[ANN] Sia - Decentralized Storage

[Taek]

Good Day!

I have some recommendations for this awesome currency:

1) Make your own forum - Needs: VPS, Brains, Node.JS, GitHub, NodeBB
2) Get featured in the press - Needs: Cash (a.k.a. Only BitCoins (Between 0.7 - 5 BTC))
3) Set up Bounties Instead of Jobs - Needs: Brains, Reasonable BitCoins, Public Announcements
4) Go to a wider audience - Needs: Social Accounts, Press Articles, Introduction Video
5) Get Listed on Exchanges - Needs: BitCoins & Community Support
6) ASIC Resistance (No Offence but the System & Reward Is Ridiculous) - Needs: Lot's of Forking
7) Face & Proof Of Developer - Needs: The Dev Team with their Info with Face & Gov. ID
8 ) Documentation - Needs: Brains, Typing, Coffee
9) Be Clean (Don't Hide) - Needs: Honesty (Good for PR)
10) Participation (Don't Act like a Bot that gives only updates) - Needs: A PR Representative
11) Proof Of Stake - Needs: Redesign to Include PeerCoin's Interest Stake System
12) Android, iOS, Java - Needs: ~ 4 - 5 BTC, Talented Devs

1 - I'm not sure we have enough users yet to justify a forum, but hopefully we'll get there soon.
2 - I'm generally against paying for press coverage, because I believe  that the press should present on things they honestly believe are interesting, not things they were paid to present as interesting. We're more than happy to do interviews or answer questions for anyone who might want to give us press coverage though.
3 - Bounties are good for very short term goals, but our goals are much more long term. I think a full time employee would go a lot farther than a series of bounties that accomplish the same thing - with the employee you know they are learning the product and have a consistent amount of work, plus they get to maintain their own code instead of us having to maintain lots of code that was acquired through bounties.
4 - I'm with you on that one. An introduction video might be worth our time, and we do have a facebook + twitter.
5 - This also needs to happen. In the long term, we don't plan on needing exchanges, but in the short term we need to be listed.
6 - There are some good reasons not to chase ASIC resistance. Our algorithm is not ASIC resistant and we're fine with that. No ASICs exist for it yet but I'm sure there will be some soon enough. I've been convinced that 300,000 coins per block is too many, I'll try and find an easy way to reduce it without changing too many other things. We might just shift the decimal place.
7 - Dev's identities are already public. I'm David Vorick, and my cofounder is Luke Champine. Sia is managed by the company Nebulous Inc., a Delaware C-Corp. That should be enough information for you to find everything else on your own.
8 - We are trying to keep up to date with the documentation. There's a very long todo list, but documentation is near the top. Our current documentation I think is pretty good, happy to fill in gaps where people feel like more information is necessary.
9 - I hope we're doing good with the honesty part 
10 - We are looking for a marketing director, it's a paid position if anyone is interested.
11 - We feel quite strongly that Proof-of-Work is much more secure that Proof-of-Stake.
12 - Any sort of moblie app is a ways out, we have other things that we would like to do first. Most people's storage needs are all on their computers. Eventually, we do plan to support music, video, tv, and movie streaming to phones but that's a long way down the road. We do have an API, if you feel like there's an application that's worth developing, we're happy to help you do it yourself. There are a lot more cool things for Sia than me + Luke alone can code up.

For more on ASICS: https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/asic-faq.pdf
For more on Proof-of-Stake: https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf

[1714068368]

1714068368

[Tobo]

Another Piece of Advice - Don't use word's like cheap, especially in the opening instead, use words like inexpensive.

low cost, high cost efficient

[td services]

I am unable to send Sianotes and message to redeem on NXT Wallet, get message "Feature not available" in NXT wallet, Windows 7, client 1.5.9, wallet 1.3 .

[Taek]

I am unable to send Sianotes and message to redeem on NXT Wallet, get message "Feature not available" in NXT wallet, Windows 7, client 1.5.9, wallet 1.3 .

