Sia - Siafund Redemption Deadline: June 1st, 2015

[Taek]

www.siacoin.com

Sia has changed substantially since the creation of this thread. Much of the information, especially in the early pages, is incorrect. A new thread has been created here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1060294.0

Sia is a new cryptocurrency that is being actively developed. We have released a whitepaper, and are in open beta.

About Sia's Technology:

Sia is a proof of work blockchain just like Bitcoin. A single feature is added that which enables clients and hosts to make storage contracts that will automatically be enforced by the network. More can be learned by visiting our website and Github page, and by reading our whitepaper (all available from our website).

About Sia's Economic Model:

Sia compensates hosts using a cryptocurrency. This cryptocurrency, Siacoin, will be easily exchangeable for bitcoins and subsequently USD. When the currency launches, 10,000 siacoins will be mined per day and distributed to hosts according to the volume of storage they offer to the network. The number of coins mined per day will decrease until the 4 year mark, at which point the network will mine coins such that the annual inflation rate is kept permanently at 5%. No coins will be premined.

Storage can only be rented using siacoins. This presents a major inconvenience for most people, so we will be providing a service that allows users to rent storage with USD, transparently exchanging dollars for siacoins behind the scenes. The siacoins spent on storage go directly to the hosts that hold the file, with the exception of a fee. The fee is distributed among the owners of Sianote. Currently, just under 0.5% of all host income has been distributed/sold/circulated as Sianotes on the Nxt Asset Exchange. The devs are no longer selling sianotes directly, they must be bought on an exchange. More can be found at www.siacoin.com/sianotes.html

Use Cases:
Since files are spread across hundreds to thousands of machines on Sia, the throughput for downloading a file is expected to be on the order of gigabits per second. Optimized files can enjoy latencies below 100 milliseconds from nearly anywhere in the world (or just on a single continent if the goal is to save money), and low redundancy files can be maintained at slow but highly reliable speeds for much cheaper than existing cloud storage solutions.

Any static data that already gets transferred over the internet would be more efficient through Sia. Every image on the internet could be embedded through Sia. This reduces the workload and bandwidth costs of webservers and makes websites as a whole cheaper to run. The same also applies to videos, which would substantially lower the barrier to entry for video websites. We plan on making Sia javascript and HTML5 friendly, meaning that pretty much any website will be able to integrate with Sia and pull content from Sia.

Sia is also friendly to applications. Imagine a music library that does all streaming directly from Sia. Right now, services such as Spotify and Pandora stream compressed music, because bandwidth costs are high when moving media around. If they streamed the music from Sia however, the costs would be reduced such that streaming FLAC from Sia would be cheaper than streaming mp3 or ogg from their own servers. Imagine video games that manage save files from Sia. Imagine streaming movies from Sia. Imagine downloading applications from Sia instead of sourceforge, a package-manger mirror, or Steam.

[1715103013]

1715103013

[1715103013]

1715103013

[1715103013]

1715103013

[tygarbyte]

are you guys competing against maidsafe and erutheum ?

[coinnewbit]

I'll have to count on you guys to build a better coin service that the public can understand more easily then.

[Taek]

I would say that we are competing against both maidesafe and etherium.

Though I didn't mention it, Sia intends to include a turing-complete scripting system that should put etherium to shame. This isn't yet designed though (we're saving that problem for last), so perhaps it's too early to be certain that we can do better than etherium.

As for maidsafe, I'm having troubles understanding exactly how their system works. It's not well documented (I guess ours isn't either) and some of the features (like data only being stored on 4 machines) seems really insecure. I'm keeping a close eye on Maidsafe though because they seem to know what they are doing. We are a storage only system however (though we offer turing complete scripting, we don't expect it to compete with a real computing platform like EC2) where Maidsafe is bandwidth and compute as well.

[moonriver]

Oh this could be huge. I will this thread.

[k!lowatts]

any giveaway?

[Taek]

There's likely to be some giveaway after we launch. One of our fears is that there will be a bunch of people trying to mine and nobody storing data. If there is nobody storing data, people can't mine (it's part of the security of the network, you can only mine once you have something to store). So we might do some giveaways so people can start storing things.

The other bump (looking for a work-around) is that you need to make a down-payment in siacoin before you can start mining. Before Sia is on any exchanges, the only way to start mining will be if someone donates you coins. We'll be passing coins around to help people out. I'm pretty sure though that we'll think of a better way to kick-start the network.

We might also just nix the required down-payment for the first 3 months. It opens up a bunch of attack vectors but if nobody is abusive initially then it won't be a problem.

[zhanlang13]

Max Coins is？I want to know the total number of this coin

[platorin]

This one looks intresting. I would also like to know the total cap coins.

[No_Zuo_No_Die]

interesting project.
would like to know more details.

[djm34]

actually it sound interesting (sound like a bit like torrent...)
But what about the network traffic generated by this ?
What kind of file gets into the storage ?
How do you protect the rest of the computer from being infected by crappy files downloaded there ?

[wemine]

Thanks for you Awesome Work and Support !!!

[djm34]

Thanks for you Awesome Work and Support !!!

random post ?

[TheMightyX]

Maidsafe has been developing for 7 years.
You think you and your anonymous team are going to be able to accomplish what they couldn't in 7 years with a large team?

This is not the first intended "proof of storage" system to grace our forums.
Do you have any proof of concept yet?
It would be nice if this was real and not a scam, but you are biting off a very big piece of pie.

[kufan]

Maidsafe has been developing for 7 years.
You think you and your anonymous team are going to be able to accomplish what they couldn't in 7 years with a large team?

This is not the first intended "proof of storage" system to grace our forums.
Do you have any proof of concept yet?
It would be nice if this was real and not a scam, but you are biting off a very big piece of pie.

That sounds really great. But  it isn't appropriate   to advertise here .

[notsoshifty]

Maidsafe has been developing for 7 years.
You think you and your anonymous team are going to be able to accomplish what they couldn't in 7 years with a large team?

This is not the first intended "proof of storage" system to grace our forums.
Do you have any proof of concept yet?
It would be nice if this was real and not a scam, but you are biting off a very big piece of pie.

I always support the cautious approach. But did you check the github, the sia-dev group history, and the general profile of the devs (who don't appear to be anonymous)? Also bear in mind the summary does state the release is a long way off. Agree that the problem sia is looking at is not an easy one, but if it's an outright scam it's a very elegantly engineered one!

[Touque]

In this system, I wonder how the blockchain consensus will be reached.

[organizer]

Sia intends to include a turing-complete scripting system that should put etherium to shame. This isn't yet designed though

HERE let me throw BTC at you.

[Taek]

Max Coins is？I want to know the total number of this coin

"network will mine coins such that the annual inflation rate is kept permanently at 5%"

No maximum. Every year the coin volume will go up by 5%. We do it this way because we want the coins to be about the storage, not about the speculation. There will be explosive growth in the first 4 years however, so there's still a ton of opportunity to jump on the coin early.

actually it sound interesting (sound like a bit like torrent...)
But what about the network traffic generated by this ?
What kind of file gets into the storage ?
How do you protect the rest of the computer from being infected by crappy files downloaded there ?

It's a lot like bittorrent, but instead of each file being entirely stored on each seeder, each file is only partially redundant (you get to pick the redundancy). It's hard to guess at exactly how much network traffic there will be, but probably a lot for people who are hosts.  There will be support for capping your bandwidth, though this will affect your income. (The model for charging for bandwidth isn't worked out yet).

Any file can get into storage. The clients will encrypt them first, but the network doesn't care. If you want to upload an unencrypted file (so it's available to the public), you will be able to do so. I'm not sure what you mean by "crappy" file, but it's just storage. If someone uploads a virus, it can't hurt your computer because the client doesn't open or read files, only stores them. If you try opening it with some program however, it might infect you.

Maidsafe has been developing for 7 years.
You think you and your anonymous team are going to be able to accomplish what they couldn't in 7 years with a large team?

This is not the first intended "proof of storage" system to grace our forums.
Do you have any proof of concept yet?
It would be nice if this was real and not a scam, but you are biting off a very big piece of pie.

1. Maidsafe has been working on this since before Bitcoin. A lot of solutions that are now available and have been thought about in greater depth were not available when maidsafe started. I'm pretty sure that if they started now, they would get a lot farther in the same 7 years.
2. The maidsafe project is considerably more ambitious than Sia. They are doing proof-of-bandwidth, proof-of-storage, proof-of-computation, and something related to uptime monitoring. It also seems like they intend files to be mobile (?). Regardless, from the best that I can tell, Maidsafe is much more ambitious than we are, and takes a more complex approach to many of the problems. This will increase the development time.
3. This project is still very ambitious, and is a few months away from a prototype. We are definitely trying to do some very difficult things. We are not asking for money at this point, nor are we giving away coins at this point. We plan to do both in the future, but will wait until we have something more substantial built.

I know that a lot of you are cautious about scams. If you look, you'll see that nowhere in this post or on our github page does a way to pay us appear (no bitcoin addresses, etc.). This project is very real and is very much not a scam; we aren't asking for your money.

Do we have a proof of concept yet?:

Well, we have a working demo that does not a whole lot. This currency is based on quorums, and we just finished building the base for quorums. A bunch of hosts can get online, engage in communication (following Leslie Lamport's solution to the byzantine generals problem) and kick dishonest hosts off the network. At the moment, there is no support for joining with a wallet or storing files. That's what we're working on now. Stay tuned.

In this system, I wonder how the blockchain consensus will be reached.

Each set of 8GB that a miner offers to the network becomes a 'participant'. Each participant downloads and watches a portion of the network, and is paired with 128 other participants (chosen randomly). The 128 operate together reaching consensus using the Byzantine Generals solution provided by Leslie Lamport in his paper "The Byzantine Generals Problem." The pdf can be be found in the doc/ folder. We used the signed solution, meaning every honest host in a quorum is guaranteed to reach the same block as every other honest host within the quorum.

Quorums are arranged into a tree. Each quorum has a set of sibling quorums that all share the same parent.

When a block is found, it's announced to the sibling quorums, and to the parent quorum. The exact algorithm is not pinned down, but each participant will send the block to 2 or 3 other random participants. This keeps communication to a minimum. A group of dishonest hosts could announce a dishonest block, so there is protect against this; upon receiving a new block, each host will fire off a confirmation to the other participants in the announcing quorum. With very high probability, at least one honest host will see the dishonest block, and will be able to alert the receiving quorum about the dishonesty. After we pick the exact numbers, we will write a formal algorithms with proofs demonstrating what attacks are possible and with what probabilities the attacks will succeed. (Our target is to make the attacks as unlikely to succeed as double-spends on the Bitcoin network when an equivalent volume of hosts are dishonest).

Does that make sense? It's very different from any existing model, using a bunch of communicating quorums instead of using a single large blockchain. The primary reason for doing this is because Sia will have a lot more information in the blockchain than Bitcoin. For example, the header data of every single file on the network is stored in the blockchain. If every miner needed all of that data, you'd be looking at hundreds of gigabytes even before figuring out which miners had which files. A tree was absolutely needed.

We believe the algorithm to secure, but that needs to be confirmed by others. At this point, the algorithm is not formally written down, which makes it hard. Expect to have something more concrete regarding quorum consensus in the next 2 weeks.

[Passion_ltc]

Interested.

[brian_nguyen]

What is Sia? Security Industry Association

[Taek]

Sia is the Egyptian personification of wisdom, or something like that. It ended up not being exactly what I thought it was when I originally picked the name, but I like it nonetheless. It's not an acronym or anything, just a single syllable.

[ShroomsKit_Disgrace]

I will be monitoring this thread with my both eyes.

[pandaisftw]

Interesting, I really like this idea. Useful work instead of performing wasted computations is definitely going in the right direction.

What are some use-cases for this? For example, if I owned a company, I would still want internal data storage within my company, if anything, to save costs on bandwidth. The only applications I can think of (right now) for this kind of distributed storage is similar to what I would upload to dropbox, which is free up to a certain point. And, I suppose, for those concerned about censorship.

Pandaisftw

[allwelder]

Interested in this great project and idea.

[Taek]

What are some use-cases for this? For example, if I owned a company, I would still want internal data storage within my company, if anything, to save costs on bandwidth. The only applications I can think of (right now) for this kind of distributed storage is similar to what I would upload to dropbox, which is free up to a certain point. And, I suppose, for those concerned about censorship.

We're expecting throughput for a file to be on the order of gigabits per second. Latency on low-redundancy files will be on the order of 100 milliseconds. So, you could theoretically boot your operating system from Sia instead of a local hard drive, given that gigabits per second is close to what SSDs can achieve. The 100 milliseconds isn't typically a problem, but could be for disk-intensive applications.

So the biggest bottleneck is probably the price of bandwidth. If you're a corporation like Google, you probably wouldn't want to use Sia to process search requests, as I'd imagine your bandwidth prices would be too high.

But anything that's already going over a wire would be fair game. Imagine if all images on the web were embedded directly from Sia. This could reduce hosting costs for many companies without degrading the user experience. Especially for video websites, this would be a huge deal. Right now hosting and streaming video is very expensive, and Sia directly addresses these costs without adding any additional expenses with regards to bandwidth. Pretty much any static webpage would also be supported.

Backups like Dropbox are an obvious use case. But applications could also talk directly to Sia. Save-data from video games could use Sia, your music library could stream directly from Sia, and your movie library too if you have a strong enough internet connection.

[Anotheranonlol]

I read your whitepaper a while ago and was intrigued by the ideas presented. Seems like storJ, maidsafe et al have a little competition. I did join a while ago to the IRC channel but there was no activity there at the time.

I hope you learn from the lessons of the encumbered maidsafe IPO for issuance of Siastock. I think a decentralised fundraising on a platform such as CounterParty, where users can directly send BTC, and later trade shares with no requirement for proprietary MSC style tokens  would be a good fit.

[Taek]

I did join a while ago to the IRC channel but there was no activity there at the time.

Sorry about that. The IRC channel has been inactive for a while because for the most part it's just 2 people living in the same timezone. After going a few weeks with no messages, we stopped checking. If this starts gaining momentum however we'll bring it back.

I hope you learn from the lessons of the encumbered maidsafe IPO for issuance of Siastock. I think a decentralised fundraising on a platform such as CounterParty, where users can directly send BTC, and later trade shares with no requirement for proprietary MSC style tokens  would be a good fit.

Looking at the maidsafe results, what we might end up doing is selling 'tokens' for 0.001btc each. We'd sell for a week or so, and then at the end we'd divide X% among all the tokens that got sold. Or maybe we'd set up a dynamic price, so each token is worth 0.0Y%, but the cost of a token changes as people buy them up or do not buy them up. We'd want something that would end up being fair, such that everybody interested got siastock and had at least 2 weeks to get in. I'm really not sure what the best approach would be. For those curious, we'd be wanting on the order of 200 bitcoins. We'd be happy to accept more of course, but less wouldn't give us enough money to work on Sia full time. If somehow things exploded and we ended up with 500 or 2000 bitcoins, we'd probably hire a few extra developers to help us out in the spirit of trying to release quicker. We would also put some money aside for security audits of the beta.

Now what if I upload, say, child porn?

(better to ask that question now than to wait until it happens)

That's a good question. We are legally required to do everything in our power to take CP and other illegal files and DMCA'd content off of the network. But just like the creators of bittorrent, Sia is a protocol so I don't know how responsible we'd be for what happened. In the worst case, the NSA forces us to back-door the protocol such that we can censor any file. I don't think this is a realistic outcome.

The US Government has been playing nice with bitcoin. Coinbase, Bitstamp, Bitcoin Foundation, etc. have not so far been held responsible for the way that people use bitcoin. I'm under the belief that Sia would work the same way. If child porn ended up on Sia, the burden falls upon the uploader and the people linking to the uploaded file. For many reasons, I think it would be very bad to enable built-in censorship of files on Sia. If we were pressured to, we might even be able to get some human rights groups to fight for us in court. I have no idea.

Another example is Tor, a technology that has enable child porn in particular for a long time. Tor is a legally protected application. It's not the Tor devs or the relay nodes that are child pornographers, and they don't host Tor to enable child pornography. People who upload illegal content to Tor are not protected, but the ecosystem is protected, and they do have powerful legal groups ready to fight for them.

Censorship is always a difficult thing to talk about, because nobody wants to enable activity like child pornography, least of all us. At the same time, we don't want to enable the government to censor things like criticisms of the people in power. As far as Sia is concerned, if you enable one you enable the other, and you are left trusting that the person in charge of censoring child porn will choose not to censor other actions like criticism of the government.

We very much want to be viewed as "good guys" in the eyes of our government (which happens to be the US government). I have no idea what this will entail or what court decisions might be made. I do think that Maidsafe, Cryptosphere, Datacoin, and other such projects are going to run into the same exact problems.

If I recall, wasn't child porn stored in the Bitcoin blockchain? Didn't someone find some way to encode an illicit photo into a set of transactions? I know other things (like Bitcoin's whitepaper) have been encoded into the blockchain. What is the legal response in Bitcoin's case?

[GullibleGooo]

Is it possible to get notified when the IPO starts? With a pling in my bitcointalk-inbox or likewise ...
Interested as I am, it won't be possible to check this thread every day.

Thanks for stopping me from putting money into StorageCoin I was just about to...

And, hey, let's stop talking about child porn... it is irrelevant to crypto coins. It's like connecting the invention of electricity and people watching too much TV, they are unrelated. The dominant coins of the future will be anonymous and BitCoin will be put in nursery.

[Taek]

We'll be notifying everyone who's expressed interest at least 2 weeks before we do any sort of IPO.

[Shivalein]

interested

[Lordoftherigs]

This looks promising  but I suppose there will be quite a few bummers on the road.

I hope the devs are bunch of strong willed f*#kers

[wwdz99]

Interested in this Innovation project and idea.

[Tobo]

Interested.

[Redwinego]

i am in...would keep focusing to see if it go a long way

[Tingbulingso]

It give me a feeling that this coin is good enough. I will invest.

[gs02xzz]

Interested.

[Jean-Luc]

Interested.

[Conurtrol]

Interested.

[Taek]

Dev here. Just wanted to post an update since it's been a few days.

Luke and I just cemented our summer - we've both just turned down full time positions and will be working on Sia full time. This week has been mostly about updating our whitepaper. It's currently at version 0.3 at can be found here.

