidate your position in Sia and move somewhere else if you can't understand the whole crypto is in the downside of a market cycle

There is not going to be any hardfork.

The whole story is that the Obelisk miners (manufactured by a subsidiary company of the Core developers) a few days ago revealed the preliminar tests on the units, and sadly the specs could be a 30% bellow the expected. As the mining network is already flooded by miners of 3 companies, by the time Obelisks are delivered their profitability will be very low (so all that speech about "doorstoppers")

The buyers of Obelisk are in rage and are pressing really hard the developing team to fork the mining algorithm of the network to invalidate every miner but Obeliks. Some buyers are going as far as considering the fork as inevitable or consider it a proven fact, I guess in hopes of shaping the reality by describing a different one.

... but the reality is that the Core team is not going to fork the network: they are stating every day that this is no reason to provoke a contentious fork, and that the decision of not forking is firm unless Bitmain/Antpool starts to behave destructively against Sia (something that can't currently happen as the hashrate of Antpool is <15%)

Sia is not optimized to upload small files. Any file smaller than 40MB will be padded to 40MB, and if you are trying to upload files in the number of thousands or tens of thousands the performance will suffer.

Instead, if you have many small files, zip them into a small number of big files and you should see a better performance

Rather than June 1st, what was originally stated is that they would be delivered during June as the latest month, what means June 30th the latest day. Let's be more precise: months have 30 days, and when deadlines are stated as a month, that means the last day of the month, not the first one. This confusion is the same that made a lot of people FUDing about Halong Miners, as some considered they should have been delivered by March 1st while what they promised was March (and actually they were delivered by the end of March, as promised)

There has not been any update yet about the final shipping dates, but they have recently shared a picture of the final miner case: https://www.reddit.com/r/siacoin/comments/8eo1x5/first_look_at_obelisk_unit/?st=jgpfa832&sh=c7130fbf and a picture of the chips: https://twitter.com/ObeliskTechHQ They are currently benchmarking them and stated they would share an update later this week

This is fake news, same as those claiming an incoming coin burn (who would burn coins if they are all in the hands of users, and developers do not own them?). There are fake roadmaps circulating around in Telegram and Discord groups, be mindful. Check it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/siacoin/comments/8a1rzs/warning_fake_sia_resources_trello_etc_are/

The message comes from an account with no previous activity. Pump&Dump FUDsters don't even care nowadays to hide their nature.

It is not very profitable to be hosting right now as the usage of the network is only 5%: there is oversupply of hosts currently. But obviously all hosts are expecting the usage to increase over time. Besides, it is funny to be a host and good to learn now for the time Sia goes prime time.

Building an energy-efficient rig is the key: low TCP CPUs, 5400rpm disks instead of 7200... About the disks, better NAS-grade or enterprise-grade disks (WD red, Seagate Ironwolf) than consumer-grade disks, as the former are prepared to last 5+ years running 24/7. And better if you offer 4TB at least, as there is a score penalty for less storage than that.

The cheapest option is using a Raspberry pi + an external hardrive, that would be an investment of around $150 (about 50-70 for the RPi setup and 80 for the disk) with a normal 4TB external disks or about 200 with the same disk size but NAS-grade.

A more beefy and professional solution could be an HP Microserver, that has 4 bays for disks. They can be found by $350-400 without disks

No, there was a second batch of A3 that was delivered last month, a third batch of A3 that will be delivered in 2 weeks, Halong B52 miners that were delivered in the last 2 weeks, Innosilicon miners currently on sale (while it looks like they are the same as Halong, but branded as Innosilicon) and there is another secret manufacturer that we knew in January had plans to make Blake2b miners as they communicated with Core Devs (but don't want their name to be disclosed).


About 6000 - 7000 units IIRC

If you were planning to host with only 1TB attached to a laptop... Yeah, definitely don't do it.

However, if what you have is 16-40TB in a machine that consumes only 50W (An HP Microserver, a Raspberry Pi with disks attached) the electric consume becomes almost irrelevant. It is like mining with GPUs: just because it is not profitable with a laptop or desktop using an old GT730, it doesn't mean mining is not profitable at all: just find the appropriate hardware.

And if you have a server or a NAS that is already connected 24/7 with free space on its disks, then hosting is a awesome idea, as there are no overhead costs

Yes, hosts are paid in Siacoins when renters make use of their storage. You decide your own pricing, but as Sia is a competitive marketplace, you'll want to keep competitive prices. You can check the current average that the top 100 hosts are asking here: https://siastats.info/hosts_network, currently 40SC/TB/month

Take in mind that hosting is a serious commitment: you have uptime requirements and you risk an amount in Siacoins in collateral as a guarantee you'll keep the files and the uptime during the whole contract. Check more info about hosting here: https://siasetup.info/guides/hosting_on_sia

Looks like your blockchain database, the consensus.db file, might be corrupted. In Windows, go to the folder
and delete the subfolders "consensus" and transactionpool. Open Sia again and let it sync the blockchain again

Yes, in Sia a wallet is a collection of addresses, all of them pointing to your balance and all of them being unlocked with a single recovery seed. So it is normal you have multiple addresses (good for privacy) but just one seed.

Keep the seed in a safe place, as it is the only way to unluck your funds in the future whenever you need to send them elsewhere using the Sia-UI

If you download it from here yes: https://github.com/avahowell/sia-coldstorage/releases . Check you are downloading it from the repository of avahowell and not anyone else's cloned software (otherwise it could be a scam aimed to steal your funds). Ava Howell is a former core developer member, so it is a trustable.

I am just curious, in order to detect potential scams (as sia-coldsrtorage is a tool only known by very advanced users): where did you learnt about it? Can you share the link your read about it and which download link it you found?

It is my pleasure to help  

Yes, sometimes the wallet might become "blind" for a transaction, it is a known bug. If that thing happens again, do exactly what you have done today: delete your wallet folder and use your recovery seed to force Sia to re-scan the blockchain


Be aware that most of the "web wallets" for Sia out there are just scams that will steal whichever funds you send there. We had in the past months dozens of cases of users scammed. Do not trust any web wallet, only the official Sia-UI that can be downloaded from the official Sia website: https://sia.tech/get-started

Yes, paste the seed again (the 29 words)... Your old password does not work anymore when you delete the wallet

If you want to use a custom password again, you can create it AFTER unlocking your wallet with the sed the first time

No, don't use your password: use your recovery seed again to unlock it. When deleting the wallet, the password get deleted too. The password is something local, the seed is global

Unlock first using your seed again and then set up a new custom password if you want

Then that error message is weird... but there is another way to nuke the wallet and recover the previous one with the seed.

1 - In "About" click on "Show Sia folders" and in the folder that pops up go to "sia" (alternatively, the folder path in Windows is C:/Users/your_user/appdata/roaming/Sia-UI/sia).

2 - Close Sia completely (in Windows, click close on the system try icon)

3 - In the folder you open, delete or rename the "wallet" subfolder. As long as no folder with the name "wallet" remains you are good

4 - Open Sia again and and click on load a wallet (the icon is an old key, iirc)

5 - Use your recovery seed when prompted. Be patient, the re-scanning of the blockchain can take something between 10 minutes and 1 hour