There's not much we can do about that, but maybe the nxt devs can help you?

Things seem to work fine for 1.4.18.

[Taek]

I have updated the siafund database. The final update to this database will be on June 1st. I will be checking NXT sometime after 12:00pm EST on June 1st. Any late submissions will not be included in the genesis block, and will be property of Nebulous at launch.

We do plan on honoring late submissions by sending you your siafunds manually afterwards, however we hold no legal obligation to do so.

There are currently 148 sianotes that are unclaimed. This is a significant number, please claim your sianotes. Less than a week remains.

The current database:

Code:

7d0c44f7664e2d34e53efde0661a6f628ec9264785ae8e3cd7c973e8d190c3c9: 8780
0439e5bc7f14ccf5d3a7e882d040923e45625166dd077b64466bc771791ac6fc: 2
049e1d2a69772b058a48bebe65724ff3bdf8d0971ebbe994e1e91c9f13e84bf4: 6
080742fa194af76ca24fdc97cae4f10b828a0df8c1a788c5413feaaecdd847e6: 7
2c6aef338a66f213ccc5f8b2db7a98fb13143420af20049c4921a3a5deb8d9da: 8
2ca31fe94a673784e69f614e9593416ea4d369ad9e1dca2b55d9554b5325cddf: 3
33979254c7073b596face3c83e37a5fdeeba1c912f89c80f46c7bb7df368b3f0: 1
38db03321c03a65f8da3ca233cc7db0a97b0e461b085bd21d3ca53c51fd0fec1: 50
44be8c5760e89620a1b1cc41e4df57d9865a1938332d486b810c1dca0607320d: 75
450ec9c85a49f52d9a5ea113c7f1cb380d3f05dc79f5f734c2b5fc4c82067224: 10
4880fdcfa930011aedcda966c4e02aba5f973be2cb88fbdfa526586e2fd579e0: 10
4882a4e3da1c3c0f3897d4f24d83e8832a3984ad717642b7264f60b2696c1af7: 50
55c69a29c474e272ca5ed6935754f7a4c34f3a7b1a214441744fb5f1f1d0d7b8: 15
57ef537d980e1316cb882ec0cb57e0be4dec7d128edf92461017fc1364455b6f: 121
5bc9650bbc28236fec851f7c61f68c888ff598ae6ff5bc7c157dbbc0cb5cfd39: 222
6ef0eead4e8ab98ab3e3879936842e3ee2cecc23ae6b9c0f8e025d84a33c3259: 10
723a932c404548b841b2d55e9d2c586a5c1f91c1d7c8d7e9637424c5a0464f99: 3
7b6ae565dcfc32cb26b78598faa7d29bfc66961dbb03b2350b918f21a673fa28: 1
7c65cfaf3277cf1a3e0ff78d96ae49f7ee1c4dffde68a6f47056e350d72d458f: 5
8689c6ac60362d0a64805be1e2868f6c1f46bbe436d446e5953940a6997beeb4: 25
9b4f591c4547efc6f602c6fe5c3bc0cde59824ba6e7ae9dd4c8f03ee59e7c017: 58
a35e33dc0e9053703e0a00ada1ead3b0ba5409bdfa6f21e77257644b48d90b1a: 75
ad788068ba56978cbf17e7c14df5f368c4379bf36f0f548b94bbad2f68458d27: 90
b3b9e4a68b5e0dc1ffe3ae6378696dddf7049bf3e5251a62de0c5b50df213d38: 20
c1316714aa87b65595129fc29878a2d0319edcbc724f01833e1b5639f42e4042: 5
c4d6ecd3e3d8987fa402eb0eeb2e8ee753260783d01db3bd3e5881b4779ed661: 44
ce3a7294833157c55612d81a3e4f98af210484a06ce735c8304c7d5e9c552082: 23
c867877ec502cb3ff106f5c3dc661b4ae8f9c956cf22331ab497886c70388448: 80
c8f9f5da3afd4cfa587246ef0e02fa7b0ac0c63dbb9bf798a5aec6188e27b177: 2
d101c7b8ba39158921fcdbb8822620623ffcfa4f4692a94eb4a11d5d262dafb0: 1
f132e5d3422073f17557b4ef4cf60e8169b5996969cbe5ed1782c1aa64c92647: 50
Unclaimed: 148
Total: 10,000 

[chrysophylax]

I have updated the siafund database. The final update to this database will be on June 1st. I will be checking NXT sometime after 12:00pm EST on June 1st. Any late submissions will not be included in the genesis block, and will be property of Nebulous at launch.