We're not very far away from having software that can upload and house files redundantly (and be self repairing), and hope to be inviting early testers by June. A lot of features that make the system as a whole secure will not be in place at this point, so be careful about what you upload and how much stake you put into the system. In the testing stages, data will almost certainly be lost as we stress test the system and simulate catastrophes.

We've also been trying to get a website together the past two days. Mostly with bootstrap but neither of us have much experience with web dev. Hopefully we'll have something up soon.

This looks promising  but I suppose there will be quite a few bummers on the road.

I hope the devs are bunch of strong willed f*#kers

  Not expecting anything easy, that's for sure.

[cawson]

I like this coin !! ;)When the ipo?

[Daedelus]

Interested 

[Mopi Salangk7]

anyone else have a very good feeling about this coin?

[Taek]

Hi, Sia dev here!

We're pleased to announce 3 things: a website, a whitepaper, and a pre-IPO!

Website: www.siacoin.com
Whitepaper: www.siacoin.com/whitepaper.pdf

Pre-IPO:

We'll be doing a pre-IPO, which means selling 15% of all Siastock. As a reminder, Sia uses Siacoin, a non-premined currency that is used to rent storage from Sia. 3.9% of all coins spent on storage are taken as a fee and distributed to the owners of Siastock, a tradeable asset built into Sia. Owning Siastock gives you a guaranteed income proportional to the value of storage being rented from the Sia network.

Stock has been chosen as an alternative to premining. As far as I'm aware, we are the first cryptocurrency to introduce stock as an idea, and we believe it is a much cleaner solution for early-backer income.

Luke and I (the two primary devs) have turned down comfy full time positions at Google and Akamai as software engineers so that we can focus entirely on Sia. However, we do not have sufficient savings to support development. This pre-IPO will give us the funds we need to put food on the table and a roof over our heads. (And insurance, transportation, etc. Living expenses.)

Unfortunately, this means that we can't use an escrow. We will run out of money before Sia is finished, which is why we are selling 15% of all Siastock at such an early stage.

Sia is the most efficient storage solution that I've ever read about. It's as cheap as buying consumer grade hardware, it's got low latency, high throughput, and is highly resilient to disasters that could take many hosts offline simultaneously. Sia's feature set is superior to existing cloud storage solutions offered by Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc. all while being only 20% of the price. If Sia takes off, you can expect hundreds of millions to billions of dollars per year being spent renting storage. 3.9% of all of this will be going to the owners of Siastock, and we are making 15% of all Siastock available for purchase for a total of 250btc.

The IPO will most likely involve using the Nxt Asset Exchange, and will most likely start during the last week of May or the first week of June.

Future Plans:
After Sia is completed and fully working we'll be selling another round of Siastock, probably 25%. This will be in the hopes of raising multiple millions of dollars. That funding will give us enough for developers, security audits, marketing, etc. Sia has the capability to replace all of the corporate and centralized cloud storage solutions. We're going to need a lot of manpower and market power in order to make that happen. We'll also need Sia libraries in every major programming language, a dead simple API, an Amazon compatible API, (perhaps a dropbox compatibe API), etc. We can also replace all streaming services such as Netflix, Spotify, etc, and that will require a lot of manpower and market power as well.

The point here is that our future plans are very big. We're substantially more than a cryptocurrency, we're the next generation of the internet, the so called 'fifth layer.' We want to make this happen, and we need your help to do that.

Thanks!

[xinyichao]

Hi, Sia dev here!

We're pleased to announce 3 things: a website, a whitepaper, and a pre-IPO!

Website: www.siacoin.com
Whitepaper: www.siacoin.com/whitepaper.pdf

Pre-IPO:

We'll be doing a pre-IPO, which means selling 15% of all Siastock. As a reminder, Sia uses Siacoin, a non-premined currency that is used to rent storage from Sia. 3.9% of all coins spent on storage are taken as a fee and distributed to the owners of Siastock, a tradeable asset built into Sia. Owning Siastock gives you a guaranteed income proportional to the value of storage being rented from the Sia network.

Stock has been chosen as an alternative to premining. As far as I'm aware, we are the first cryptocurrency to introduce stock as an idea, and we believe it is a much cleaner solution for early-backer income.

Luke and I (the two primary devs) have turned down comfy full time positions at Google and Akamai as software engineers so that we can focus entirely on Sia. However, we do not have sufficient savings to support development. This pre-IPO will give us the funds we need to put food on the table and a roof over our heads. (And insurance, transportation, etc. Living expenses.)

Unfortunately, this means that we can't use an escrow. We will run out of money before Sia is finished, which is why we are selling 15% of all Siastock at such an early stage.

Sia is the most efficient storage solution that I've ever read about. It's as cheap as buying consumer grade hardware, it's got low latency, high throughput, and is highly resilient to disasters that could take many hosts offline simultaneously. Sia's feature set is superior to existing cloud storage solutions offered by Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc. all while being only 20% of the price. If Sia takes off, you can expect hundreds of millions to billions of dollars per year being spent renting storage. 3.9% of all of this will be going to the owners of Siastock, and we are making 15% of all Siastock available for purchase for a total of 250btc.

The IPO will most likely involve using the Nxt Asset Exchange, and will most likely start during the last week of May or the first week of June.

Future Plans:
After Sia is completed and fully working we'll be selling another round of Siastock, probably 25%. This will be in the hopes of raising multiple millions of dollars. That funding will give us enough for developers, security audits, marketing, etc. Sia has the capability to replace all of the corporate and centralized cloud storage solutions. We're going to need a lot of manpower and market power in order to make that happen. We'll also need Sia libraries in every major programming language, a dead simple API, an Amazon compatible API, (perhaps a dropbox compatibe API), etc. We can also replace all streaming services such as Netflix, Spotify, etc, and that will require a lot of manpower and market power as well.

The point here is that our future plans are very big. We're substantially more than a cryptocurrency, we're the next generation of the internet, the so called 'fifth layer.' We want to make this happen, and we need your help to do that.

Thanks!

sorry, what  ever your project is so power and amazing ,without escrow , i'm out.

pos , visa , edge , sim , nxn ,stc ,what, sbc , lax ......    all of them ,  we all remember.....

if dev have confidence in the project , you should same as the dev of gen 2.0 coin just like  EXO , QORA , they are really powerfull and work hard . by the way , they used escrow .

[ownerbest]

Do you know there are someone steal your thought? Stroagecoin, copied everything from Siacoin

[xuxx]

Interested.

So many coins now.
I all want.
waiting this coins come.

[cawson]

Hi, Sia dev here!

We're pleased to announce 3 things: a website, a whitepaper, and a pre-IPO!

Website: www.siacoin.com
Whitepaper: www.siacoin.com/whitepaper.pdf

Pre-IPO:

We'll be doing a pre-IPO, which means selling 15% of all Siastock. As a reminder, Sia uses Siacoin, a non-premined currency that is used to rent storage from Sia. 3.9% of all coins spent on storage are taken as a fee and distributed to the owners of Siastock, a tradeable asset built into Sia. Owning Siastock gives you a guaranteed income proportional to the value of storage being rented from the Sia network.

Stock has been chosen as an alternative to premining. As far as I'm aware, we are the first cryptocurrency to introduce stock as an idea, and we believe it is a much cleaner solution for early-backer income.

Luke and I (the two primary devs) have turned down comfy full time positions at Google and Akamai as software engineers so that we can focus entirely on Sia. However, we do not have sufficient savings to support development. This pre-IPO will give us the funds we need to put food on the table and a roof over our heads. (And insurance, transportation, etc. Living expenses.)

Unfortunately, this means that we can't use an escrow. We will run out of money before Sia is finished, which is why we are selling 15% of all Siastock at such an early stage.

Sia is the most efficient storage solution that I've ever read about. It's as cheap as buying consumer grade hardware, it's got low latency, high throughput, and is highly resilient to disasters that could take many hosts offline simultaneously. Sia's feature set is superior to existing cloud storage solutions offered by Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc. all while being only 20% of the price. If Sia takes off, you can expect hundreds of millions to billions of dollars per year being spent renting storage. 3.9% of all of this will be going to the owners of Siastock, and we are making 15% of all Siastock available for purchase for a total of 250btc.

The IPO will most likely involve using the Nxt Asset Exchange, and will most likely start during the last week of May or the first week of June.

Future Plans:
After Sia is completed and fully working we'll be selling another round of Siastock, probably 25%. This will be in the hopes of raising multiple millions of dollars. That funding will give us enough for developers, security audits, marketing, etc. Sia has the capability to replace all of the corporate and centralized cloud storage solutions. We're going to need a lot of manpower and market power in order to make that happen. We'll also need Sia libraries in every major programming language, a dead simple API, an Amazon compatible API, (perhaps a dropbox compatibe API), etc. We can also replace all streaming services such as Netflix, Spotify, etc, and that will require a lot of manpower and market power as well.

The point here is that our future plans are very big. We're substantially more than a cryptocurrency, we're the next generation of the internet, the so called 'fifth layer.' We want to make this happen, and we need your help to do that.

Thanks!

sorry, what  ever your project is so power and amazing ,without escrow , i'm out.

pos , visa , edge , sim , nxn ,stc ,what, sbc , lax ......    all of them ,  we all remember.....

if dev have confidence in the project , you should same as the dev of gen 2.0 coin just like  EXO , QORA , they are really powerfull and work hard . by the way , they used escrow .


without escrow , i'm out too.

[Taek]

sorry, what  ever your project is so power and amazing ,without escrow , i'm out.

without escrow , i'm out too.

I understand. I also hope that you understand; we need the money before we can finish the coin. If we could get to 100btc without escrow, we could take escrow until there's an alpha. But then there's the same sort of issue: an alpha is certainly not a full coin, and would not be released under the pretence of being a full coin.

Sia is not programmed yet (well, it's partially programmed). It will take us several months to get to get to the full coin, and we will run out of money long before then. If you're willing to do something like a 3 month escrow (no Bitcoins for us until an alpha... or something like that), we might be able to make it work out. But we need to eat, we need electricity and internet, and we need a place to sleep.

The other thing that we have over the other scams is that our identities are fully public. I'm David Vorick, the other dev is Luke Champine. We were Ycombinator finalists under the idea for Sia, but were turned away for being several months from completion. You can email me directly, and you can email Luke directly to confirm our identities. (first.last@gmail.com)

If there's any mid-step you will accept as opposed to waiting until Sia is fully developed, we are happy to consider escrow. We are legitimate, and we are willing to take large steps to prove it. We understand the huge aversion to buying into an IPO without escrow, because anybody could be running a scam. If you are interested in the coin and want to get involved, consider what would make you willing to trust us, and let us know. We are not anonymous developers.

The other thing is that Sia will be having a second IPO (a real IPO) once the currency is completed. For this, escrow will certainly be used but the price will also be much higher, at least 10x as expensive if not much more. Investing at this early stage represents greater risk but also much greater reward.

Do you know there are someone steal your thought? Stroagecoin, copied everything from Siacoin

Yes I've been in at least one thread with Storagecoin. Whoever runs the account 'Storagecoin' can hardly speak english, I don't know how he can convincingly pass as the writer of the whitepaper that he stole. Additionally, the source code he uploaded (at first, idk if he's fixed it now) has my name (David Vorick) in it. Furthermore, the whitepaper being presented is several months old, has hand-drawn images (my own drawings as it were), and is severly flawed in a few ways (that we've since fixed). Anybody who does their due diligence on storagecoin at this point will reveal the scam almost immediately.


====================

I just wanted to say again, we're willing to take extra steps to prove ourselves as legitimate. We realize that many of you will never take a risk without escrow, which is why at the moment we are only collecting enough money to get by until the launch of Sia. Sia has been my pet project for 10 months now, and we've just recently kicked it into full gear. You can see our github page and our commit history. If you feel so compelled, you can open an issue in the issue tracker asking us to confirm this thread. I'm not sure what else would put you at ease, but feel free to make suggestions.

[nemo1618]

Hi, other dev (Luke) here.

Just wanted to make myself known, and to mention that we're looking for others to contribute to the project. In particular, we could use people versed in:

• Academic proofs
• The Go programming language
• Web/graphic design

Feel free to email either of us if you want to help out. You can also contribute directly by opening a pull request on our GitHub page.

Thanks!

[left-ca]

Jesus, another shit coin...

[gvans]

I am interested. Supposedly time is of essence here. Whoever comes first with working product has some benefit, be it maidsafe of sia.

[Momimaus]

There is a second problem without the use of an escrow.

If you fail with the programming and you decide to stop it and give up. We will not get our money back, obviously cause you already spent it for living expenses.

It´s really hard to invest in this one, even if we believe that you are honest.

Maybe you can add some juice. 15% is not much.


So you want to sell 15% for 250BTC.  What happened if you get just 100BTC? The 15% will be distributed among the 100BTC invistors right?


With paying 250BC for 15%, the whole thing would be worth almost 700 Grand, even if it´s just an idea right now.
Think about it, if you want guys to invest, I think you have to give away way more than 15% for 250BTC.

[Daedelus]

Hi Taek,

I have compiled a list of projects that are listing on the Nxt Asset Exchange and I see that you plan to use it. Great News  

The porjects so far are here >>>> https://nxtforum.org/news-and-announcements/asset-exchange-ipos-launch-day-listings!/

If you want to add Siacoin, please post the details and I will add it to the OP and promote it with the rest of the projects.

Thanks  

[Taek]

There is a second problem without the use of an escrow.

If you fail with the programming and you decide to stop it and give up. We will not get our money back, obviously cause you already spent it for living expenses.

This is true, except that neither Luke nor I will stop working on Sia regardless of what happens. If we run out of money, we'll take full time jobs and work on Sia in our spare time. If prior experience is any indication, Sia would still get at least 20hrs a week from each of us. Things would move slower, but we'd be committed to finishing what we accepted money to finish.

Maybe you can add some juice. 15% is not much.


So you want to sell 15% for 250BTC.  What happened if you get just 100BTC? The 15% will be distributed among the 100BTC invistors right?

We'll have to see what the market thinks. We've already got several large investors interested (>5 btc) and we haven't even started yet. We don't need everybody to be willing to pay this price, only enough to hit 250btc. I feel pretty confident that we can get very close.

If we only get to 100BTC, what will happen is we'll stop the IPO (after 2 weeks). At 100BTC we'll be able to develop for several months and have much more to show for our efforts, and we'll be a much less risky option. As the funds start to run dry, we'll continue the IPO and sell the remaining X% for a higher price. (less risk, higher price). I'm quite confident that we can hit 100BTC.

[biekelroy]

the acceptable way is find a trustworthy  escrow, dev made a detail plan , just like 5 steps , when you finish first step,escrow release 2% ,when you finish step 2, release 4% to you ,finished step 3 ,release 8%,when you show us beta version and test ok ,then 20%, finial version will be release all.

[U]

IPO ETA?

[ownerbest]

sorry, what  ever your project is so power and amazing ,without escrow , i'm out.

without escrow , i'm out too.

I understand. I also hope that you understand; we need the money before we can finish the coin. If we could get to 100btc without escrow, we could take escrow until there's an alpha. But then there's the same sort of issue: an alpha is certainly not a full coin, and would not be released under the pretence of being a full coin.

Sia is not programmed yet (well, it's partially programmed). It will take us several months to get to get to the full coin, and we will run out of money long before then. If you're willing to do something like a 3 month escrow (no Bitcoins for us until an alpha... or something like that), we might be able to make it work out. But we need to eat, we need electricity and internet, and we need a place to sleep.

The other thing that we have over the other scams is that our identities are fully public. I'm David Vorick, the other dev is Luke Champine. We were Ycombinator finalists under the idea for Sia, but were turned away for being several months from completion. You can email me directly, and you can email Luke directly to confirm our identities. (first.last@gmail.com)

If there's any mid-step you will accept as opposed to waiting until Sia is fully developed, we are happy to consider escrow. We are legitimate, and we are willing to take large steps to prove it. We understand the huge aversion to buying into an IPO without escrow, because anybody could be running a scam. If you are interested in the coin and want to get involved, consider what would make you willing to trust us, and let us know. We are not anonymous developers.

The other thing is that Sia will be having a second IPO (a real IPO) once the currency is completed. For this, escrow will certainly be used but the price will also be much higher, at least 10x as expensive if not much more. Investing at this early stage represents greater risk but also much greater reward.

Do you know there are someone steal your thought? Stroagecoin, copied everything from Siacoin

Yes I've been in at least one thread with Storagecoin. Whoever runs the account 'Storagecoin' can hardly speak english, I don't know how he can convincingly pass as the writer of the whitepaper that he stole. Additionally, the source code he uploaded (at first, idk if he's fixed it now) has my name (David Vorick) in it. Furthermore, the whitepaper being presented is several months old, has hand-drawn images (my own drawings as it were), and is severly flawed in a few ways (that we've since fixed). Anybody who does their due diligence on storagecoin at this point will reveal the scam almost immediately.


====================

I just wanted to say again, we're willing to take extra steps to prove ourselves as legitimate. We realize that many of you will never take a risk without escrow, which is why at the moment we are only collecting enough money to get by until the launch of Sia. Sia has been my pet project for 10 months now, and we've just recently kicked it into full gear. You can see our github page and our commit history. If you feel so compelled, you can open an issue in the issue tracker asking us to confirm this thread. I'm not sure what else would put you at ease, but feel free to make suggestions.

I'm really interested in this idea, I struggled about whether or not to invest storagecoin. Now seem that I was right not to join in stc.
I believe u, and I think I will invest even without escrow, it will be better if there is.
I will keep eye on this. If you are going to start IPO, PM me. 

[turtlerabbit]

when is the ipo on nxt?

[GaryL]

This coin looks very innovative, and I think it is a very noteworthy thing!

[Taek]

Sorry if I missed this somehow...  but what will be the total amount of Siastock?

...not in reference to the initial 15% pre-IPO but in general...

thnx  

So, I really want to make 3.9 total Siastock, since the host fee is 3.9%. If you have 1 Siastock that means you get 1% of all host fees on the network. It makes it very easy to convert the amount of Siastock you have to the % of host fees that you get.

But 3.9 is a pretty non-conventional number, and will require many decimals of precision. Ultimately, I haven't decided.

[Taek]

Announcement!

Our asset on the Nxt AE is live!


