Everyone speculates about whether SIA will rise or fall, but how many take the time to read up on what SIA is and why it might be used? I thought, hey let's find out what it takes to actually use this system. What do I have to do to host? How cheap or expensive is it to rent storage space? Interestingly, Siatech doesn't have this basic information (why not?). You eventually find a link to a "third party" site called SiaSetup.
Right now, I would say SIA is way too complicated to gain wide user adoption. And the website says it is not aimed at individuals, it is more for 'enterprises' which I think is a huge strategic mistake. I think SIA could take off if it focused on individuals first and not enterprises. Win over loyal individuals and they will market your product to the enterprises they end up working at.
Whether a hoster or a renter, your SIA wallet needs to be running most if not all of the time. If, as a host, your computer goes down, you pay penalties (loss of posted SIA collateral). If as a renter you do not "top off' your credits every 6 weeks, your 3 month contract may elapse and when it does, your data goes POOF. There are too many penalties as I read SiaSetup for hosters and renters. The average storage price, 18 SIA per Terabyte, per month, is attractive. But by default SIA slices and dices your data and distributes it to 30 hosts, and you have pay for a contract with each host. The contract rate, at least as it appears on SiaSetup is more expensive than storage which doesn't make much sense.
And you can only retrieve your data from the same computer you uploaded your data from. Think about that. Well, actually, you can backup all your SIA data files and copy them over to another computer. But the first time you upload or download a file, then you have to recopy everything all over if you want to retrieve the files from a different system. I had to re-read this part it is so incredibly user unfriendly. If my files are chopped up and encrypted in the cloud, half of the value proposition to me is that I can grab them from anywhere there is an Internet connection. But not so with Sia. This is one of those wtf are you thinking types of flaws.
I use Mega and it is easy, relatively intuitive, convenient, and not that expensive. I was attracted to SIA because I thought it might be a distributed, more redundant, more secure, better type of Mega for storing files. SIA is not that in its current incarnation, which is a shame. I love the idea of distributed, redundant, encrypted hosting. That's a powerful capability. But I think renters, for example, should have some sort of grace period if they are late on topping off their credits before their files are deleted. And I wonder (it's not explained on Siasetup) whether auto-notifications warn renters about the impending deletion of their data? And while I understand the thought behind making hosts pay when their computer goes down, I think the cost to the hosting entity should be smaller. There are power losses beyond the ability of conscientious people to avoid those mishaps.
For hosting, you need a minimum of 4 free TB or you are penalized. And you start out being penalized because you haven't earned "trust" yet and it takes six weeks or more to climb out of that hole. This seems to do nothing more than skew hosting towards those who were early in setting up their storage and who now have, by virtue of time, a higher trust score. I don't like this. If you want to measure trust, it should be based on some short rolling average of up-time for the host. Maybe it is, but this is not well explained on SiaSetup. And if I am correct, this is a somewhat suspect way to tilt the field towards those who got into SIA right from the beginning.
It's no wonder to me that there is plenty of empty, un-rented, unused storage at the moment. SIA is not friendly or easily accessible to individuals in the way that Mega is. I hope that the developers really work on making the entire ecosystem much easier to jump into -- both for persons who wish to rent out unused HD space, and for persons (not just enterprises!) that want a better alternative to Mega, or Amazon, or the greatest privacy destroying data sponge of them all -- Google.
SIA is a great idea. But the implementation for end users is too complicated to gain widespread adoption anytime soon. KISS. This is all fixable and I hope to see more efforts both on the main webpage and in the software to make hosting and renting storage space an easy, painless, experience. The world doesn't need another payment token. The world does need a better way to store files privately and beyond the ability of governments and other individuals to spy on that data. The developers clearly recognize this but they aren't making it easy for Joe sixpack to use their system. At least not yet.
In the meantime, just because I like challenges, I am going to set up hosting. And maybe someone should have a talk with Kim Dotcom. Just saying.
Great text mate!
I did download and install sia wallet once, but never ended up using it, and now I have a different pc... havent bothered installing it again. And the reason really is because I think its a bit too complicated.
I do hodl SIA for a long time already, but they are still on my bittrex account...
They definitely need to improve user friendlyness.