We do plan on honoring late submissions by sending you your siafunds manually afterwards, however we hold no legal obligation to do so.

There are currently 148 sianotes that are unclaimed. This is a significant number, please claim your sianotes. Less than a week remains.

The current database:

Code:

7d0c44f7664e2d34e53efde0661a6f628ec9264785ae8e3cd7c973e8d190c3c9: 8780
0439e5bc7f14ccf5d3a7e882d040923e45625166dd077b64466bc771791ac6fc: 2
049e1d2a69772b058a48bebe65724ff3bdf8d0971ebbe994e1e91c9f13e84bf4: 6
080742fa194af76ca24fdc97cae4f10b828a0df8c1a788c5413feaaecdd847e6: 7
2c6aef338a66f213ccc5f8b2db7a98fb13143420af20049c4921a3a5deb8d9da: 8
2ca31fe94a673784e69f614e9593416ea4d369ad9e1dca2b55d9554b5325cddf: 3
33979254c7073b596face3c83e37a5fdeeba1c912f89c80f46c7bb7df368b3f0: 1
38db03321c03a65f8da3ca233cc7db0a97b0e461b085bd21d3ca53c51fd0fec1: 50
44be8c5760e89620a1b1cc41e4df57d9865a1938332d486b810c1dca0607320d: 75
450ec9c85a49f52d9a5ea113c7f1cb380d3f05dc79f5f734c2b5fc4c82067224: 10
4880fdcfa930011aedcda966c4e02aba5f973be2cb88fbdfa526586e2fd579e0: 10
4882a4e3da1c3c0f3897d4f24d83e8832a3984ad717642b7264f60b2696c1af7: 50
55c69a29c474e272ca5ed6935754f7a4c34f3a7b1a214441744fb5f1f1d0d7b8: 15
57ef537d980e1316cb882ec0cb57e0be4dec7d128edf92461017fc1364455b6f: 121
5bc9650bbc28236fec851f7c61f68c888ff598ae6ff5bc7c157dbbc0cb5cfd39: 222
6ef0eead4e8ab98ab3e3879936842e3ee2cecc23ae6b9c0f8e025d84a33c3259: 10
723a932c404548b841b2d55e9d2c586a5c1f91c1d7c8d7e9637424c5a0464f99: 3
7b6ae565dcfc32cb26b78598faa7d29bfc66961dbb03b2350b918f21a673fa28: 1
7c65cfaf3277cf1a3e0ff78d96ae49f7ee1c4dffde68a6f47056e350d72d458f: 5
8689c6ac60362d0a64805be1e2868f6c1f46bbe436d446e5953940a6997beeb4: 25
9b4f591c4547efc6f602c6fe5c3bc0cde59824ba6e7ae9dd4c8f03ee59e7c017: 58
a35e33dc0e9053703e0a00ada1ead3b0ba5409bdfa6f21e77257644b48d90b1a: 75
ad788068ba56978cbf17e7c14df5f368c4379bf36f0f548b94bbad2f68458d27: 90
b3b9e4a68b5e0dc1ffe3ae6378696dddf7049bf3e5251a62de0c5b50df213d38: 20
c1316714aa87b65595129fc29878a2d0319edcbc724f01833e1b5639f42e4042: 5
c4d6ecd3e3d8987fa402eb0eeb2e8ee753260783d01db3bd3e5881b4779ed661: 44
ce3a7294833157c55612d81a3e4f98af210484a06ce735c8304c7d5e9c552082: 23
c867877ec502cb3ff106f5c3dc661b4ae8f9c956cf22331ab497886c70388448: 80
c8f9f5da3afd4cfa587246ef0e02fa7b0ac0c63dbb9bf798a5aec6188e27b177: 2
d101c7b8ba39158921fcdbb8822620623ffcfa4f4692a94eb4a11d5d262dafb0: 1
f132e5d3422073f17557b4ef4cf60e8169b5996969cbe5ed1782c1aa64c92647: 50
Unclaimed: 148
Total: 10,000 