SiaNotes
Ticker symbol
SIAN
What is it? 
Decentralized Cloud Storage Network, , bitcointalk thread
What percentage of the company is being sold? 
15%
How many shares to be sold?
1500 (out of 10,000)
What price will they be sold at?
2400 NXT (subject to change with exchange rates - raising 250 BTC total)
Nxtforum discussion
https://nxtforum.org/alternate-cryptocurrencies/sia-official-nxt-thread/
Other sites
www.siacoin.com
bitcointalk thread
Nxt account used to issue assets
Account ID: 13179792715523067888
Asset ID: 11593659039925686857
Asset Name: sianote

The process has changed slightly. I have made 10,000 sianotes available through the Nxt AE. At the launch of Sia, each sianote will convert to 0.01% stock. 10,000 = 100% stock. Only 15% is for sale, meaning that throughout our whole pre-IPO, only 1500 sianotes will be sold. The price works out to 2400 NXT each. This is slightly different from numbers previously stated, and this is the final way that it will work (can't change, as we are live!). As of right now, 100 are for sale, and over the next 3 weeks I will keep adding more until 1500 total have been sold.

When I get nxt, they will be converted directly to USD to safeguard ourselves from the volatility of cryptocurrency. Bitcoin has been relatively stable for the past month but I want to minimize risk.

If you do not want to deal with nxt, you can send me bitcoins directly and I'll mark you down on a sheet. At any time, you can request the number of sianotes that you bought and I will send them to your nxt account. I actually prefer that all large transactions occur this way, because I get to avoid a 0.2% transaction fee that occurs when converting from nxt to btc. (It's not a big deal though, if you are more comfortable directly using the AE, feel free to do so.)

===========

I thought you had already decided that the 15% pre-IPO will be 5000 shares...  is it safe to assume that you're aiming for a breakdown of the 3.9 total Siastock into ~39000 shares?

I'm not sure what the best volume is for direct Siastock. Before converting any sianotes to siastock however, the number of siastock will be locked in. For example, if I decide to use 1 total siastock, each sianote will convert to 0.0001 siastock. If I decide to use 10000 siastock, each sianote will convert directly to 1 siastock. Regardless of how many siastock there are, exactly 3.9% of all host income (for renting out storage) on Sia will be distributed among the owners of Siastock every block. Having an exact number is just a convention, which is why right now I'm operating purely in percentages.

[hxnb]

About Sia's Technology

[frankkkkkkk]

it is too hard to catch you

[coloredcoin]

seem a scam?

[Esbie Blanquera4832]

Glad to see more interest in the coin.Keep up the good work!

[ownerbest]

Someone bought at 9,000 nxt. I think you should put more orders now

[Lordoftherigs]

Announcement!

Our asset on the Nxt AE is live!

Very smart decision...  Nxt AE is SMOOTH LIKE BUTTER!!!    


Edit:  IF you do not manage to sell all available shares...  is there any chance you will decrease the amount of shares (< 10000)...  thus increasing the percentage equivalent of each purchased share?  Not that I am hoping for the pre-IPO and IPO to not do well...  but leaving such window open might be a good incentive for people to participate...  due to the possibility of receiving some type of bonus percentage per share if we end up with limited participation.

+1

[PondSea]

Can you guys list a public BTC address in the OP for us to send it to?

[Momimaus]

Someone bought at 9,000 nxt. I think you should put more orders now

Probably due to a mistake.

[msin]

Please post BTC address for direct investment. 

[TheMightyX]

Just so everyones on the same page:
You are valuing your project at 1666 BTC or $733,333.00

Three quarters of a million dollars for something that is little more than an idea and a little bit of code at this point.
Please keep in mind people that if you are investing in this, you are agreeing to that valuation.

Also by asking for investors to cover your expenses while you develop you are shifting all the risk from yourself onto the investors. If it flops or if you can't make it work; at least you got paid a nice salary while you were doing it.

Expecting others to foot 100% of the risk is a shady way of doing business I think.

If you really need the money for expenses you could have a seperated escrow system that pays you out a fraction per month for a certain amount of time.

For example you could receive 20% a month, every month, for 5 months.

Assuming you sell out of the IPO, this would equate to $22,000 a month. Don't try to tell us that your expenses would cost your more than 22K a month. You would have to rent quite a few Lamborghini's to make that happen. If you need more time you could split the escrow into 10 parts equaling $11,000 a month. Anyone and their entire family could live quite comfortable with that kind of cash so I can't think of a reason why this wouldn't work (2 team members? easy! $5,500 a month each! 3 team members? easy! $3,666 a month each!).

In this scenario, your expenses are covered, and if you don't produce anything after a month at least 80% of the funds are saved (or 60%, or 40%, etc etc, atleast you are protecting investors in some way).

Please provide a valid reason as to why this system would not work.

[giveBTCpls]

Im on for the giveaway.

[Lordoftherigs]

Just so everyones on the same page:
You are valuing your project at 1666 BTC or $733,333.00

Three quarters of a million dollars for something that is little more than an idea and a little bit of code at this point.
Please keep in mind people that if you are investing in this, you are agreeing to that valuation.

Also by asking for investors to cover your expenses while you develop you are shifting all the risk from yourself onto the investors. If it flops or if you can't make it work; at least you got paid a nice salary while you were doing it.

Expecting others to foot 100% of the risk is a shady way of doing business I think.

If you really need the money for expenses you could have a seperated escrow system that pays you out a fraction per month for a certain amount of time.

For example you could receive 20% a month, every month, for 5 months.

Assuming you sell out of the IPO, this would equate to $22,000 a month. Don't try to tell us that your expenses would cost your more than 22K a month. You would have to rent quite a few Lamborghini's to make that happen. If you need more time you could split the escrow into 10 parts equaling $11,000 a month. Anyone and their entire family could live quite comfortable with that kind of cash so I can't think of a reason why this wouldn't work (2 team members? easy! $5,500 a month each! 3 team members? easy! $3,666 a month each!).

In this scenario, your expenses are covered, and if you don't produce anything after a month at least 80% of the funds are saved (or 60%, or 40%, etc etc, atleast you are protecting investors in some way).

Please provide a valid reason as to why this system would not work.

Indeed the 2400nxt for 1 sianote ratio seems very imbalanced. Especially when you realize this is a pre-IPO were 95% of the project if not more is still just an idea.

[schnötzel]

Just so everyones on the same page:
You are valuing your project at 1666 BTC or $733,333.00

Three quarters of a million dollars for something that is little more than an idea and a little bit of code at this point.
Please keep in mind people that if you are investing in this, you are agreeing to that valuation.

Also by asking for investors to cover your expenses while you develop you are shifting all the risk from yourself onto the investors. If it flops or if you can't make it work; at least you got paid a nice salary while you were doing it.

Expecting others to foot 100% of the risk is a shady way of doing business I think.

If you really need the money for expenses you could have a seperated escrow system that pays you out a fraction per month for a certain amount of time.

For example you could receive 20% a month, every month, for 5 months.

Assuming you sell out of the IPO, this would equate to $22,000 a month. Don't try to tell us that your expenses would cost your more than 22K a month. You would have to rent quite a few Lamborghini's to make that happen. If you need more time you could split the escrow into 10 parts equaling $11,000 a month. Anyone and their entire family could live quite comfortable with that kind of cash so I can't think of a reason why this wouldn't work (2 team members? easy! $5,500 a month each! 3 team members? easy! $3,666 a month each!).

In this scenario, your expenses are covered, and if you don't produce anything after a month at least 80% of the funds are saved (or 60%, or 40%, etc etc, atleast you are protecting investors in some way).

Please provide a valid reason as to why this system would not work.

Indeed the 2400nxt for 1 sianote ratio seems very imbalanced. Especially when you realize this is a pre-IPO were 95% of the project if not more is still just an idea.

+1

 You will keep 85% of the Notes?

[msin]

You are valuing your project at 1666 BTC or $733,333.00

You're not making sense...  doing a couple simple calculations doesn't prove ANYTHING...  if want people to give any validity whatsoever to your post...  you need to restrict your comments to the 250 BTC pre-IPO goal at this stage...    

Yes he is, the dev is selling SiaNotes at a current market cap of $733k.  Why is that wrong to state here?  I know the devs and I have no doubt they are honest and capable, but I also think users here have a right to ask questions.

Edit; BTW, I think listing on Nxt AE is awesome, as it will allow investors to trade SiaNotes as the project progresses.  I don't see another IPO here that allows investors to trade part of their stake other than private transactions.

[yop850]

Im on for the giveaway.

I have read all the pages in this thread and cannot find any current offer of a giveaway. Could someone point out to me where it is? I would like to be one of the giveaway recipients, if possible.

[schnötzel]

Im on for the giveaway.

I have read all the pages in this thread and cannot find any current offer of a giveaway. Could someone point out to me where it is? I would like to be one of the giveaway recipients, if possible.

post #7

ps: strg + f helps

[Taek]

Update!

There's been a surprising amount of interest, and a technical bump in the road.

In trying to convert nxt to btc, it seems that Bter has eaten my coins. I'm not sure what's going on there, but they only ate a small portion. Even if I end up losing those coins entirely, it's not a big deal. But it does mean that I'm going to stop accepting nxt until I can convert them to btc. I don't want to lose a ton of money because the price randomly plummets.

A few people have contacted me with requests to buy with btc. Because the time flood timer is 6 minutes, I'm now requesting that you email me. david.vorick@gmail.com
Additionally, there has been an explosion of interest, the price is going up. (apologies to everyone who didn't get in early, I had no idea there would be so much demand.) 1 BTC = 5 sianotes. 2850 Nxt = 1 sianote.

The process for buying with bitcoins:
1. Tell me which account is sending bitcoins, how many bitcoins it is sending, and how much stock you are getting in return. 1BTC = 5 sianotes.
2. AFTER you have told me this, send me the coins. I really don't want to get messages from 2 different people who claim they each sent the coins. Tell me first, then send the coins
3. If you are sending more than 5btc, confirm with me first. This is just because demand has been so high, and I'm worried that we might over-sell.
4. Send bitcoins to this account: 146dACCKyDsUre5DXQbKwrb6Xf3ycoAP3p
5. Sianotes are not divisible. If you send me an uneven number of bitcoins, I will round down. I cannot send you half of a sianote.
6. If you have an Nxt account, also tell me which account to send the sianotes to.

If you do not have an Nxt account, create a public key and sign that I am to hold onto your sianotes for you. When it is time for you to claim your sianotes, you'll need to sign a statement telling me where to send the sianotes. I don't want to get an email from a scammer who is claiming to be you, and then send your sianotes to the wrong place. (again, you only need a public key if I'm holding your sianotes until a later date)

I'll make another post once I have Nxt withdrawals working, and then I'll continue selling Sianotes on the exchange.

Thanks everybody for your interest and investments. It means a lot to us.

[nemo1618]

Wow, we've been really overwhelmed by the response so far! Thanks to everyone who has supported us.

To address some questions/concerns:

Just so everyones on the same page:
You are valuing your project at 1666 BTC or $733,333.00

Three quarters of a million dollars for something that is little more than an idea and a little bit of code at this point.
Please keep in mind people that if you are investing in this, you are agreeing to that valuation.

Also by asking for investors to cover your expenses while you develop you are shifting all the risk from yourself onto the investors. If it flops or if you can't make it work; at least you got paid a nice salary while you were doing it.

$750k is not an unreasonable valuation. As Y Combinator finalists, we already had an implicit valuation of $1.7M ($120k @ 7%). Sia is much more than just another cryptocurrency, and we believe that our current valuation is justified.

You are correct that we are shifting risk onto investors; that's what investors do, trade risk today for value tomorrow! Bear in mind that traditional seed funding, as well as Kickstarter campaigns, operate on this assumption. There is certainly some risk involved when you back a Kickstarter, but people do it anyway because they want to support cool projects and they trust the creator to deliver. That is why we've been very open about our identities and our code base; it makes us more accountable and increases the social pressure to succeed.

Im on for the giveaway.

I have read all the pages in this thread and cannot find any current offer of a giveaway. Could someone point out to me where it is? I would like to be one of the giveaway recipients, if possible.

There will likely be a giveaway after launch, but keep in mind that only Siacoin will be given away, not Siastock. The latter is a lot more valuable

[PondSea]

If we contacted you about buying with btc before your announcement of the rate change, can you sell it to us at the old rate? Seems unfair that we have done that then you change the price?

[Taek]

I'm going to use this post to cover a bunch of things. I strongly dislike the 6 minute flood timer, it's causing a lot of grief. Nonetheless...

Just so everyones on the same page:
You are valuing your project at 1666 BTC or $733,333.00

Yes. As it stands, our project is a whitepaper and ~8,000 lines of code that sets up a single quorum and doesn't store files. This alone is not worth $700k. However, with this round of funding, you have our existing project and the idea, plus 2 developers who can afford to live for a full year working full time on Sia. Up until this point, we've had to balance Sia against our other responsibilities. This round of funding gives us a lot of time. The idea, whitepaper, plus 6-12 months of implementation is what is worth $700k. We're also lucky because the 2 developers are cofounders. If we were trying to raise what Google would pay us for 1 year, we'd need a lot more money. As it happens, we're content enough to just be able to afford California living expenses.

The other thing is that there is a clear demand for Siastock/Sianotes. One of my fears is that someone is willing to pay a lot more than the cost, but misses out on the opportunity because we have lowballed our offer and sold out before they realized we were doing the IPO. We've been at it for less than 1 day and still haven't contacted everyone who expressed interest.

Expecting others to foot 100% of the risk is a shady way of doing business I think.

There is a significant amount of opportunity cost associated with doing this. Our investors are not handling all of the risk. We are giving up very comfy salaries to do this. Our opportunity cost is actually more than the money we are raising.

If you really need the money for expenses you could have a seperated escrow system that pays you out a fraction per month for a certain amount of time.

For example you could receive 20% a month, every month, for 5 months.

Assuming you sell out of the IPO, this would equate to $22,000 a month. Don't try to tell us that your expenses would cost your more than 22K a month. You would have to rent quite a few Lamborghini's to make that happen. If you need more time you could split the escrow into 10 parts equaling $11,000 a month. Anyone and their entire family could live quite comfortable with that kind of cash so I can't think of a reason why this wouldn't work (2 team members? easy! $5,500 a month each! 3 team members? easy! $3,666 a month each!).

In this scenario, your expenses are covered, and if you don't produce anything after a month at least 80% of the funds are saved (or 60%, or 40%, etc etc, atleast you are protecting investors in some way).

Please provide a valid reason as to why this system would not work.

We're looking at raising the money to last a full year. Doing a staggered escrow would work just fine, if anybody wanted to arrange that. The problem is that we'd need strict rules for figuring out whether or not the money should be released an when. As we stand, we've got enough people who seem willing to fund us even without escrow. Ultimately, I'm expecting that Luke and I combined will be spending around $5k per month, especially early on. As Sia progresses, we'll start to have legitimate business expenses. The ~$100k that we are trying to raise gives us enough to live comfortably for a full year (including insurance), plus a comfortable amount of emergency money in case anything goes awry. (cars break down, people get sick, etc. Just need to be prepared). And even after that we'll have extra money for servers, initial hard drives, and be able to set up a reasonably reliable base network without any additional miners.

Just make sure to enter the correct Bter Deposit Address when sending NXT and you have nothing to worry about...  pending deposits disappear after they get the required confirmations but that is just because Bter transfers the NXT to another account before they credit your account.

Expanding on this a little bit more, I sent a test volume of 50 nxt to my bter deposit address. This was confirmed in about 30 minutes. Then I sent 25,000 nxt to the same address and bter never updated our balance. If you look at the blockchain though you see that the coins were forwarded to bter's primary account. I'm not sure if large transactions have a 1 day hold or something, but it's been 68 confirmations and I'd expect to see something. If someone can help us out, I'm trying to trade nxt to bitcoins for 0.00007 btc per nxt.

It's disconcerting but I'm not too worried because not a large percentage of the funds are at stake. I will of course honor all sianotes that have thus far been sold regardless of how things turn out with bter.


==============

If we contacted you about buying with btc before your announcement of the rate change, can you sell it to us at the old rate? Seems unfair that we have done that then you change the price?

Yes, I've been able to contact some people but haven't been able to get to everybody yet (that 6 minute flood timer...). Anyone who sent me a message requesting a sale before the price raise can buy up to 10BTC worth of sianotes at the old price. You should know who you are.

Other people have expressed concern with the price raise, saying it seems a bit dishonest. It was a tough decision to make, because I was afraid that this might seem the case. I don't want to follow MaidSAFE and sell out in 5 hours, where many interested parties end up missing out. The price raise is to slow down the offers a bit and give everyone who's contacted me or expressed interest over the past few weeks a chance to invest. I really have no idea the best or most honest way to do this, however I'm keeping a list of everyone who buys at the inflated price. If at a later point we decide the honest thing to do is have everyone pay the same price, all people who invested will be given more sianotes according to their investment.

At the low price, we are selling out very fast, and this concerns me. As far as I know, there's no smooth way to handle a pre-IPO with cryptocurrency. We're doing our best. Ultimately, we care about getting our 250 btc, and we care that everyone feels like they had a proper chance to get involved and invested. We don't need more than 250btc at this point, and we're happy giving up 15% siastock to get the money. Thanks for understanding, and I'm open to suggestions.

[MsCollec]

It's interesting but can you offer escrow

[newIndia]

So when the IPO is supposed to kick off and will u use any escrow for the same ?

[Taek]

Our transactions have come through on bter, there might just be a larger delay for larger transactions. Or maybe the need manual approval, as it seems like both large transactions got confirmed at the same time.

Whatever it is, bter is working for us now. This means that we can continue selling on the AE.

[stereotype]

Wow. That 100 went fast!

[Vega]

Our transactions have come through on bter, there might just be a larger delay for larger transactions. Or maybe the need manual approval, as it seems like both large transactions got confirmed at the same time.

Whatever it is, bter is working for us now. This means that we can continue selling on the AE.

I bought some. It going really fast, this 200 should be sold within an hour.

You should at least try to find a private buyer for the nxt, this volume is too much to dump on bter.

[Taek]

You should at least try to find a private buyer for the nxt, this volume is too much to dump on bter.

 

We're looking for a private buyer of Nxt. We'd be looking to sell somewhere between 500,000 and 2,500,000 for 0.00007 btc each.

It looks like we could sell these over the course of a week on bter, but ultimately I have no idea how long it'll take to sell so many. We can absolutely do escrow for the nxt to bitcoin trade, but I don't know which escrow's are trustworthy.

