[ANN] Sia - Decentralized Storage

[in-cred-u-lous]

Sia usage report #2.

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Now I wanted to see if I can use it for something practical: backup. So I used it to upload 3 files 28 GB total.

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So, overall, I'm not going to actually use Sia for backups this time as it's more expensive than cloud storage providers. But it definitely looks promising.

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.

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[fonzerrellie]

ya sounds like it is coming along nicely, thanks for the user update 

[allwelder]

Shared a simple article about Sia,Storj,Maidsafe and IPFS.
http://blockchain.hk/sia-storj-maidsafe/

[HYPERfuture]

Shared a simple article about Sia,Storj,Maidsafe and IPFS.
http://blockchain.hk/sia-storj-maidsafe/

MAID does decentralized internet, sia just does storage as far as I can tell.

[meme magic]

hey are sia notes still relevant/ a thing and how much has been taken per note if theyre still existing?

[4emily]

Finally got my 0.5.1 wallet synchronised, just as the Polo DDOS attack was in progress, so couldn't at that time withdraw my Sia onto the wallet  Never a dull moment in the wonderful world of crypto 

Having now withdrawn some Sia onto the wallet, the question now occurs to me: how do I back up the wallet? As far as I can see there's no wallet.dat file.

Here's a snapshot of my roaming folder:



The only info that changes seems to be DevTools Extensions which updates to the current date/time whenever I close the wallet.

Do I simply need to make a backup copy of the roaming folder or is there another file somewhere that I need to back up and if so what its name/default location?

Thanks for any help 

[bitspill]

Finally got my 0.5.1 wallet synchronised, just as the Polo DDOS attack was in progress, so couldn't at that time withdraw my Sia onto the wallet  Never a dull moment in the wonderful world of crypto 

Having now withdrawn some Sia onto the wallet, the question now occurs to me: how do I back up the wallet? As far as I can see there's no wallet.dat file.

Here's a snapshot of my roaming folder:



The only info that changes seems to be DevTools Extensions which updates to the current date/time whenever I close the wallet.

Do I simply need to make a backup copy of the roaming folder or is there another file somewhere that I need to back up and if so what its name/default location?

Thanks for any help 

Everything is stored in a subfolder next to the Sia install, not in Roaming like a typical coin.

The file you are looking for is 'wallet.json'

[4emily]

Thanks 

[samspaces]

I accidentally shut down the computer while Siad was running.
My balance now is 0. How is that possible? The blockchain didn't reload from 0.

Any ideas?
Thanks.

[bitspill]

I accidentally shut down the computer while Siad was running.
My balance now is 0. How is that possible? The blockchain didn't reload from 0.

Any ideas?
Thanks.

Did you unlock the wallet? It won't show a balance when locked.

[samspaces]

I accidentally shut down the computer while Siad was running.
My balance now is 0. How is that possible? The blockchain didn't reload from 0.

Any ideas?
Thanks.

Did you unlock the wallet? It won't show a balance when locked.

I shut siad down again, restarted it, unlocked the wallet (had it unlocked before too), it had to catch up 3 blocks, but it shows the balance now.
Weird thing is that I would think that the 'siac wallet' command shows the balance right away, but I guess that too has to wait for a block chain sync.

Anyway, balance retrieved. Thanks.

Oh by the way, it does show the balance when locked in the version I use (0.4.4)

[Vorksholk]

For anyone who isn't on the slack community or IRC (already posted there), here's an optimized CUDA miner. Gets >40% performance improvement on pre-Maxwell, and ~10% improvement on Maxwell GPUs.

I have source and binaries here: https://github.com/Vorksholk/Sia-CUDA-Miner
KlausT also accepted my pull request and compiled his own binaries: https://github.com/KlausT/Sia-CUDA-Miner

The binaries I compiled seem to run a few percent faster (maybe due to compiler flags), but it's within an insignificant margin of error.

If you're building on Ubuntu (and have the CUDA toolkit and the cURL development library installed, of course), something like this should work for 6xx and 7xx cards (plus the Titan, Titan Black, Titan Z, Quadro K5xxx/K6xxx, Tesla K10/20X/40/80):

Code:

g++ network.cpp -std=c++11 -c -lcurl
nvcc -c -std=c++11 -gencode=arch=compute_30,code=\"sm_30,compute_30\" --optimize 3 -Xptxas -dlcm=ca gpu-cuda-miner.cu -lcurl
nvcc -std=c++11 -gencode=arch=compute_30,code=\"sm_30,compute_30\" gpu-miner.cpp network.o gpu-cuda-miner.o -lcurl -o gpu-miner

and Maxwell + future:

Code:

g++ network.cpp -std=c++11 -c -lcurl
nvcc -c -std=c++11 -gencode=arch=compute_52,code=\"sm_52,compute_52\" --optimize 3 -Xptxas -dlcm=ca gpu-cuda-miner.cu -lcurl
nvcc -std=c++11 -gencode=arch=compute_30,code=\"sm_52,compute_52\" gpu-miner.cpp network.o gpu-cuda-miner.o -lcurl -o gpu-miner

Note that the 750 Ti has compute capabilities 5.0, so despite being Maxwell, you'll want to use the older compilation. You can change the "30" in compute_30 and sm_30 to another number depending on your specific card. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA, and just remove the period from the correct compute capability version that corresponds to your card. Older 5xx cards are compute 2.0 or 2.1.

For reference, a 980 Ti with an overclock to 1500 MHz gets 1850 MH/s.

[meme magic]

hey are sia notes still relevant/ a thing and how much has been taken per note if theyre still existing?

bump

other words included to circumvent spam filtering

[bitspill]

hey are sia notes still relevant/ a thing and how much has been taken per note if theyre still existing?

bump

other words included to circumvent spam filtering

Sianotes were exchanged for Siafunds a while ago, and as such are now worth nothing.

A Siafund on the other hand earns you 0.0039% of hosting fees and are selling for ~10 million Sia coins in P2P trades last I saw.

[meme magic]

hey are sia notes still relevant/ a thing and how much has been taken per note if theyre still existing?

bump

other words included to circumvent spam filtering

Sianotes were exchanged for Siafunds a while ago, and as such are now worth nothing.

A Siafund on the other hand earns you 0.0039% of hosting fees and are selling for ~10 million Sia coins in P2P trades last I saw.

thats right, thanks!

i forgot that there was an exchange done. Thats a significant amount of sia for an exchange - does the sia wallet have the ability to work with siafunds yet? Would it be possible to plug in keys and transfer these? How is the % collection handled per siafund?

[akaman]

A Siafund on the other hand earns you 0.0039% of hosting fees and are selling for ~10 million Sia coins in P2P trades last I saw.

Clarification: Renters pay 3.9% in fees to Siafund holders. There are 10,000 Siafunds. So, each individual Siafund entitles the holder to 0.00039% in "commission"  for each paid file contract. If you have 10 Siafunds, you therefore get 0.0039% of each paid file contract.

[ttx]

Ethereum community is still looking for a storage solution (IPFS, swarm, etc) We'd appreciate your consideration a lot
https://twitter.com/EthereumPress/status/706877288902758400

[ttx]

Link to Sia-v0.5.2-rc

[ttx]

Do not be afraid to buy 

[Eliovp]

Ethereum community is still looking for a storage solution (IPFS, swarm, etc) We'd appreciate your consideration a lot
https://twitter.com/EthereumPress/status/706877288902758400

Mm, imagine ethereum and sia working together  .....