ok - im lost ... what did i miss? ...

claim? ...

#crysx

[xibeijan]

This project look promising. I've never seen a project like this... design is superior to Storj.

Adding to my list.

I am considering acquiring sianotes over on the NXT AE.  What is your projected average-case ROI for siafund investors?

[goldmaxx]

watching this one...

Regards

Goldmaxx

[athenaclub]

ok - im lost ... what did i miss? ...

claim? ...

#crysx

First to make it clear for others, David and Luke created Siacoin not to compete with Bitcoin or litecoin as a currency.
The sole purpose of Siacoin is to be an open source decentralized distributed cloud storage service to compete with
centralized cloud storage services. Siacoins should not have speculative value like all other coins. You mine for
consensus but the coins you get mining have value only because you sell them to people who want to store their files
on the Sia network and Siacoins are the only way to rent storage on Sia. Now anybody with storage can make money
as "mom and pop" datacenters.

The important thing to remember is the two devs created all this for profit just as Microsoft and Amazon provides cloud
storage for profit. The Siacoin project is a revenue stream for David and Luke's corporation they formed Nebulous inc.

How does Siacoin provide revenue for them? Through Siafunds. Siafunds are built into Sia and automatically receive
Siacoins as a 3.9% fee only and I mean only when a storage contract successfully completes. Siafunds do not get any
fees for regular transactions. Think of it this way. The Sia network allows anybody to buy some hard drives and provide
them as cloud storage without red tape or having to form a company. Whenever these hosts get paid for their
storage services, siafund takes 3.9% of it. Thats a damn good deal for everybody.

The devs turned down high paying jobs at Google to chase this. They were broke, so crowd funded on Nxt Asset Exchange
to get enough money to work on Sia for a year at least. It was successful and Nxt investors received 10% of Siafunds.
Nebulous owns the other 90%.

Its been almost a year since and a lot of ups and downs occurred including different iterations of Sia.

The fees Siafund collect are also not for buying yachts. Just like any corporation Nebulous needs the income to pump
back into Siacoin by hiring more people to make Sia as strong as needs to be to replace all centralized cloud services.
Ideally Nebulous will have hundreds or thousands of employees and Sia will be battle tested and trusted as the go
to storage service. If that happens then you can see how valuable Siafunds will be. And Nxt Siafund buyers would
deserve it with the risk they've been through. Buy some while you can on the Nxt AE if you want but now they are
pretty expensive. Siafunds will also be tradable within Sia according to the devs.

Read the whitepaper on http://www.siacoin.com/sia.pdf.
Read the history of this project https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=591283.msg6486684#msg6486684

[mightgetlucky]

Interesting project, will follow it.

[td services]

I am unable to send Sianotes and message to redeem on NXT Wallet, get message "Feature not available" in NXT wallet, Windows 7, client 1.5.9, wallet 1.3 .

There's not much we can do about that, but maybe the nxt devs can help you?

Things seem to work fine for 1.4.18.

Tried using online wallets listed on nxt.org site - one requires registration, the other won't let me sign on with passphrase only, seems to want some other ID from wallet, the third link goes to a site which does not show a wallet anywhere.

Tried downgrading NXT client install from 1.5.9 to 1.4.18. Now the NSR server crashes when I try to launch wallet. I'll probably have to manually clear everything off the computer for NXT and do a clean install. I estimate I'm already 4 hours into trying to redeem these Sianotes overall, between reading on how to do it, downloading, installing, and creating the key, and trying to send the transaction to redeem the notes.