[gvans]

You may want to ask Anon136 to provide escrow, he is here and on nxtforum

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=381041

[msin]

You should at least try to find a private buyer for the nxt, this volume is too much to dump on bter.

 

We're looking for a private buyer of Nxt. We'd be looking to sell somewhere between 500,000 and 2,500,000 for 0.00007 btc each.

It looks like we could sell these over the course of a week on bter, but ultimately I have no idea how long it'll take to sell so many. We can absolutely do escrow for the nxt to bitcoin trade, but I don't know which escrow's are trustworthy.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=345336.0;topicseen

[Chang Hum]

Interesting Idea I don't know if it's been brought up but monetizing (small siacoin charge) downloads would seriously encourage uploads of quality content.

[Taek]

Interesting Idea I don't know if it's been brought up but monetizing (small siacoin charge) downloads would seriously encourage uploads of quality content.

Yes actually we're going to build that into the scripting system. You can make a download free or you can charge a small amount for it (or even a large amount). It's not well defined yet, but ideally Sia could be used by Netflix, Hulu, or Pay-per-view and have the charges built in. Piracy might be an issue after the first download, but in most cases the legitimate service (especially if it's easy and comfortable to use) will get sufficient downloads.

[ownerbest]

So, who is the owner of 9839339869956953060 nxt account?
This account have eat 325 sianotes.

[JKBtCn]

Are you filling any more orders on the NXT AE? I've requested orders both via AE for your asking price and requested a bitcoin order to your email but will not send if you are still placing orders via AE. Thanks  

[wartywarlock]

Guys, if you think this will be used for anything other than child pron, start your brain up.

[marek3ball]

Solve movies rental issue could be huge. It would be great to integrate it with subtitle support by community into opensource XBMC.

[msin]

I suggest that you encourage BTC investments and then issue SiaNotes to investors.  The Nxt AE is still young and you may have a hard time offloading several million Nxt at once.  Would be nice to see the OP updated with total amount invested, so others can see how much of the 15% IPO is available.  Excited to see the progress on development in the upcoming months. 

[Taek]

Are you filling any more orders on the NXT AE? I've requested orders both via AE for your asking price and requested a bitcoin order to your email but will not send if you are still placing orders via AE. Thanks  

We've been releasing about 100 at a time, but a few heavier investors seem to be snapping them up as fast as I release them. (IE the 325 account). I'm changing the prices again, but only on the AE. I'm also up to 1.7m nxt, which will probably take [too long] a few weeks to sell on bter.com. I have been contacted once by someone offering to do a bulk buy of nxt though, so that might solve the problem.

Spending Bitcoins, 1 BTC = 5 sianotes.
On the AE, 1 sianote = 3100 nxt.

Again, this is because I've pretty much got all the nxt that I'm comfortable with, and a few investors seem to be monopolizing the AE.

I suggest that you encourage BTC investments and then issue SiaNotes to investors.  The Nxt AE is still young and you may have a hard time offloading several million Nxt at once.  Would be nice to see the OP updated with total amount invested, so others can see how much of the 15% IPO is available.  Excited to see the progress on development in the upcoming months. 

So far, I have sold 1000 sianotes, which means 500 remain. I'll be updating the OP soon. The response has been significant and I'm very excited to have sold so many sianotes. At this point I have cashed out enough BTC for Luke and I to last the entire summer, and that doesn't even include the 1.7 million nxt. Assuming the nxt cashes out smoothly, we'll have enough to complete development!

You may want to ask Anon136 to provide escrow, he is here and on nxtforum

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=381041

This guy looks good for nxt=>btc escrow, but I'd feel more comfortable if other people in this thread can confirm that he's trustworthy.

[Conurtrol]

Anon136 is probably the most trustworthy guy on the forum.

[msin]

So far, I have sold 1000 sianotes, which means 500 remain. I'll be updating the OP soon. The response has been significant and I'm very excited to have sold so many sianotes. At this point I have cashed out enough BTC for Luke and I to last the entire summer, and that doesn't even include the 1.7 million nxt. Assuming the nxt cashes out smoothly, we'll have enough to complete development!

This guy looks good for nxt=>btc escrow, but I'd feel more comfortable if other people in this thread can confirm that he's trustworthy.

Awesome news on IPO, to be honest didn't think it would go that fast, really glad to hear it was successful and you can begin development.

Anon is like your grandfather, best friend, and dog wrapped into one, he is completely trustworthy.

[Daedelus]

Anon136 is probably the most trustworthy guy on the forum.

+1
Anon136 is well known for being the escrow for many IPOs, all without a hitch (on his end I mean, some of the IPOs have gone belly up and he returned the cash). He has built a good reputation he is leveraging to launch his Silver Bullion Gateway on the AE.

[Anotheranonlol]

Why did you decide go via the NXT AE?, that method enriches/favors NXT holders and means putting in additional steps to buy the shares for investors who aren't holding NXT. and additional steps for the issuer to cashout to BTC. It's a tedious process to sell often via BTER and means taking haircuts either side if the liquidity is not there . Basically a lose/lose unless you as issuer are planning on accumulating NXT or a buyer already rich in NXT

I want to invest in SIA but don't want to hold NXT because the distribution method is one of the most disproportionately skewed to few individuals in recent memory (early NXT IPO backers, some presumably who used socks to register multiple stakes have already profitted enough), I would rather not support that in any way. You could of made a BTC denominated offering directly using CounterParty (without requirement for any XCP token) and open ownership of siastock to whole crypto community, without having to sell the shares in background via PM's and undertake complicated manual book-keeping to ensure you don't oversell shares and so forth.. Addtionally because that method is on-top of bitcoin blockchain it will be transparent and auditable for anyone to look at so there will be no cries of fraud like with maidsafe IPO.. An example of an IPO issuance on counterparty is below http://blockscan.com/assetInfo.aspx?q=ROCKMINER

[gs02xzz]

Why did you decide go via the NXT AE?, that method enriches/favors NXT holders and means putting in additional steps to buy the shares for investors who aren't holding NXT. and additional steps for the issuer to cashout to BTC. It's a tedious process to sell often via BTER and means taking haircuts either side if the liquidity is not there . Basically a lose/lose unless you as issuer are planning on accumulating NXT or a buyer already rich in NXT

You can buy it with BTC -see the OP's update here post#89- https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=591283.80

If you do not have an Nxt account, create a public key and sign that I am to hold onto your sianotes for you. When it is time for you to claim your sianotes, you'll need to sign a statement telling me where to send the sianotes. I don't want to get an email from a scammer who is claiming to be you, and then send your sianotes to the wrong place. (again, you only need a public key if I'm holding your sianotes until a later date)

[Daedelus]

Why did you decide go via the NXT AE?, that method enriches/favors NXT holders and means putting in additional steps to buy the shares for investors who aren't holding NXT. and additional steps for the issuer to cashout to BTC. It's a tedious process to sell often via BTER and means taking haircuts either side if the liquidity is not there . Basically a lose/lose unless you as issuer are planning on accumulating NXT or a buyer already rich in NXT

I want to invest in SIA but don't want to hold NXT because the distribution method is one of the most disproportionately skewed to few individuals in recent memory (early NXT IPO backers, some presumably who used socks to register multiple stakes have already profitted enough), I would rather not support that in any way. You could of made a BTC denominated offering directly using CounterParty (without requirement for any XCP token) and open ownership of siastock to whole crypto community, without having to sell the shares in background via PM's and undertake complicated manual book-keeping to ensure you don't oversell shares and so forth.. Addtionally because that method is on-top of bitcoin blockchain it will be transparent and auditable for anyone to look at so there will be no cries of fraud like with maidsafe IPO.. An example of an IPO issuance on counterparty is below http://blockscan.com/assetInfo.aspx?q=ROCKMINER

You'll find that Nxt today has a better distribution than BTC so it is odd that you promote BTC over Nxt (I wasn't an early investor).

[Anotheranonlol]

Why did you decide go via the NXT AE?, that method enriches/favors NXT holders and means putting in additional steps to buy the shares for investors who aren't holding NXT. and additional steps for the issuer to cashout to BTC. It's a tedious process to sell often via BTER and means taking haircuts either side if the liquidity is not there . Basically a lose/lose unless you as issuer are planning on accumulating NXT or a buyer already rich in NXT

I want to invest in SIA but don't want to hold NXT because the distribution method is one of the most disproportionately skewed to few individuals in recent memory (early NXT IPO backers, some presumably who used socks to register multiple stakes have already profitted enough), I would rather not support that in any way. You could of made a BTC denominated offering directly using CounterParty (without requirement for any XCP token) and open ownership of siastock to whole crypto community, without having to sell the shares in background via PM's and undertake complicated manual book-keeping to ensure you don't oversell shares and so forth.. Addtionally because that method is on-top of bitcoin blockchain it will be transparent and auditable for anyone to look at so there will be no cries of fraud like with maidsafe IPO.. An example of an IPO issuance on counterparty is below http://blockscan.com/assetInfo.aspx?q=ROCKMINER

You'll find that Nxt today has a better distribution than BTC so it is odd that you promote BTC over Nxt (I wasn't an early investor).

NXT were brought for total of 21 btc between ~73 stakeholders
current valuation~ 71,450 BTC (very short time later)

340238% profit for lucky few. And how many used alt-accounts to register multiple stakes?

http://87.230.14.1/nxt/nxt.cgi?action=34

not better distribution by any stretch of the imagination as far as I can see.

As far as argument against bitcoin distribution goes. (Excluding satoshis mined stash, which for all we know will be distributed evenly in an act of charity) A huge amount of early coins from 2009- 2011 will never be touched again because the private keys are completely destroyed. Bitcoin was a new paradigm. 1-cpu one vote and anyone could join in

[Nerissa Betasolo2c]

SIAcoin is doing well, with so many great things to come.

[Daedelus]

Why did you decide go via the NXT AE?, that method enriches/favors NXT holders and means putting in additional steps to buy the shares for investors who aren't holding NXT. and additional steps for the issuer to cashout to BTC. It's a tedious process to sell often via BTER and means taking haircuts either side if the liquidity is not there . Basically a lose/lose unless you as issuer are planning on accumulating NXT or a buyer already rich in NXT

I want to invest in SIA but don't want to hold NXT because the distribution method is one of the most disproportionately skewed to few individuals in recent memory (early NXT IPO backers, some presumably who used socks to register multiple stakes have already profitted enough), I would rather not support that in any way. You could of made a BTC denominated offering directly using CounterParty (without requirement for any XCP token) and open ownership of siastock to whole crypto community, without having to sell the shares in background via PM's and undertake complicated manual book-keeping to ensure you don't oversell shares and so forth.. Addtionally because that method is on-top of bitcoin blockchain it will be transparent and auditable for anyone to look at so there will be no cries of fraud like with maidsafe IPO.. An example of an IPO issuance on counterparty is below http://blockscan.com/assetInfo.aspx?q=ROCKMINER

You'll find that Nxt today has a better distribution than BTC so it is odd that you promote BTC over Nxt (I wasn't an early investor).

NXT were brought for total of 21 btc between ~73 stakeholders
current valuation~ 71,450 BTC (very short time later)

340238% profit for lucky few. And how many used alt-accounts to register multiple stakes?

http://87.230.14.1/nxt/nxt.cgi?action=34

not better distribution by any stretch of the imagination as far as I can see.

As far as argument against bitcoin distribution goes. (Excluding satoshis mined stash, which for all we know will be distributed evenly in an act of charity) A huge amount of early coins from 2009- 2011 will never be touched again because the private keys are completely destroyed. Bitcoin was a new paradigm. 1-cpu one vote and anyone could join in

My comments were about current distribution, from your comments you still believe Nxt is held by 73 stakeholders?

[Vega]

NXT were brought for total of 21 btc between ~73 stakeholders
...

You just copied one of your previous posts from an other topic. Any chance that you read a reply by toknormal on the same page? Because it was a very good reply worthy of consideration.

[Daedelus]

NXT were brought for total of 21 btc between ~73 stakeholders
...

You just copied one of your previous posts from an other topic. Any chance that you read a reply by toknormal on the same page? Because it was a very good reply worthy of consideration.

It was also 21 BTC between over a hundred people but some never came forward for their stake. Maybe no one else came forward in the 2 month period they had a chance as they thought it might be vapourware. We'll never know but I am more interested in the distribution today.

(sorry to hijack your thread  )

[Anotheranonlol]

NXT were brought for total of 21 btc between ~73 stakeholders
...

You just copied one of your previous posts from an other topic. Any chance that you read a reply by toknormal on the same page? Because it was a very good reply worthy of consideration.

it's a bit offtopic but will address it

his reply was:

the big flaw in this whole argument about "distribution" is that it's based more on a toy-throwing-out-of-pram premise than any dispassionate appraisal of the "distribution model".

For example. The argument goes that NxT stakeholders stand to make an X0000000 % gain from their investment and that that's somehow "excessive". Whereas if someone buying a currency that had, say 5000 buy-ins and also made an X0000000 % gain - that would be alright.

The fact is that there isn't anywhere near enough market liquidity in any of these currencies for such gains ever to be realised at the amounts of holdings the original stakeholders had. Thats why it doesn't matter if it's 76 or 7600 original holders - it's like melting 2 big blocks of ice or 20 little ones in a jug of water. It dilutes just the same.

If the envisaged potential market for these cryptos is, say 50 million people, then an initial "distribution" of 5000 doesn't look too great either. That's 0.01% of the market getting the initial stake. Thats the real hypocrisy behind these empty criticisms.

Yes, the premise is somewhat 'toy throwing out of pram' because who wouldn't kick themselves at a chance to realise a gain of X0000000 %..?
But more to the point it's a valid concern despite any predujice or hissy fits about missing the boat. How can you  support a coin which has enriched such a small group of people in such a disproportionate way when we can create NXT clones giving all the benefits of nxt without the flawed distribution.

Pyramid of 21 initial holders (and god knows how many out of those 21 were single guys owning sock puppets to register multiple stakes) is not a stable foundation for a future currency in any shape or form..it's just absolutely incomprehensible to the point where it seems lunacy it's already survived this long. NXT is a great concept, but the ownership of the total supply was given to such a tiny group of people and from that point forward it's just a trickle down, many I'm sure being self-interested and greedy have manipulated to the best of their abilities distributing their own holdings between multiple accounts and only giving nxt away when it suits them and would boost the value of their pile. the argument is that they'll never realise their gains but they can slowly dump onto markets tiny portions of their holdings and now with things like siastock they can diversify some of their 'unrealisable' nxt ownership into  siastock. They're hardly bagholders and could have made considerable amounts of money already. Good for them but I wouldn't support it

[msin]

NXT were brought for total of 21 btc between ~73 stakeholders
current valuation~ 71,450 BTC (very short time later)

340238% profit for lucky few. And how many used alt-accounts to register multiple stakes?

http://87.230.14.1/nxt/nxt.cgi?action=34

not better distribution by any stretch of the imagination as far as I can see.

As far as argument against bitcoin distribution goes. (Excluding satoshis mined stash, which for all we know will be distributed evenly in an act of charity) A huge amount of early coins from 2009- 2011 will never be touched again because the private keys are completely destroyed. Bitcoin was a new paradigm. 1-cpu one vote and anyone could join in

So why didn't you invest?  Was it because you knew it would have poor distribution?  The creator didn't get rich off of Nxt, and it was an open IPO for two months (far longer than any IPO's held now), so stop whining about distribution, it's not the creator's fault that only 73 people decided to invest.  It's such a tired argument.  What was he supposed to do, he wanted to launch the coin.  I bought Nxt on the open market, when it was 1Mil for 1BTC, because I saw potential.  Nxt has a great community of devs that get things done, and aren't chronic whiners.  I could sit here and stomp my feet about satoshi holding 1.5Mil BTC or that MT Gox blatantly ripped off everyone, but I don't because it's pointless.  Anyway, stop posting here and go mine some BTC.  This should be dedicated to Sia, not Nxt.

[Anotheranonlol]

NXT were brought for total of 21 btc between ~73 stakeholders
current valuation~ 71,450 BTC (very short time later)

340238% profit for lucky few. And how many used alt-accounts to register multiple stakes?

http://87.230.14.1/nxt/nxt.cgi?action=34

not better distribution by any stretch of the imagination as far as I can see.

As far as argument against bitcoin distribution goes. (Excluding satoshis mined stash, which for all we know will be distributed evenly in an act of charity) A huge amount of early coins from 2009- 2011 will never be touched again because the private keys are completely destroyed. Bitcoin was a new paradigm. 1-cpu one vote and anyone could join in

So why didn't you invest?  Was it because you knew it would have poor distribution?  The creator didn't get rich off of Nxt, and it was an open IPO for two months (far longer than any IPO's held now), so stop whining about distribution, it's not the creator's fault that only 73 people decided to invest.  It's such a tired argument.  What was he supposed to do, he wanted to launch the coin.  I bought Nxt on the open market, when it was 1Mil for 1BTC, because I saw potential.  Nxt has a great community of devs that get things done, and aren't chronic whiners.  I could sit here and stomp my feet about satoshi holding 1.5Mil BTC or that MT Gox blatantly ripped off everyone, but I don't because it's pointless.  Anyway, stop posting here and go mine some BTC.  This should be dedicated to Sia, not Nxt.

I didn't invest because frankly I didn't see the thread prior to IPO closure. People keep saying it's a tired argument. It can never be a tired argument because it's like the burj khalifa of arguments. it overshadows absolutely anything else. The creator could of easily register stakes without you knowing about it. You can not build a supposed '2.0 crypto-currency' upon a POS distribution between only 21 people. It can't work it's nonsensical to even propose a currency with such an unfair distribution has a serious chance of success...it's 100x worse than what we have with fiat with fat cat oligarchs controlling huge amounts of the worlds wealth. while poor scrape for few dollars daily.. with nxt it's out of the frying pan into a blazing inferno., and this is the reason community will jump onto coins such as NEM over NXT.

[msin]

NXT were brought for total of 21 btc between ~73 stakeholders
current valuation~ 71,450 BTC (very short time later)

340238% profit for lucky few. And how many used alt-accounts to register multiple stakes?

http://87.230.14.1/nxt/nxt.cgi?action=34

not better distribution by any stretch of the imagination as far as I can see.

As far as argument against bitcoin distribution goes. (Excluding satoshis mined stash, which for all we know will be distributed evenly in an act of charity) A huge amount of early coins from 2009- 2011 will never be touched again because the private keys are completely destroyed. Bitcoin was a new paradigm. 1-cpu one vote and anyone could join in

So why didn't you invest?  Was it because you knew it would have poor distribution?  The creator didn't get rich off of Nxt, and it was an open IPO for two months (far longer than any IPO's held now), so stop whining about distribution, it's not the creator's fault that only 73 people decided to invest.  It's such a tired argument.  What was he supposed to do, he wanted to launch the coin.  I bought Nxt on the open market, when it was 1Mil for 1BTC, because I saw potential.  Nxt has a great community of devs that get things done, and aren't chronic whiners.  I could sit here and stomp my feet about satoshi holding 1.5Mil BTC or that MT Gox blatantly ripped off everyone, but I don't because it's pointless.  Anyway, stop posting here and go mine some BTC.  This should be dedicated to Sia, not Nxt.

I didn't invest because frankly I didn't see the thread prior to IPO closure. People keep saying it's a tired argument. It can never be a tired argument because it's like the burj khalifa of arguments. it overshadows absolutely anything else. The creator could of easily register stakes without you knowing about it. You can not build a supposed '2.0 crypto-currency' upon a POS distribution between only 21 people. It can't work it's nonsensical to even propose a currency with such an unfair distribution has a serious chance of success...it's 100x worse than what we have with fiat with fat cat oligarchs controlling huge amounts of the worlds wealth. while poor scrape for few dollars daily.. with nxt it's out of the frying pan into a blazing inferno., and this is the reason community will jump onto coins such as NEM over NXT.

He could have done a # of things, so what. Speculation is just that.  I think you have your #'s mixed up.  73 stakeholders, 21 BTC.  Not 21 people.  I understand your concern, I really do, but I bought after Nxt was launched at a valuation that was more than fair, and it even went back down after the initial spike, and stakeholders were dumping millions of Nxt for at least a month.  All these IPO's disguise their profit as "distribution".   Anyway, no one is changing your mind, so why argue about it, your time would be better spent being productive.  And you can buy Sia without being forced to hold Nxt. 

[voldemort628]

guys, lets not hijack this thread of the Sia project
lets move the discussion to a move relevant topic/tread .

cheers

[Taek]

guys, lets not hijack this thread of the Sia project
lets move the discussion to a move relevant topic/tread .

cheers

Made a new topic. Put a response there. TL;DR: I am happy with using Nxt, and I don't think it's current skewed distribution is anything to worry about.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=609322

[Blocktree]

Why did you decide go via the NXT AE?, that method enriches/favors NXT holders and means putting in additional steps to buy the shares for investors who aren't holding NXT. and additional steps for the issuer to cashout to BTC. It's a tedious process to sell often via BTER and means taking haircuts either side if the liquidity is not there . Basically a lose/lose unless you as issuer are planning on accumulating NXT or a buyer already rich in NXT

I want to invest in SIA but don't want to hold NXT because the distribution method is one of the most disproportionately skewed to few individuals in recent memory (early NXT IPO backers, some presumably who used socks to register multiple stakes have already profitted enough), I would rather not support that in any way. You could of made a BTC denominated offering directly using CounterParty (without requirement for any XCP token) and open ownership of siastock to whole crypto community, without having to sell the shares in background via PM's and undertake complicated manual book-keeping to ensure you don't oversell shares and so forth.. Addtionally because that method is on-top of bitcoin blockchain it will be transparent and auditable for anyone to look at so there will be no cries of fraud like with maidsafe IPO.. An example of an IPO issuance on counterparty is below http://blockscan.com/assetInfo.aspx?q=ROCKMINER

You'll find that Nxt today has a better distribution than BTC so it is odd that you promote BTC over Nxt (I wasn't an early investor).

NXT were brought for total of 21 btc between ~73 stakeholders
current valuation~ 71,450 BTC (very short time later)

340238% profit for lucky few. And how many used alt-accounts to register multiple stakes?

http://87.230.14.1/nxt/nxt.cgi?action=34

not better distribution by any stretch of the imagination as far as I can see.

As far as argument against bitcoin distribution goes. (Excluding satoshis mined stash, which for all we know will be distributed evenly in an act of charity) A huge amount of early coins from 2009- 2011 will never be touched again because the private keys are completely destroyed. Bitcoin was a new paradigm. 1-cpu one vote and anyone could join in

THERE WILL BE Another unfair IPO of Nxt .
All participants are Nxt big stake holders
Nxt is born for unfairness.

[Taek]

Update on the IPO.

As of right now, There are 147 sianotes that are still for sale. 49 of these are currently on the AE at 3100 each.

[PondSea]

Just sent a email to David and Luke about investing in the IPO at the original rate since i PMed them about investing using BTC before the rate change.

[Daedelus]

Hi,

Can you post the Reed Solomon version of the Nxt address used to issue your asset on the AE? (The version that looks like NXT-sdfcdD-2Dwwe- etc etc )

This is now default in the NRS v1.1.3.

Could you post it here for me to pick up later >>> https://nxtforum.org/index.php?action=pm;f=inbox;sort=date;start=0

Thanks 

[Eadeqa]

I didn't invest because frankly I didn't see the thread prior to IPO closure.

How is this Nxt fault if you didn't see the IPO that was open to everyone for 2 months? As for Nem, even if we assume there are no sock puppets and it really has 3000 stakeholders, the world population is 7 billion, so that is very "unfair" distribution too.  You can never have "fair distribution". BTC has even worse distribution with just 1 person holding 10%.  What matters is future adoption and use by wider community, merchants and general public.

[findgreenland]

Update on the IPO.

As of right now, There are 147 sianotes that are still for sale. 49 of these are currently on the AE at 3100 each.

Wasn't the price supposed to be 2400?

[Taek]

Wasn't the price supposed to be 2400?

The original price was 2400, but we sold 1/2 of the supply in under 24 hours. So we raised the price. It's been 3 days and we're down to the last 10% shares, so I'm trying to stretch them out.

You can still buy them for 1BTC = 5 sianotes following the BTC method.

I'm not sure how many shares are on the AE at this point but I'm not planning on releasing any more to the AE. (I think there's like 65 available @ 3100 each). After that I'll leave 1 more day (tomorrow) for BTC sales and then the pre-IPO will be complete.

We've hit our funding goal! This is a big deal and we're very pleased with all the support we've gotten from the community. Stay tuned over the next 6 months, we're going to try and have an alpha version released every 30 days or so. The first alpha release will most likely be a single quorum (128 participants) storing a set of files with wallets and intra-quorum transactions.

[SmithsonJim]

When i saw coolness factor for second i was thinking it would be coin that would lower heating necessary for mining.

Still I don't understand why both SCN and STK when it could be easily one.

[Forobitcoins]

Wasn't the price supposed to be 2400?

The original price was 2400, but we sold 1/2 of the supply in under 24 hours. So we raised the price. It's been 3 days and we're down to the last 10% shares, so I'm trying to stretch them out.

You can still buy them for 1BTC = 5 sianotes following the BTC method.

I'm not sure how many shares are on the AE at this point but I'm not planning on releasing any more to the AE. (I think there's like 65 available @ 3100 each). After that I'll leave 1 more day (tomorrow) for BTC sales and then the pre-IPO will be complete.

We've hit our funding goal! This is a big deal and we're very pleased with all the support we've gotten from the community. Stay tuned over the next 6 months, we're going to try and have an alpha version released every 30 days or so. The first alpha release will most likely be a single quorum (128 participants) storing a set of files with wallets and intra-quorum transactions.

Congrats, I buy 10 sianotes, good luck!!!

[findgreenland]

Wasn't the price supposed to be 2400?

The original price was 2400, but we sold 1/2 of the supply in under 24 hours. So we raised the price. It's been 3 days and we're down to the last 10% shares, so I'm trying to stretch them out.

You can still buy them for 1BTC = 5 sianotes following the BTC method.

I'm not sure how many shares are on the AE at this point but I'm not planning on releasing any more to the AE. (I think there's like 65 available @ 3100 each). After that I'll leave 1 more day (tomorrow) for BTC sales and then the pre-IPO will be complete.

We've hit our funding goal! This is a big deal and we're very pleased with all the support we've gotten from the community. Stay tuned over the next 6 months, we're going to try and have an alpha version released every 30 days or so. The first alpha release will most likely be a single quorum (128 participants) storing a set of files with wallets and intra-quorum transactions.

Congrats, I buy 10 sianotes, good luke!!!

You r really lucky. I didn't expect it would sell in a minute.

[Gaoweida]

 , take brain up..It would be great to integrate it with subtitle support by community into opensource XBMC.

[Taek]

When i saw coolness factor for second i was thinking it would be coin that would lower heating necessary for mining.

Well, it's sort of more friendly. With Bitcoin, nothing is happening except heat is being produced. The calculations used for mining are completely worthless for general computing, and the rigs used for mining can't even be repurposed to do anything else (except break certain hash schemes, I suppose.)

Sia on the other hand uses its 'protection' algorithm to produce storage that is available to the general public. So while it's not 'free' in the same sense that a POS (how do we distinguish between proof-of-storage and proof-of-stake?) currency doesn't burn energy, Sia does replace the general datacenter, providing two functions at once. Overall I think Sia would be better for the ecosystem. But the other benefit is economic, because storage on Sia can only be acquired using Siacoins, which causes inherent demand for the Siacoin that's directly related to the value of the storage on Sia.

< this isn't strictly true... Sia relies heavily on fully random numbers, which ends up being very difficult to pull off in a quorum, potentially impossible. The solution we've chosen is a proof-of-work model (and actually, you can just use the existing Bitcoin blockchain), which damages the environmental argument because our random number generation is just as wasteful as traditional POW currencies >

Still I don't understand why both SCN and STK when it could be easily one.

What is unclear? Did you read the economic model?

Siacoin is supposed to be inflationary, because we want to keep the emphasis of the value on the people who are actively contributing to Sia. With Bitcoin, people who provided $1000 worth of mining in the first 6 months have hundreds of thousands of dollars of reward today. Imagine if instead that hundreds of thousands of dollars was going to todays miners. The hashrate would be higher, and the currency would probably also be more stable ("more stable", though I doubt stable enough to defeat the instability argument).

At the same time, we need a way to feed ourselves. At this stage, that meant doing fundraising, which meant we needed some convincing source of value for our investors. Selling a coin that's permanently inflationary didn't sound too attractive to me. The other thing is that I've always felt like premining is a "dirty" way to get money for the developers. It's not clear exactly how much value the developers will have, and there's a large potential for the early adopters to have control over the markets. Someone owning 1% of a currency can perform massive manipulations, and if they're good at manipulating the market they will profit greatly at everyone else's expense.

Siastock derives its value from Siacoin, but the reverse is not true. If someone performs a massive pump-and-dump on Siastock, only Siastock holders will be affected. This rests well with me, because Siastock is designed to be highly speculative. It's where the greatest opportunity for making money is. But it shelters the people who just want to use Sia for storage, as they will be using exclusively Siacoin. Over time (after the initial explosive growth of Sia... [fingers crossed]), the Siacoin should be stable in an inflationary direction, and ultimately a poor long term investment. Siastock on the other hand gains value as Sia gains value, and is a fantastic investment (though risky) for anyone who's confident that Sia as a whole will continue to gain value.

I think that separating Siacoin from Siastock will end up being one of the defining improvements of Sia over other cryptocurrencies.

[PondSea]

Hi David,

Can you please confirm receipt of my btc deposit via email when you get a chance please.

 

[Taek]

Hi David,

Can you please confirm receipt of my btc deposit via email when you get a chance please.

 

Yes, I have received your coins, will be sending the sianotes in the next few minutes.

=====================================

I'm announcing the close of our IPO. We will no longer be accepting Bitcoins for sianotes. 27 sianotes are still available on the AE for 3100 each, once these are sold there will be no more added.

Thank you very much for participating.

[sherpico77]

Great idea, interesting project. Good luck

[turtlerabbit]

Am I late into the party???

[CashFlow]

This is a torrent. 0 idea. want to fuck money "free"

[sherpico77]

Am I late into the party???

You can use Nxt Asset Exchange to buy shares ('sianote' asset)

[Taek]

You can use Nxt Asset Exchange to buy shares ('sianote' asset)

We (the developers) are not selling Sianotes any more, but one of the advantages of using the Nxt AE is that a few other people are selling shares that they bought earlier. Especially if you post a buy at a high enough price, you will be able to get your hands on some.

I believe right now there are a few available for 3100, which is the price we (the developers) were selling them for at the end of the fund-raiser.

[John_Paul]

@Taek - does Sia network has to be decentralized? It seems the services that Sia provide do not require Sia network to be decentralized as long as the network is encrypted. The network is encrypted and distributed but the company can be an organized legal entity

[Taek]

@Taek - does Sia network has to be decentralized? It seems the services that Sia provide do not require Sia network to be decentralized as long as the network is encrypted. The network is encrypted and distributed but the company can be an organized legal entity

The network does not have to be decentralized, though I think that there are substantial advantages to it being decentralized, from a societal perspective even if that's not what's best for the company. Imagine if the internet were fully centralized, where you had to go through some central server and pay some fee in order to host your own website. It would have killed a lot of random quirky things that ended up being very beautiful.

Siastock gives us the potential to have tens of millions and even hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue. For a single product, this is plenty for me.

[gvans]

Siastock gives us the potential to have tens of millions and even hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue. For a single product, this is plenty for me.

Wow, that is a hefty estimate. Then again I really don't have the competence to judge it wrong or right. But what kind of timeframe do you think this could be accomplished in, potentially?

[techboy]

even if sia coin just managed to become a 30m $ USD market cap coin .... it is still going to be 30x from ipo price.

[msin]

Siastock gives us the potential to have tens of millions and even hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue. For a single product, this is plenty for me.

Wow, that is a hefty estimate. Then again I really don't have the competence to judge it wrong or right. But what kind of timeframe do you think this could be accomplished in, potentially?

This would be possible if Sia becomes the standard for decentralized crypto storage.  It will take years.

[gitinahang]

When you are ready to raise money for the real ipo which you have mentioned should be at least 10x more expensive are you going to continue

using the NXT asset exchange under the same asset? If you do so only now asking for a much higher price than the pre ipo you will have pre ipo asset

holders undercutting your price to make their profit and you will not raise as much. Can you explain what your plan for this is?

[msin]

When you are ready to raise money for the real ipo which you have mentioned should be at least 10x more expensive are you going to continue

using the NXT asset exchange under the same asset? If you do so only now asking for a much higher price than the pre ipo you will have pre ipo asset

holders undercutting your price to make their profit and you will not raise as much. Can you explain what your plan for this is?

I would assume that they will not use Nxt AE as Siastock will be ready to be issued directly to investors at that point.

[Tobo]

When you are ready to raise money for the real ipo which you have mentioned should be at least 10x more expensive are you going to continue
using the NXT asset exchange under the same asset? If you do so only now asking for a much higher price than the pre ipo you will have pre ipo asset
holders undercutting your price to make their profit and you will not raise as much. Can you explain what your plan for this is?

The market will decide the Siastock and Sianote price. In the next run of fundraising, if Sia shows enough progress, the price of Sianotes will increase. It would be stupid for the existing investors to sell low. For instance, during the first run of the Sia pre-IPO, the individual sales prices are always higher than the issuer's sales price. Sia's progress will be reflected on the price of Sianotes on the Nxt AE. Let's watch.

[mrnxtuser]

When you are ready to raise money for the real ipo which you have mentioned should be at least 10x more expensive are you going to continue

using the NXT asset exchange under the same asset? If you do so only now asking for a much higher price than the pre ipo you will have pre ipo asset

holders undercutting your price to make their profit and you will not raise as much. Can you explain what your plan for this is?

I would assume that they will not use Nxt AE as Siastock will be ready to be issued directly to investors at that point.

I think using the Nxt AE for Siastock even after the IPO would increase exposure for both Nxt and Sia .. Sia isn't going to be used as a currency, It's going to be a much needed storage service for people who care about encryption and privacy. There's already a big community for Nxt, might as well take advantage of  that.

[Taek]

But what kind of timeframe do you think this could be accomplished in, potentially?

This would be possible if Sia becomes the standard for decentralized crypto storage.  It will take years.

We have a lot of ambition and believe that Sia has the potential to be the standard for all cloud-based storage. It's very competitive, reliable, cheap, fast, and it's decentralized. Various estimates place the total cloud storage market around $20 billion annually by 2018, and I think that Sia can be a huge chunk of that. 2018 I think is the earliest that we'd start to see mass-adoption, and then by 2020 we could probably be the biggest player on the field.

It's a long timeline.

even if sia coin just managed to become a 30m $ USD market cap coin .... it is still going to be 30x from ipo price.

That's true, but I would be very disappointed if Sia only managed a $30m valuation at peak. That would mean that the storage never really took off. If people actually started using Sia for their high-priority files, $250 million is the lowest value that I could imagine. We're here to play the long game, and we want to become a vital component of everyday internet infrastructure. If we could pull that off, there would be a lot of money involved.

When you are ready to raise money for the real ipo which you have mentioned should be at least 10x more expensive are you going to continue

using the NXT asset exchange under the same asset? If you do so only now asking for a much higher price than the pre ipo you will have pre ipo asset

holders undercutting your price to make their profit and you will not raise as much. Can you explain what your plan for this is?

I would assume that they will not use Nxt AE as Siastock will be ready to be issued directly to investors at that point.

I don't think undercutting is going to be an issue, but the Siastock that's already been sold will be available to anyone who's willing to pay whatever the sellers are selling at. We'll have Sia up and running before we raise our next round, which means we'll be converting Sianotes into Siastock and then selling Siastock directly. We'll have a better grasp of the mechanics of that though when we're closer to that point.

I think using the Nxt AE for Siastock even after the IPO would increase exposure for both Nxt and Sia .. Sia isn't going to be used as a currency, It's going to be a much needed storage service for people who care about encryption and privacy. There's already a big community for Nxt, might as well take advantage of  that.

Sia isn't meant to be used directly as your primary tool for transferring money. But you'll still need Siacoin (a currency) to access storage, and the Sia network will need a simple and trust-free way to distribute fees among the holders of Siastock. I don't think at that point the Nxt AE makes sense anymore. We'll know a lot better when we're further along.