I do onsite computer service as my main business, and can say for a fact not one of my customers would be able to use this for any kind of business.

[athenaclub]

I am unable to send Sianotes and message to redeem on NXT Wallet, get message "Feature not available" in NXT wallet, Windows 7, client 1.5.9, wallet 1.3 .

There's not much we can do about that, but maybe the nxt devs can help you?

Things seem to work fine for 1.4.18.

Tried using online wallets listed on nxt.org site - one requires registration, the other won't let me sign on with passphrase only, seems to want some other ID from wallet, the third link goes to a site which does not show a wallet anywhere.

Tried downgrading NXT client install from 1.5.9 to 1.4.18. Now the NSR server crashes when I try to launch wallet. I'll probably have to manually clear everything off the computer for NXT and do a clean install. I estimate I'm already 4 hours into trying to redeem these Sianotes overall, between reading on how to do it, downloading, installing, and creating the key, and trying to send the transaction to redeem the notes.

I do onsite computer service as my main business, and can say for a fact not one of my customers would be able to use this for any kind of business.

Guess you're not a regular Nxt user. Still it should be simple. Nxt does not need to be installed. Go to https://nxtforum.org/nrs-releases/
and choose 1.4.18. I have had problems with 1.5.9 as well. Verify the hash with something like onlinemd5.com and extract the folder to your
desktop. Double click run.bat and leave the command window open until blockchain is fully dled. Depending how fast your computer and
connection is it could take a couple hours to half a day. Open a browser and go to http://localhost:7876/. Type your passphrase and there
really should not be any single problem.

[xibeijan]

NXT AE is simple.  I got my sianotes there no problem.

Can't wait for launch!!!

[Voidcrafter]

What makes this coin supperior to storj ?

[grandpa_seth]

What makes this coin supperior to storj ?

This has been addressed already in this thread.

Dev technical answer:

We already have Storj. How is Sia different from it?

Sia uses a substantially different technology stack. From what I understand of Storj, storage verification happens through hosts checking on each other. Storj does not have good protection against deduplication, Sybil attacks, and has a novel and not academically verified method of consensus. Sia does use an academically verified method of consensus, has strong deduplication defense, and strong Sybil defense.

Storj has been changing rapidly, some of my criticisms may no longer apply.

My non technical answer:

Nobody knows and nobody can say which will be better or if either will even be completed. All anyone can do is try their best

in their belief as to how a storage coin can work best. I decided long ago not to bother even following Storj cuz I liked Sia's

2 devs and what they're trying to do. If I'm right I'm rich, if I'm wrong oh well then Storj coin holders will be. Que sera sera.

By the way, an obvious difference is Sia has a launch date around the corner.

[robinson5]

Is there a way I can mine Sia on a mac when it launches? Thanks

[bubbletea789]

Is there a way I can mine Sia on a mac when it launches? Thanks

yes. You can even try the client and mining now, more info at siacoin.com.
but the coins mined now are play coins only, you could help testing. After 7th june then you can mine the real ones.

[Taek]

ok - im lost ... what did i miss? ...

claim? ...

#crysx

First to make it clear for others, David and Luke created Siacoin not to compete with Bitcoin or litecoin as a currency.
The sole purpose of Siacoin is to be an open source decentralized distributed cloud storage service to compete with
centralized cloud storage services. Siacoins should not have speculative value like all other coins. You mine for
consensus but the coins you get mining have value only because you sell them to people who want to store their files
on the Sia network and Siacoins are the only way to rent storage on Sia. Now anybody with storage can make money
as "mom and pop" datacenters.

The important thing to remember is the two devs created all this for profit just as Microsoft and Amazon provides cloud
storage for profit. The Siacoin project is a revenue stream for David and Luke's corporation they formed Nebulous inc.