[mrnxtuser]

As someone who wants to start hosting from the beginning. Is it likely that my beginning storage machines/servers would have to increase storage capacity to be able keep up with increasing adoption of Sia? Would I be able to be compensated for my beginning investment of hardware as a host early enough so that I can start increasing storage capacity through the sia coins mined and compensated for being a host? I know it sounds greedy, but it'd be great to know how much of a benefit it would be for being an early host.

[nemo1618]

As someone who wants to start hosting from the beginning. Is it likely that my beginning storage machines/servers would have to increase storage capacity to be able keep up with increasing adoption of Sia? Would I be able to be compensated for my beginning investment of hardware as a host early enough so that I can start increasing storage capacity through the sia coins mined and compensated for being a host? I know it sounds greedy, but it'd be great to know how much of a benefit it would be for being an early host.

Yes, early adopters will likely see greater returns. Because the cost of storage is managed by a supply-and-demand algorithm, storage becomes cheaper as more people join the network. Over time, providers' "mining rigs" will become more sophisticated (just as we've seen with Bitcoin), so you'll want to increase your margin as much as possible by using a dedicated NAS, RAID array, etc.

Additionally, the value of a siacoin will increase alongside adoption, so you stand to benefit by not cashing out immediately. Long-term, the inflationary nature of the currency will deter people from holding on to siacoins.

[mrnxtuser]

As someone who wants to start hosting from the beginning. Is it likely that my beginning storage machines/servers would have to increase storage capacity to be able keep up with increasing adoption of Sia? Would I be able to be compensated for my beginning investment of hardware as a host early enough so that I can start increasing storage capacity through the sia coins mined and compensated for being a host? I know it sounds greedy, but it'd be great to know how much of a benefit it would be for being an early host.

Yes, early adopters will likely see greater returns. Because the cost of storage is managed by a supply-and-demand algorithm, storage becomes cheaper as more people join the network. Over time, providers' "mining rigs" will become more sophisticated (just as we've seen with Bitcoin), so you'll want to increase your margin as much as possible by using a dedicated NAS, RAID array, etc.

Additionally, the value of a siacoin will increase alongside adoption, so you stand to benefit by not cashing out immediately. Long-term, the inflationary nature of the currency will deter people from holding on to siacoins.

Thanks for the reply.

Do you have any hardware and raid specifications that would best suited for the sia network? I was thinking of using freeNAS and using raid-z (ZFS),  raid 5 or raid 0 + 1 http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Hardware_Recommendations

It's not highly sophisticated but it's easy enough to set up for a beginner and from what I've researched most FREENAS users use the zfs raid configuration that would require minimum 8gb ECC ram + 1gb for every TB

[Taek]

Thanks for the reply.

Do you have any hardware and raid specifications that would best suited for the sia network? I was thinking of using freeNAS and using raid-z (ZFS),  raid 5 or raid 0 + 1 http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Hardware_Recommendations

It's not highly sophisticated but it's easy enough to set up for a beginner and from what I've researched most FREENAS users use the zfs raid configuration that would require minimum 8gb ECC ram + 1gb for every TB

So, we don't yet have any hardware recommendations, but when the time is closer to buy bulk storage for Sia we'll be doing some research and testing and sharing some guides. At the very least I think you'd want RAID 5, though ZFS may end up being more efficient. When one of your hard drives fail on Sia, you can repair it using Sia but that's going to require downloading an enormous amount of data (for each TB lost you'll need to pay for 4-8TB of network traffic. You'll only end up downloading about 1TB but that's because other nodes on the network are helping you move the process along. The numbers aren't fully worked out but they're not friendly). Because you can expect hard drives to fail frequently, you should have a local backup to save yourself the bandwidth. But because Sia is also doing redundancy, you'll only need 99% uptime instead of 99.999...% uptime.

You shouldn't need a ton of RAM. Instead you'll end up storing most of what would be in RAM on-disk. We'll be optimizing rigs so that the most expensive component is by far the storage and not the processor or case or anything else.

There will be a 10mpbs connection speed requirement for all participants. Each participant will need 10mpbs in bursts, so one participant requires a 10mbps connection (even if you only contribute 64GB). Because the network randomizes these bursts though (and they are infrequent), a single 10mbps connection should be able to support storage of several TB.

But again we'll write many pages of documentation on this so a newbie to Sia can catch up relatively easy and feel like they are optimizing the amount of money they make.

[mrnxtuser]

So, we don't yet have any hardware recommendations, but when the time is closer to buy bulk storage for Sia we'll be doing some research and testing and sharing some guides. At the very least I think you'd want RAID 5, though ZFS may end up being more efficient. When one of your hard drives fail on Sia, you can repair it using Sia but that's going to require downloading an enormous amount of data (for each TB lost you'll need to pay for 4-8TB of network traffic. You'll only end up downloading about 1TB but that's because other nodes on the network are helping you move the process along. The numbers aren't fully worked out but they're not friendly). Because you can expect hard drives to fail frequently, you should have a local backup to save yourself the bandwidth. But because Sia is also doing redundancy, you'll only need 99% uptime instead of 99.999...% uptime.

You shouldn't need a ton of RAM. Instead you'll end up storing most of what would be in RAM on-disk. We'll be optimizing rigs so that the most expensive component is by far the storage and not the processor or case or anything else.

There will be a 10mpbs connection speed requirement for all participants. Each participant will need 10mpbs in bursts, so one participant requires a 10mbps connection (even if you only contribute 64GB). Because the network randomizes these bursts though (and they are infrequent), a single 10mbps connection should be able to support storage of several TB.

But again we'll write many pages of documentation on this so a newbie to Sia can catch up relatively easy and feel like they are optimizing the amount of money they make.

Thanks a lot. I already have in mind what I want to do with the NAS. As I've mentioned before (or perhaps I haven't) I'll be taking advantage of my offices 100/100 Mbps fibre optics. Unethical I know but I'm the network admin there so I do what I want.

With the client, would we be able control how much bandwidth you are providing to the network? I was thinking it would be a good idea if you are able to set a schedule on the times you are able to provide maximum bandwidth to the SIA network. For example me setting a cap of 100/100 Mbps between 5pm and 8am (Non work hours) and a cap of 20/20 Mbps between 8am and 5pm (work hours).

[John_Paul]

Can one computer/server have two hosts/participants? For a quorum, is it true that the only time for a quorum to be down is the time that the quorum loses all 28 redundancies and one or more of the other 100 participants are down? How does a quorum or host get recovered from catastrophes?

[Taek]

Can one computer/server have two hosts/participants?

Yes, one server can host many participants, each at 64GB (revised from the original 8GB). It's expected that most servers will have on the order of dozens of participants, and we're trying to write the program such that a modest machine (maybe $300) can handle all of the computational power required to operate ~20-50 TB. These are all vague estimates at this point.

For a quorum, is it true that the only time for a quorum to be down is the time that the quorum loses all 28 redundancies and one or more of the other 100 participants are down? How does a quorum or host get recovered from catastrophes?

So, this has a lot of answers. Quorum-important data like error-detection and wallet info, as well as the block history is either stored at full redundancy (everyone in the quorum has a full copy) or at a redundancy of 8. So wallet data and other equally important data will only be lost if 112 out of 128 participants go offline at the same time. This gives us extremely high reliability, even when the assumption is that 50% of the network is dishonest.

Files on the other hand get to choose their redundancy. If you are storing extremely important documents (like your private keys, for example), you'll want to choose the maximum grade redundancy. This comes at a cost, instead of paying $5 per TB per month, you'll be paying $50 per TB per month. But if you're only storing 100kb at that price, who cares? For everyday files, you'll want to pick a more reasonable redundancy, like 100 out of 128, which means that your file will only be lost if 28 participants disappear at the same time. Assuming no malice and reasonable uptime (like 98%) per participant, it's extremely unlikely that you'd lose the file. We let users pick their redundancy because everyone is going to have different levels of paranoia/trust in the system, and we don't want to force one person to pay what they consider to be 10% too much and force another person to have redundancy that they worry is too little.

When one or more participants go offline, the network immediately replaces them with new participants. This involves having the new participants download the files and error-correct them and consumes a lot of bandwidth. This can be optimized in a few ways and we're exploring the best way to handle this. Overall, replacing a lost participant should take something in the 6-8hr range, and even less if the new guy has lots of bandwidth. That's why we set the default at 100 non-redunant participants. Assuming 98% uptime, it's going to be extremely rare that 28 out of 128 go offline in the same 8 hour window.

If the network is malicious though, and 50% of participants are cooperating to take down a file, they can all go offline together and a 99.9% uptime wouldn't save the file. If you're paranoid about your file being attacked, you should use the 8 redundancy that the network as a whole uses. (16 non-redundant participants)

[Touque]

I guess that the participants can also back up their own file by themselves to make an extra layer of safety.

[nemo1618]

With the client, would we be able control how much bandwidth you are providing to the network? I was thinking it would be a good idea if you are able to set a schedule on the times you are able to provide maximum bandwidth to the SIA network. For example me setting a cap of 100/100 Mbps between 5pm and 8am (Non work hours) and a cap of 20/20 Mbps between 8am and 5pm (work hours).

That's a good suggestion. It should be relatively straightforward to implement scheduled rate-limiting; any half-decent torrent client does. Of course, you'll have to maintain some minimum bandwidth at all times.

[Taek]

I'm happy to announce that we are starting to implement one of my favorite features: wallet-based approval of transactions instead of signature based approval of transactions. This sort of works like a script.

Wallets will have balances, scripts, and a way to interact with a script. This script will have the power to submit updates and transactions (such as allocating storage or editing a file, or of course sending money to another wallet). The rules of the output depend entirely upon what script is loaded into the wallet.

The typical signature-based-transaction behaviour can be simulated by having a public key in the data field (or several public keys in the data field. Or pointers to files that have whole lists of public keys... you get the point) and verifying an input+signature against the public key.

The script is going to be a full turing machine, and Luke (nemo) has started working on the details of the script. It's going to be a bytecode where each instruction has costs some volume of money (to discourage long scripts) and a timeout, in case an infinite loop occurs or more computation is allocated than the quorum has the ability to compute against. The script will also have access to higher level functions such as 'verify signature', that way verifications don't need to be written by-hand using the bytecoin.

This is all a ways away from being implemented but we've been making good progress.

[gs02xzz]

Thanks for the update!

[msin]

Thanks for the update!

+1, thanks for keeping us updated.

[mrnxtuser]

Thanks for the update! 

[Taek]

http://gigaom.com/2014/06/03/sec-charges-owner-of-bitcoin-sites-for-selling-unregistered-securities/

In light of this new article, I wanted to post about the legal status of Sia and Sianotes. Nothing that follows is a legally binding statement, we are working with our lawyers to get something that is legally binding. Cryptocurrency is a tricky field and it's taking a long time for us to get the legal statements we want. I believe we talked briefly about securities, and I believe that we were reassured that Sianotes are not securities, but we will be discussing the subject again.

I'm now going to list a set of statement that are similar to what you might see from the legally binding statement. None of the statements contained in this post are legally binding as they have not been reviewed by a lawyer. I'm expecting the legal statements to be similar, however it's hard to predict as I am not a lawyer.

Sianotes are not corporate equity.
Siastock is not corporate equity.
Sianotes have no cash value.
Siastock has no cash value.
Sianotes are owned/managed by Nebulous Incorporated. All liability falls upon the corporation and not upon myself or Luke.
Sianotes will eventually be converted to Siastock.
Siastock will be a source of income. Therefore, Sianotes represent a promise of future payments.
Hosts on Sia will have an income, part of this income will be taken as a fee and distributed among the owners of Siastock.
Host income is defined as 'payment for storage provided.' The only income that is taxed is income from offering storage. Other potential fees such as transaction fees, bandwidth fees, and computational fees are not included. Also not included are transactions sent directly to the host account.
1 Sianote is the promise of (1/10,000 * 0.039) of all host income, or 0.00039% of all host income.
Sianotes may not be redeemed until the completion and launch of Sia.
Sianotes do not apply to any alphas, betas, or test networks.

If there have been any misunderstandings (such as the expectation that you were buying corporate equity), please contact me.

We want Sia to be a legally recognized and supported product. We are doing everything we can to make this possible. I had hoped to make a legal statement without making a non-legally binding statement first, but I feel like it's an important issue and the legal statement is taking too long to construct. Especially if we have to register with the SEC or something, we could be delayed multiple weeks.

In the mean time though we've got lots of time to code. Most of the delays are scheduling and waiting for responses. The codebase is coming along nicely.

I want to say one last time that nothing in this post is legally binding. We're doing everything that we can to protect ourselves and Sia from legal prosecution and potential lawsuits. These protections must be applied carefully, and that takes time. Luckily, thus far it has not been very expensive or time-wasting, it's just been a slow process.

Thanks again for all of the support, we hope to have more updates soon.

[gs02xzz]

Sounds good!

[ownerbest]

Please Google 'Permacoin', Microsoft wants to create this Permacoin, it mentions storage thing.
I think there maybe some similar ideas with sia?

[Taek]

Please Google 'Permacoin', Microsoft wants to create this Permacoin, it mentions storage thing.
I think there maybe some similar ideas with sia?

So I guess I'll start with my concerns, because it's good to recognize the things that scare you. First, this has Microsoft's name all over it, which is hyper intimidating. That's something MaidSAFE, Cryptosphere, Bitcloud don't have behind them. Out of those competitors, the best will win because nobody has marketing power. With Microsoft backing something, it could win even it it's outright toxic to its users. So that's got me on edge. Second, this paper has a lot of intellectual clout behind it. Microsoft Research, Google is mentioned, Gregory Maxwell is mentioned. They're coming from a strong position.

"Large datacen-
ters enjoy economies of scale and save costs on bulk power
and cooling; even Amazon Glacier, which, as mentioned in
Section 6, most closely matches our operating points (cheap
to store, expensive to recover), is much cheaper per gigabyte
and offers similar features like geographic replication of data"

So, if I'm reading this correctly, they claim that Amazon Glacier is much cheaper per GB than permacoin. This will not-even-close to be true for Sia. Sia is the cheapest, fastest, best distributed system I've read about, and Permacoin doesn't appear to be able to make the same claims.

They don't use quorums, which will probably prevent them from being able to come close. Also, Microsoft's name is on it, but it seems to be a research idea and not part of the Microsoft product line, which is reassuring for Sia.

I need to give this paper a lot more time to fully understand it, but the approach is considerably different from Sia (though they use many of the same tricks). Sia's goal has become to provide cheap, fast, robust/redundant storage, and all of our design decisions are based around optimizing for that.

But at the very least it's clear that Sia is not alone. I wonder if Google or Amazon or Apple will step forward into this space. It's a very hot place to be and they've got access to some of the brightest minds in the world.

[ownerbest]

Now, I admire your technology and market judgment more than before.
If sia comes out as planned, there is no doubt that sia will be something huge.
Just go for it!

[Tobo]

Please Google 'Permacoin', Microsoft wants to create this Permacoin, it mentions storage thing.
I think there maybe some similar ideas with sia?

Interesting. Microsoft is sponsoring a decentralized solution. It sounds weird.

[blackhatzw]

How can  I get some coins now

[schnötzel]

How can  I get some coins now

Nxt Asset (always good to read 1st page  )

[blackhatzw]

How can  I get some coins now

Nxt Asset (always good to read 1st page  )

sianote in nxt asset has been sold out.

[PondSea]

How can  I get some coins now

Nxt Asset (always good to read 1st page  )

sianote in nxt asset has been sold out.

People are selling it, but not from the issuer

[loveyouforever]

Is there an IPO for this coin, I know pre-IPO has ended.

[Taek]

So, the pre-IPO has ended, but you can still get pre-IPO shares by visiting the NXT AE and getting the Sianotes. Within the next few days we'll be updating the website to explain what Sianotes are, how to get them, and what Sianotes are not. Before spending significant sums of money, you should be confident about what exactly a Sianote can be traded for. Depending on how much money we have and need, and how much attention we get from Venture Capitalists, we may or may not do an IPO. Siastock is going to be our primary form of income, so we are looking to hold onto a lot of that. Siacoin on the other hand is inflationary, so distribution problems should never be an issue. Early on, we'll probably be giving away a good amount of Siacoin to encourage people to use the network.  I'm not committing to anything though because a lot will be changing between now and launch.

I've got most of the wallet stuff worked out (and now partially implemented), so I'm going to go ahead and explain the workings a bit.

First, everything on Sia is script oriented. Instead of needing transactions to be signed by some authority (like the owner of a wallet), they only need to be approved by a script. This script is turing complete (though you'll get cut off if you run too long - the process is a bit more flexible and complicated than that but I'll save it for another post) and takes some input, which is processed before the script submits some actions to the network.

By doing this, you can emulate the use of public keys. Imagine that the first N bytes are a script that looks at the M bytes following the script, and M is a public key. The N bytes look at the input and assume that the first R bytes are a signature of the remaining bytes. If the signature matches the public key stored on disk, the input is accepted and run as the script.

But you can also allow for purely algorithmic actions. For example, you could have a script that takes as input a transaction (this is allowed - you can send money to a script and have it accompanied by input to the wallet script) and then generate a random number (scripts have access to the quorum's secure random number generator) between 0 and 6. If the number is 6, then 4 times the input is returned to the sender. You now have completely decentralized gambling run by a wallet that needs no interfacing to a third party.

But because scripts are turing complete, you can do much fancier things as well. Email, for example. Someone sends you an email by doing a transaction with an input message. The script then takes the message and stores it to disk automatically, but only accepts the message if the transaction contains enough to store the message for N days.

You could even potentially store an entire altcoin on Sia using script logic. Imagine that the input is a Bitcoin block. The script then figures out if the block is valid and stores it in memory, rejecting it otherwise. You then have a decentralized, automated archive for the Bitcoin blockchain that's secure and is being stored at a low redundancy. No central authorities or signatures necessary. So, it's a very powerful system (though it's got some constraints because it's not super efficient - probably 200-500x as expensive as doing it on your local machine. In terms of running Bitcoin though it's better, because it's a 1 time cost of 200-500x, as opposed to 1x times the number of nodes on the Bitcoin network.) The minimum size for a wallet is 4kb stored at redundancy 127 across 3 snapshots (the snapshot system allows for verifications and allows people to listen on quorums without needing the full list of scripts, which could potentially be very large - that's also going to be in another post), which is 4kb * 127 * 3 = ~1.5mb. This probably sounds like a lot, but assuming 1TB of raw storage gets priced around $5/mo, a wallet is going to run something like 0.001 cents per year. Very, very affordable.

I'm not sure what the max size for a script is going to be, but scripts are going to have the same required 127*3 redundancy, so they'll be moderately expensive. While the limit will probably be small (like 1mb), there will be techniques that allow you to chain multiple scripts together across wallets.

[ownerbest]

Good work, can't wait to see the wallet and scripts, 

[xibeijan]

way overpriced

[Taek]

way overpriced

Would you like to justify that? Right now Siastock has a market cap somewhere around $2m, which is in the top 30 coins. But Sia easily has enough potential to overtake all of the trivial coins, which would put its cap above $10m. But the potential here is a lot bigger than that. We're storage in a coin, and we do the storage part better than MaidSAFE, which has a much higher price than Sia.

The only reason that Sia is not worth substantial more is that the coin is not complete yet. But we're very close to having an alpha that people will be able to play around with. I reckon we can have an alpha out by July 1st with file storage (not done), proof-of-storage (mostly done), wallet transactions (mostly done), script wallets (done - at least done as far as alpha goes), and quorum based byzantine consensus (done for a while).

[msin]

way overpriced

way underpriced

[Momimaus]

way overpriced

Would you like to justify that? Right now Siastock has a market cap somewhere around $2m, which is in the top 30 coins. But Sia easily has enough potential to overtake all of the trivial coins, which would put its cap above $10m. But the potential here is a lot bigger than that. We're storage in a coin, and we do the storage part better than MaidSAFE, which has a much higher price than Sia.

The only reason that Sia is not worth substantial more is that the coin is not complete yet. But we're very close to having an alpha that people will be able to play around with. I reckon we can have an alpha out by July 1st with file storage (not done), proof-of-storage (mostly done), wallet transactions (mostly done), script wallets (done - at least done as far as alpha goes), and quorum based byzantine consensus (done for a while).

sounds good bro

[gs02xzz]

way underpriced

Agreed. Sia is not a crypto currency like bitcoin and its clone. It is a business model for data storage. There is a big utility and demand for it on the market. There is no comparison between Sia and current crypto currencies. Maybe the closest one is Maidsafe. But Maidsafe is not in production yet.

[Taek]

Alright it took a while, but the website is finally updated with information on Sianotes and how to buy them. Thanks for the patience!

[msin]

Alright it took a while, but the website is finally updated with information on Sianotes and how to buy them. Thanks for the patience!

+1, http://www.siacoin.com for those too lazy to read OP

[PondSea]

way overpriced

Would you like to justify that? Right now Siastock has a market cap somewhere around $2m, which is in the top 30 coins. But Sia easily has enough potential to overtake all of the trivial coins, which would put its cap above $10m. But the potential here is a lot bigger than that. We're storage in a coin, and we do the storage part better than MaidSAFE, which has a much higher price than Sia.

The only reason that Sia is not worth substantial more is that the coin is not complete yet. But we're very close to having an alpha that people will be able to play around with. I reckon we can have an alpha out by July 1st with file storage (not done), proof-of-storage (mostly done), wallet transactions (mostly done), script wallets (done - at least done as far as alpha goes), and quorum based byzantine consensus (done for a while).

Can't wait :-)

[Tobo]

Isle of Man can be an option if legal issues in US are too troublesome - https://nxtforum.org/general-discussion/nxt-crypto-valley-its-time-to-get-serious!/msg46069/#msg46069
 

[PondSea]

Dev would you be able to give us weekly progress reports if it is not too much of a issue?

[Taek]

Wow! I guess it's been a full week at this point.

Things have moved along well. We're pretty close to an alpha, and pretty close to working on files.

What you can do:

1. bootstrap a quorum and add siblings using wallet scripts
2. The default bootstrap wallet premines 15,000 coins and has a script body that allows arbitrary people to request new wallets that have 100 coins each. This can obviously be abused, but for the alpha we're not worried about it.
3. The default script body for wallets can send transactions and join the quorum as a sibling
4. Wallet weights work, and you can allocate storage (kinda, there's no script that allows you to do this, but that's pretty trivial. The real problem is that you can't upload data yet).

So, apart from a few things, we have pretty much a full cryptocurrency working at a single-quorum level, which is all we're looking for at the alpha level.

What we still need:

signatures - nothing uses signatures/public keys yet except for siblings, which means that anybody can perform actions upon wallets. This should be done in a few days (Luke's working on it)
nonces - scripts submitted once can be submitted again. This is a huge security problem! This will be fixed in a few days (I'm working on it)
uploading files - to upload files securely, you have to go through a staged process. Right now I'm working on the staged process (this is actually the same code that enables nonces). After that we'll need to implement the remaining erasure coding (erasure coding is already implemented at a broad level, so the new erasure coding should be easy). This should be done in about a week.
rewarding participants - this should be super trivial
having a max volume of data stored on quorum - also pretty trivial
proof of storage - most of the framework is already in place, should only take a day or two once file uploading has been finished
non-expert client - right now you pretty much need to read the code to figure out how the client and server work, and beyond that you still won't understand most of the output. By the alpha we'll have a client and server that explain themselves and come with a guide. But it will still be pretty far from intuitive or friendly.
better testing - everything is pretty buggy. The codebase is good but we've lightened up a lot on the testing these past 2 weeks. This means a lot more simple errors have slipped through. The initial alpha release will probably not be much better, and will have occasional bugs that may crash the program and kick you from the quorum. Pretty much all of these bugs should have a 1 line fix.

So, we're getting close to an alpha. Things are looking really good. You can test out what we do have by forking us on github or just cloning the source repo. There's not much to play with at this point but the scripting is really far along. If you're feeling adventurous you can try writing your own script bodies and script inputs. The alpha will hopefully have about a half-dozen examples.

[PondSea]

Thanks for the update

[ownerbest]

Thanks for the update.
Sia is a big thing, devs are very responsible guys, I never doubt that.

[Taek]

So, I've got good news and bad news.

The good news is, I've realized that we can use the idea of a merkle tree to make the maximum sector size essentially unlimited, which saves a lot of gymnastics for larger files, and makes file proofs a lot cheaper in terms of bandwidth.  It also makes changing parts of a sector reasonably priced without needing to download the whole sector. (before, you needed to download the entire sector before uploading any changes. Now, you just need to download log(n) hashes).

The bad news is that I've got to redesign and implement a few things to make it possible. But it makes file proofs more bandwidth efficient by a factor of 200, which is a pretty big deal because that was a bottleneck before and makes the minimum requirement for being a participant much, much less. I'm still hopeful about July 1st.

[voldemort628]

But it makes file proofs more bandwidth efficient by a factor of 200, which is a pretty big deal because that was a bottleneck before and makes the minimum requirement for being a participant much, much less. I'm still hopeful about July 1st.

doesnt sound that bad after all

[grandpa_seth]

I like it when the people I've invested in tell me the bad news is some extra work to implement the really good news. I'm going to buy a happy meal now.

[robinson5]

Hi I'm very interested in Sia and wondering how to get involved.  If all the Siastock have been sold then what are the Sianotes being sold on NXT's AE?  Also, is Siacoin available yet to be bought or mined? How many Siastock have been sold?

Thanks for explaining!

[Taek]

Not all of the Siastock has been sold. If you look at this page: http://www.siacoin.com/sianotes.html, you will see the following statement:

"One Sianote can be directly converted to 0.00039% of host income from renting storage, or 10,000 for 3.9% of all host income from storage. Currently, there are approximately 1250 sianotes in circulation, or just under 0.5%."

For the near future, no more Sianotes will be released into circulation. While there are 10,000 Sianotes total, there is no guarantee that the final host income fee will be 3.9%. We are committed to having a fee of at least 0.5%, because this is a fee that we have promised to our investors. We will probably have a fee that is higher, because then we have some income for the company (which will give us power as a corporate entity to hire developers, market our product, purchase security audits, and potentially many other things that require a strong financial base).

We made 10,000 Sianotes to give ourselves flexibility to release more in the future if we decided without needing to create a new asset on the AE. We have no commitments to put more Sianotes in circulation than are already in circulation.

I think this covers everything you asked.

[Taek]

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/28uxkg/bitcoin_crowdfunder_swarm_launches_raises_720000/

Wow. Makes my crowd fund feel pretty weak. I hadn't even heard of these guys. Reading the Reddit comments though, it seems like there's a lot of skepticism around the fundraising, and people aren't sure if it actually happened, or if they spoofed the first volumes.

[Taek]

Status Update

We're nearing completion of the alpha version of the server. Right now Sia as a whole is around 9kloc, and most everything that's left to implement in the server is proof of storage. The server now supports file uploads, but the client does not, which means you still can't upload files. I'm optimistic about having the client portion of uploading done today, which means that Sia will be mostly complete as an alpha. After that's done we'll need to do a large code review, then we'll need to revise the whitepaper, and then we'll need to create a bunch of documentation around using the alpha.

It still seems like all of this can be finished by July 1st! Because it's an alpha, I'm expecting it to be a bit buggy, and it's definitely missing a lot of mechanics that will be in the full version. But it should give a reasonable idea of what the full version might be like.

The alpha is only going to have a cli server and client.

[gvans]

Thanks again for updates. The alpha will be open for anyone?

[Taek]

Yes, the alpha will be publicly available.

[Momimaus]

Can´t wait for it. 

[Lordoftherigs]

This project have mighty Devs

[PondSea]

Wow crazy James from nxt has over 1/3 of the ipo shares 

[gs02xzz]

Wow crazy James from nxt has over 1/3 of the ipo shares  

Actually James bought 1/3 of the pre IPO notes and there is only about 12% of total notes was issued for the pre IPO. Overall, James asset own about 4% of total Sianotes/Siastocks. That is still huge. If Sia is taking off one day, James asset owners will be rich.

[loveyouforever]

Will it have further IPO when it launches?

[MingZhou]

Will it have further IPO when it launches?

Based on what dev said, maybe and maybe not.

[PondSea]

Hi Taek，

Is there any indication when the alpha might be out?

[Taek]

Hi, we're a bit behind, but today we're working nonstop. It should be out before we go to sleep. We've got most things ready.

Thanks for the patience, sorry about the delay.

[GeorgeW]

Hi, we're a bit behind, but today we're working nonstop. It should be out before we go to sleep. We've got most things ready.
Thanks for the patience, sorry about the delay.

No worries. Take your time as long as you give an update.

[Momimaus]

Hi, we're a bit behind, but today we're working nonstop. It should be out before we go to sleep. We've got most things ready.

Thanks for the patience, sorry about the delay.

Take your time. Rome wasn´t build in a day, so you can take a week 

[PonyBoy]

So I wonder if there will ever be legal repercussions for the people sharing disk space for this coin.

What happens if/when a child porn ring starts using this coin to store imgs? It would mean anyone sharing disk space for this coin could possibly be arrested and tried for possessing child porn.

[Vega]

So I wonder if there will ever be legal repercussions for the people sharing disk space for this coin.

What happens if/when a child porn ring starts using this coin to store imgs? It would mean anyone sharing disk space for this coin could possibly be arrested and tried for possessing child porn.

If i understand this correctly there will be no way to know what do you store on your computer, it's encrypted. It will not even be full files, just pieces of data.

btw, this is a much more relevant question with some other crypto currencies
If a crypto currency allows anyone to send messages or comments what happens when someone sends the data of a child porn pic as messages, comments? Then technically anyone who stores the blochain posesses that picture.

This is why it is a very bad idea to make posession of any information or data illegal. In the near future there will be some serious problems with this.

[Taek]

The first alpha release is complete. This isn't intended to be used for actual file storage, just to demonstrate what Sia might look like. Feedback is appreciated, but we are aware of a large number of bugs and points of insecurity. There's a lot that hasn't been implemented yet. Think of it more as a proof-of-concept than a traditional alpha.

Check it out at siacoin.com/download.html

There you will find an explanation on how to download and install Sia. Unfortunately, we don't have Windows binaries yet.

We have an IRC channel now, #sia-talk on freenode. We have registered a few other channels for future use, but until there's a need for them we plan on keeping them mostly dormant.

Things you can do with the current alpha:

Create wallets
Send money between wallets
Upload files to wallets (max 256 atoms, explained later)
Download files

The block speed for the alpha release is 256 seconds per block. Unfortunately, many actions such as upload take several blocks to complete, though never more than 4. This can make the production Sia a little slow to play around with. (If it really bothers you, you can recompile with a shorter interval.) The full version of Sia will have block speeds somewhere between 1 block every 2-16 hours. However, it will also support accelerated actions, which can only occur under certain but easily achieved constraints. Most people will not realize that Sia moves at a pace of 1 step every few hours, because they will be using cryptographic proofs behind the scenes to accelerate their actions. These accelerations won't be supported in Sia until the beta.

Notes:
- Empty wallets do not get deleted.
- Participants do not get kicked for not having files.
- Participants do get kicked for missing a single heartbeat. This can cause problems for unstable connections
- Sometimes participants don't join the quorum in-sync. This is rare, and the fix is to just try again.
- After creating a new quorum, you must wait a full block before adding any siblings.
- You may encounter some hard crashes. This is because a good error-handling framework is still in the works.

What are Atoms?
An atom is a unit of storage on the Sia network. Uploaders are allowed to pick their own redundancy, which means that the amount of data which can be stored in an atom is variable. At full redundancy (every sibling has the complete file), only 4kb can be stored per atom, the max file size is 1MB, and the redundancy is equal to the quorum size. (For the alpha, the quorum size is 32). At a lower redundancy (like double redundancy), an atom is 4KB * 16 hosts, which means the max file size is slightly more flexible.

Picking a Redundancy
Redundancy works by picking a value, k, which represents the number of siblings that need to remain online in order for the file to be recoverable. The amount of redundancy is QuorumSize/K. At k=32 (the current quorum size), the redundancy is 1, meaning there is exactly 1 copy of the file on the network. At k=16, there are 2 complete copies of the file on the network, and the original file can be rebuilt from any 16 siblings.

Setting up a Quorum
Right now, all quorums are pseudo-decentralized, which means that anybody can establish a quorum, and anybody can join a quorum that has extra space for siblings. To establish a quorum, run the server executable and type 'e'. This creates a new quorum bootstrapped to your current address and chosen port number. To join a quorum, type 'j', and input the address of any host in the quorum you wish to join.

Messing Around
Feel free to dig into the source code a bit. To reduce the quorum size (which reduces the block speed), change QuorumSize in src/quorum/quorum.go. To change the step length (currently set to 8 seconds, reducing this will also reduce the block speed), change StepDuration in src/participant/listen.go.

We realize right now that setting up a quorum is a bit of a pain, and that there are lots of frustrating things that can go wrong while keeping one running. This is merely a result of the early stage of the software. Later versions will be easier to use, less dependent on a stable internet connection, and will not have occasional synchronization hiccups.


Moving Forward:
The first thing we're doing is taking a 3-4 day break from coding. It's easy to get your head buried and miss out on what's happening in the rest of the world. We'll be using this time to take a broader perspective on Sia and figure out what the next best steps are.

We're also setting a deadline for a alpha v2 release in 3-4 weeks. This alpha will have:

+ increased DOS (denial-of-service) protection
+ automatic port forwarding
+ smooth, cryptographic synchronization among hosts
+ wallets that get deleted upon running out of money
+ nonces for transactions, meaning a signed transaction can only be used once
+ proof-of-storage with cheating protection and auto-cheating implemented. (Auto cheating is something you do if you don't have the file, for example if your disk corrupts.

After that we'll be looking toward building the meta-quorums, cryptographic DOS protection (), an instant-transaction network, and a more comfortable scripting environment.

If you have questions, you can post here, chat with us in the IRC channel, or shoot us an email.

[msin]

Thanks for the update!

[PaulWang]

It seems that Sianotes price has increased more than 30% in term of Nxt and 100% in term of BTC. https://nxtblocks.info/#section/assets_exchange/11593659039925686857

[msin]

It seems that Sianotes price has increased more than 30% in term of Nxt and 100% in term of BTC. https://nxtblocks.info/#section/assets_exchange/11593659039925686857

Typical for an alpha release.  Expect much bigger returns when Sia is up and running.

[zoro1]

do you think you are able to join forces with storj?   i think one decentralized cloud storage is enough,
then we can develop all the other decentalized apps based on storage

[Taek]

We've already been in touch with storj. We're both looking at working together but it's difficult to tell how exactly to fit the pieces together. We're also in the next few months going to be looking at joining forces with other Boston based cryptocurrencies, and we'll definitely be involved with the MIT Bitcoin project.

Right now most alt-coins are competing with each other. I think there's some room to change that to at least some degree, but the biggest obstacle is that everyone is so passionate about what they're currently working on. But right now the politics are very friendly, and we might get some very powerful partnerships up and running in the next year or so.

====

In other news, I've been looking at our current automatic repair scheme for files, and I've realized that repairing low redundancy files is extremely expensive using Reed-Solomon encoding, even if you wait until you're repairing 8-12 files at a time. As an only solution, I don't think it's reasonable.

Luckily we've got a large array of options available to us. We can have a slow-degrade of files, where when 1 node goes offline all the other nodes respond by shifting some of their data to the new node. You start with a file at 1.2 or 1.5 redundancy (or whatever), and over time it slowly degrades to 1 and less than 1 redundancy as nodes fail. It's then up to you to figure out when to repair it. This is obviously not ideal because then the network can't automatically repair your files, but it might not be difficult to set up some sort of peripheral service (perhaps even a decentralized peripheral service) that automatically repairs your files for you as they degrade. And maybe we could establish some rules for extending redundancy and... anyway, it's an option that's available to us.

Another option is to support other types of codes. Reed-Solomon codes are nice because they're maximum-distance separable. A redundancy of 3 results in storing 3 complete copies of the file. A redundancy of 1.2 results in storing 1.2 complete copies of the file. LT codes, Spinal codes, and Raptor codes are all alternatives that might be cheaper to repair, but you lose the some efficiency in storage. A redundancy of 3 might take 3.5 or 5 complete copies of the file being stored. But if you can repair files using only 50% extra bandwidth instead of 15000% extra bandwidth, it could be worth the tradeoff.

What I'm really going to be holding out for, and perhaps working on myself (once the other facets of Sia are developed, so don't expect anything soon), is a new type of erasure code that is both maximum-distance separable and minimum-bandwidth recoverable. That means that repairing a 16MB file piece would only take 16MB of downloads, instead of needing to rebuild the entire original file that the pieces build out. Intuitively, it seems possible. I have no idea, but I'm not aware of any mathematical laws indicating that it wouldn't be possible.