How does Siacoin provide revenue for them? Through Siafunds. Siafunds are built into Sia and automatically receive
Siacoins as a 3.9% fee only and I mean only when a storage contract successfully completes. Siafunds do not get any
fees for regular transactions. Think of it this way. The Sia network allows anybody to buy some hard drives and provide
them as cloud storage without red tape or having to form a company. Whenever these hosts get paid for their
storage services, siafund takes 3.9% of it. Thats a damn good deal for everybody.

The devs turned down high paying jobs at Google to chase this. They were broke, so crowd funded on Nxt Asset Exchange
to get enough money to work on Sia for a year at least. It was successful and Nxt investors received 10% of Siafunds.
Nebulous owns the other 90%.

Its been almost a year since and a lot of ups and downs occurred including different iterations of Sia.

The fees Siafund collect are also not for buying yachts. Just like any corporation Nebulous needs the income to pump
back into Siacoin by hiring more people to make Sia as strong as needs to be to replace all centralized cloud services.
Ideally Nebulous will have hundreds or thousands of employees and Sia will be battle tested and trusted as the go
to storage service. If that happens then you can see how valuable Siafunds will be. And Nxt Siafund buyers would
deserve it with the risk they've been through. Buy some while you can on the Nxt AE if you want but now they are
pretty expensive. Siafunds will also be tradable within Sia according to the devs.

Read the whitepaper on http://www.siacoin.com/sia.pdf.
Read the history of this project https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=591283.msg6486684#msg6486684

I can confirm that the information here mostly correct. You can also learn more by visiting siacoin.com/siafunds.html and siacoin.com/sianotes.html.

What makes this coin supperior to storj ?

So, I recently talked to Shawn (the Storj founder) and from what I understand, we are a lot farther along in the development process than they are. We use a proof-of-work blockchain to enforce all of our contracts, they don't - they only use the blockchain when it is necessary. We have our completely separate blockchain, where they are using counterparty on Bitcoin. One of the biggest elements is scaling. The amount that we can scale is limited by the amount of data we can put on the blockchain. Using a lot of payment-channel style optimizations, we can get somewhere between 20k and 1 million users to fit on Sia given the current technology stack. Once we're over 1 million users, we'll have to find something else.

I'm not sure how well Storj will scale, but their test group A showed that they needed to improve a lot of things. They believe that test group B is still a few months away. We are launching on June 7th.

One of the biggest differences between Sia and Storj is that Sia intentionally stayed off the radar (we've actually been around longer than Storj - Sia was originally invented at Hack MIT in 2013) until we had something to show everybody. We surfaced briefly to do a crowd fund because we were broke. We're now ready to rock and roll, and we have a client that is functional. We also have a very clear roadmap for the next 3 months, and I believe we'll be a satisfactory replacement for Bittorrent by the end of the year. The current 500mb filesize limit should be raised to well over 1TB by August.

If you are curious, you should try out the beta and tell us what you think.

I'm not sure if Storj plans on having an API, but Sia has an API that other apps and decentralized apps can hook into for decentralized storage. Imagine if XBMC started streaming movies and music off of Sia. And imagine if Streamium used Sia to put streams in an archive. These are both things that are already possible using our API, so long as you keep files below 500mb. (and again, this limit is going to be lifted in the next few months).

I hope this helps. We think that there's a lot to love about Sia.

Is there a way I can mine Sia on a mac when it launches? Thanks

Everything that we release has been and will continue to be cross-platform. We support Windows, Linux, and Mac for all official releases.

[msin]

The amount that we can scale is limited by the amount of data we can put on the blockchain. Using a lot of payment-channel style optimizations, we can get somewhere between 20k and 1 million users to fit on Sia given the current technology stack. Once we're over 1 million users, we'll have to find something else.

Can you elaborate on this?

[xibeijan]

Can't wait to see the GUI!  keep up the great work.  I keep thinking... just wait untill all torrents are hosted on Sia.  Say goodbye to megadownload!!!  And hello to Sia!  Anyone who has a sianote will be rich.