Regardless, this ultimately means that automatic file repairing is not going to be a feature for a while. We'll be working on the other pieces of quorum-based cryptocurrency and giving the expensive recovery problem time to stew. I'm optimistic for the long term prospects.

[robinson5]

On Sia's website under Sianotes (http://www.siacoin.com/sianotes.html) it says that "the developers will own the majority of Siastock".  I know there are only 1250 sianotes in circulation which represents a little under 0.5% of host income.  Sia is tentatively planning on having a 3.9% fee so does this mean the remaining 8,750 sianotes, which represents a little more than 3.4% of host income, is held by the developers?  Or are the remaining sianotes just not in circulation and no one has them yet?  I'm fine with the developers keeping sianotes because they should be able to reward themselves for all the work.  I'm just wondering how much they have because I think at some point it could potentially be too much.  Thanks for explaining!

[PondSea]

On Sia's website under Sianotes (http://www.siacoin.com/sianotes.html) it says that "the developers will own the majority of Siastock".  I know there are only 1250 sianotes in circulation which represents a little under 0.5% of host income.  Sia is tentatively planning on having a 3.9% fee so does this mean the remaining 8,750 sianotes, which represents a little more than 3.4% of host income, is held by the developers?  Or are the remaining sianotes just not in circulation and no one has them yet?  I'm fine with the developers keeping sianotes because they should be able to reward themselves for all the work.  I'm just wondering how much they have because I think at some point it could potentially be too much.  Thanks for explaining!

From my understand the devs hold the rest unless they have another ipo and then it will get distributed again.

[Taek]

We're thinking 3.9%. If we took too much, then hosts wouldn't be inclined to be on our network, which would be bad for the entire network.

The Siastock would be owned by Nebulous Incorporated, which is a company and not two individuals. That's an important distinction. We are looking for large volumes of income, initially on the order of millions of dollars but we would like to see Nebulous become a Google or Microsoft sized company. At that point most of the revenue would be coming from sources other than Siastock, of course.

The big reason we're looking at taking a lot of money is so that we can do a lot with the cryptocurrency. Bitcoin is often criticized as being underfunded. Imagine if Satoshi's 1 million btc were funding a corporation with hundreds of full time developers, marketing, and actively doing things like attacking mastercard. That's where our Siastock will be going.

[Tobo]

Will Nebulous issue stocks in the near future? Will siastocks have a chance to convert to Nebulous stocks?

[Taek]

Siastocks will never turn into Nebulous stocks. There are legal barriers to doing that.

It's very difficult to crowd fund corporate equity, and it's strongly recommended against by every lawyer I've talked to so far. You can crowd fund a product (like through Kickstarter), but as soon as you are selling equity to a bunch of little investors you've got legal problems.

[msin]

A smart strategy,  if you are able to raise that kind of capital and employ several devs, you can accomplish many things in a short period of time.  This makes sense for Sia as Sia has a more commercial application than other Cryptos.

[Malibusparky]

Siastocks will never turn into Nebulous stocks. There are legal barriers to doing that.

It's very difficult to crowd fund corporate equity, and it's strongly recommended against by every lawyer I've talked to so far. You can crowd fund a product (like through Kickstarter), but as soon as you are selling equity to a bunch of little investors you've got legal problems.

So then maybe dumb question but does that mean the lawyers you've talked to say the money I'll be making from siastock is legal?

[Taek]

So then maybe dumb question but does that mean the lawyers you've talked to say the money I'll be making from siastock is legal?

There aren't any clear regulations around this type of product. We sold you something that'll generate you income, except in many ways it feels like a financial instrument. The SEC for the most part has been playing nice with Bitcoin related tech. Some companies have gotten busted for illegally selling equity, but Sianotes are not equity and are thus protected against that specific case.

I wish that I could give you a definitive yes, but our lawyers said the best they could do is "it's probably not going to be a problem." There's no law that clear-cut makes it illegal, and there's no law that makes it seem likely to be illegal. But the laws are so complex and convoluted that if some regulator decided it needed to be illegal, they could likely find some wording in an existing law and use it to prosecute us. They don't think that will happen though.

If we do receive any sort of notification or attention from the SEC (which is the body that is most likely to want to regulate Sianotes), we'll let everyone know immediately.

I personally don't see it being a problem. I also know that the name 'Siastock' isn't going to stick around, because it's very much not stock in the traditional sense, and we don't want regulators making that mistake. I haven't figured out a good replacement name yet though.

[grandpa_seth]

So then maybe dumb question but does that mean the lawyers you've talked to say the money I'll be making from siastock is legal?

There aren't any clear regulations around this type of product. We sold you something that'll generate you income, except in many ways it feels like a financial instrument. The SEC for the most part has been playing nice with Bitcoin related tech. Some companies have gotten busted for illegally selling equity, but Sianotes are not equity and are thus protected against that specific case.

I wish that I could give you a definitive yes, but our lawyers said the best they could do is "it's probably not going to be a problem." There's no law that clear-cut makes it illegal, and there's no law that makes it seem likely to be illegal. But the laws are so complex and convoluted that if some regulator decided it needed to be illegal, they could likely find some wording in an existing law and use it to prosecute us. They don't think that will happen though.

If we do receive any sort of notification or attention from the SEC (which is the body that is most likely to want to regulate Sianotes), we'll let everyone know immediately.

I personally don't see it being a problem. I also know that the name 'Siastock' isn't going to stick around, because it's very much not stock in the traditional sense, and we don't want regulators making that mistake. I haven't figured out a good replacement name yet though.

That is the answer that should have been expected. Its kind of a reminder to us all that although your idea for siacoin is superb and sianotes sold like hotcakes this is still a risky investment with no guarantee of anything. That being said if you are successful I fully expect a huge return on investment. As for the new name to siastock I wouldn't even attempt at suggesting a proper name. I think you two can come up with something appropriate when the time comes. Commence obligatory members posting name suggestions.

[Momimaus]

Hey dev, everything is very nice so far.

Can I ask you to renew the timeline? I think a lot of things have changed.

[Taek]

A lot of things have changed.

Current plans:

0. Review and refactor codebase. This will take probably all of this week. We're going to start at a high level, see what's working and what isn't, build out a bunch of tests for the stable code, and then rewrite any code that no longer makes sense. Ultimately we're probably going to end up replacing around 30% of the existing code. That's just an estimate.
1. Fix network instability intolerance. I think Luke knows what he's doing, and should be able to resolve most of the problems within the next 2 weeks.
2. Implementation of nonces in the quorum that throws out scripts which have already been processed. Shouldn't take too long.
3. Full cryptographic synchronization. This one might take longer, because there are things we'll need that we haven't started programming yet.
4. Wallets get destroyed after running out of funds.
5. Test-net, with full uptime nodes hosted in several locations (we have a few volunteers who will help to host these), running full blockchains. It'll be self-monitoring and self restarting, and it'll log all problems that happen.

After that there should be uploading, downloading, sending money around, all based in a scripting system. There will be proof of storage, network stability, and a test-net that helps us find issues with the quorum. Still no user friendly client at that point.

Overall I'm expecting this to take a month. I'd like to imagine that it'll go faster but I can't be certain.

[Tobo]

Siatoken

[Momimaus]

Thank you. Sounds very good.

[Taek]

So, we've been holding off on this announcement, but I think we're at a place where we can tell everyone.

We've just signed a $375,000 agreement for 7.5% of the company equity. There's still some paperwork to sign, but we should have the cash by the end of July. Which means we're also about to be hiring one or two full time employees. We need someone who will build the frontend, and will preferably work and live in Boston. We might be able to pick up an MIT graduate. I've got a really good feeling as a whole about our investor, he's had several hit investments and is really interested in seeing Sia succeed.

Another thing that's in progress is that we're going to be involved with the MIT Bitcoin project. We haven't met anyone in person yet but we should be meeting with the guys leading the initiative in the next few weeks.

So, on the business front things are looking good.

[Daedelus]

So, we've been holding off on this announcement, but I think we're at a place where we can tell everyone.

We've just signed a $375,000 agreement for 7.5% of the company equity. There's still some paperwork to sign, but we should have the cash by the end of July. Which means we're also about to be hiring one or two full time employees. We need someone who will build the frontend, and will preferably work and live in Boston. We might be able to pick up an MIT graduate. I've got a really good feeling as a whole about our investor, he's had several hit investments and is really interested in seeing Sia succeed.

Another thing that's in progress is that we're going to be involved with the MIT Bitcoin project. We haven't met anyone in person yet but we should be meeting with the guys leading the initiative in the next few weeks.

So, on the business front things are looking good.

Can you check my maths?

A $375,000 investment for 7.5% equity values Sia at $5million.

The 1500 Sianotes being sold on Nxt Asset Exchange represent 15% of the company? So the AE market cap at that valuation should be $750,000.

Sianote is currently valued at 4200 NXT * 1500 = 6.3 million NXT = $318,623.

So Sianote is currently selling at 42% its fair value. So.... panic buy?

[stereotype]

So, we've been holding off on this announcement, but I think we're at a place where we can tell everyone.

We've just signed a $375,000 agreement for 7.5% of the company equity. There's still some paperwork to sign, but we should have the cash by the end of July. Which means we're also about to be hiring one or two full time employees. We need someone who will build the frontend, and will preferably work and live in Boston. We might be able to pick up an MIT graduate. I've got a really good feeling as a whole about our investor, he's had several hit investments and is really interested in seeing Sia succeed.

Another thing that's in progress is that we're going to be involved with the MIT Bitcoin project. We haven't met anyone in person yet but we should be meeting with the guys leading the initiative in the next few weeks.

So, on the business front things are looking good.

Just the MIT Bitcoin project would have been good on its own.  The spin-offs, connections, and interest this will generate for Sia, shouldn't be under estimated.
And now you have seasoned investors already interested and willing to buy-in. Nicely done Sir. 
Something tells me this space is going to heat up very soon, with more smart money moving in across the main contenders, in the hope of being positioned to carve out market share. Watching with interest. 

[Vendettacoin]

How can i join now?

[voldemort628]

How can i join now?

sianotes are available on Nxt AE. make sure u follow instructions carefully and get the right asset.
http://nxtforum.org/ is a good start.

[stereotype]

How can i join now?

Buy some Nxt from Poloniex or BTER, download the official Nxt client, and create an account...... http://nxtra.org/nxt-wallet/  
and buy/bid for sianote, on the AE.

[Daedelus]

Do the assets on AE represent 15% of the company?

Edit: Yes


SiaNotes
Promoter(s)
Taek
What is it? 
Decentralized Cloud Storage Network
What percentage is being sold? 
15%
How many siastock to be sold?
1500 (out of 10,000)
What price will they be sold at?
2400 NXT (subject to change with exchange rates - raising 250 BTC total)
Nxtforum discussion
https://nxtforum.org/alternate-cryptocurrencies/sia-official-nxt-thread/
Other sites
www.siacoin.com
bitcointalk thread
Nxt account used to issue assets
NXT-K5ZJ-NNR2-4J4B-D92UF
(13179792715523067888 in original format)
Asset ID
11593659039925686857
Asset Name
sianote
Ticker symbol
SIAN

[stereotype]

It could now be interpreted as 22.5% of siastock would have been sold, and this deal could form part of the extra 25% (40% total) that was going to be sold, after sia was complete.

"After the completion of Sia, an additional volume of Siastock will be sold in an IPO, likely 25%. (The total sold between the pre-IPO and IPO would then be 40%). During the IPO, Siastock will be substantially more expensive and be used to acquire office space, full time developers, security audits of both the protocol and of the software, as well as marketing."

Can Taek clear this up?

[Tobo]

Sia sold about 12% of sianotes at the pre-sale, not 15%. I guess that this 7.5% shares sold are shares of Nebulous, the company, not the sianote. Sianote is one of the main income resources of Nebulous in the future and the sole resource in the beginning. So the higher the company's stock value, the higher the sianote's value.

[Momimaus]

Sia sold about 12% of sianotes at the pre-sale, not 15%. I guess that this 7.5% shares sold are shares of Nebulous, the company, not the sianote. Sianote is one of the main income resources of Nebulous in the future and the sole resource in the beginning. So the higher the company's stock value, the higher the sianote's value.

Why 12%?

He said 10000 shares in total. And he sold 1500 at IPO.

[msin]

So, we've been holding off on this announcement, but I think we're at a place where we can tell everyone.

We've just signed a $375,000 agreement for 7.5% of the company equity. There's still some paperwork to sign, but we should have the cash by the end of July. Which means we're also about to be hiring one or two full time employees. We need someone who will build the frontend, and will preferably work and live in Boston. We might be able to pick up an MIT graduate. I've got a really good feeling as a whole about our investor, he's had several hit investments and is really interested in seeing Sia succeed.

Another thing that's in progress is that we're going to be involved with the MIT Bitcoin project. We haven't met anyone in person yet but we should be meeting with the guys leading the initiative in the next few weeks.

So, on the business front things are looking good.

Very good news, interested to hear what comes of the MIT project.

[Tobo]

Why 12%?
He said 10000 shares in total. And he sold 1500 at IPO.

Because the investors liked this project so much and Sia could reach their funding goal with about 1250 sianotes - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=591283.200

it also means that the sianotes in circulation are rarer than people thought and should be more valuable.

[Momimaus]

Why 12%?
He said 10000 shares in total. And he sold 1500 at IPO.

Because the investors liked this project so much and Sia could reach their funding goal with about 1250 sianotes - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=591283.200

it also means that the sianotes in circulation are rarer than people thought and should be more valuable.

alright. good to know

[aiying715]

So, we've been holding off on this announcement, but I think we're at a place where we can tell everyone.

We've just signed a $375,000 agreement for 7.5% of the company equity. There's still some paperwork to sign, but we should have the cash by the end of July. Which means we're also about to be hiring one or two full time employees. We need someone who will build the frontend, and will preferably work and live in Boston. We might be able to pick up an MIT graduate. I've got a really good feeling as a whole about our investor, he's had several hit investments and is really interested in seeing Sia succeed.

Another thing that's in progress is that we're going to be involved with the MIT Bitcoin project. We haven't met anyone in person yet but we should be meeting with the guys leading the initiative in the next few weeks.

So, on the business front things are looking good.

Can you check my maths?

A $375,000 investment for 7.5% equity values Sia at $5million.

The 1500 Sianotes being sold on Nxt Asset Exchange represent 15% of the company? So the AE market cap at that valuation should be $750,000.

Sianote is currently valued at 4200 NXT * 1500 = 6.3 million NXT = $318,623.

So Sianote is currently selling at 42% its fair value. So.... panic buy?

Let me tell u guys,the ultimate Cruel truth is that totally 10000 Sianote just represent 3.9% host income from renting storage.One Sianote can be directly converted to 0.00039% host income from renting storage.The other is nothing.No represent the company.No represent the siacoin.No represent anything.

The Below can prove it.

"One Sianote can be directly converted to 0.00039% of host income from renting storage, or 10,000 for 3.9% of all host income from storage. Currently, there are approximately 1250 sianotes in circulation, or just under 0.5%."

Hi Taek,

I have a question about IPO,This time 15% IPO means 15% siacoins or 15% siastock or total project 15%(siacoins+siastock)?

Waiting for your reply,thanks.

The pre-IPO is just for siastock. No siacoins are involved, except that siastock provides an income in siacoins as explained by the economic model.

We're thinking 3.9%. If we took too much, then hosts wouldn't be inclined to be on our network, which would be bad for the entire network.

The Siastock would be owned by Nebulous Incorporated, which is a company and not two individuals. That's an important distinction. We are looking for large volumes of income, initially on the order of millions of dollars but we would like to see Nebulous become a Google or Microsoft sized company. At that point most of the revenue would be coming from sources other than Siastock, of course.

Siastocks will never turn into Nebulous stocks. There are legal barriers to doing that.

It's very difficult to crowd fund corporate equity, and it's strongly recommended against by every lawyer I've talked to so far. You can crowd fund a product (like through Kickstarter), but as soon as you are selling equity to a bunch of little investors you've got legal problems.

So wake up guys,Sia project is amazing,but sianote is just a joke.What a pitiful ROI,that's why I ignore it.

[tobeaj2mer01]

Maybe joining in Siacoin now is too late, price is too high.

[Taek]

Can you check my maths?

A $375,000 investment for 7.5% equity values Sia at $5million.

The 1500 Sianotes being sold on Nxt Asset Exchange represent 15% of the company? So the AE market cap at that valuation should be $750,000.

Sianote is currently valued at 4200 NXT * 1500 = 6.3 million NXT = $318,623.

So Sianote is currently selling at 42% its fair value. So.... panic buy?

Do the assets on AE represent 15% of the company?

Edit: Yes


SiaNotes
Promoter(s)
Taek
What is it?  
Decentralized Cloud Storage Network
What percentage is being sold?  
15%
How many siastock to be sold?
1500 (out of 10,000)
What price will they be sold at?
2400 NXT (subject to change with exchange rates - raising 250 BTC total)
Nxtforum discussion
https://nxtforum.org/alternate-cryptocurrencies/sia-official-nxt-thread/
Other sites
www.siacoin.com
bitcointalk thread
Nxt account used to issue assets
NXT-K5ZJ-NNR2-4J4B-D92UF
(13179792715523067888 in original format)
Asset ID
11593659039925686857
Asset Name
sianote
Ticker symbol
SIAN

Woah HUGE clarification needs to be made. Sianotes ARE NOT corporate stock/equity. For the $375,000, we sold corporate equity, which is very different from Sianotes. Our investor doesn't own any sianotes at all.

Tobo is correct. ~1250 sianotes were sold during the initial crowd-fund. While the original post said that would equal 12.5% of all Sianotes (and indeed equal 12.5% of all Sianotes created on the AE), we have reserved the right to change the number of Sianotes in circulation. 1 sianote earns 0.00039% of host income from renting storage. The full legal rules are established at http://www.siacoin.com/sianotes.html. In total just under 0.5% of all host income has been sold off.

Before you buy Sianotes, make sure you understand what you are buying. You ARE NOT buying equity, you are not buying a percentage of the company. You are buying a percentage of host income from storage, which will still have significant value if Sia takes off.

The post investment valuation of Nebulous Incorporated (the company behind Sia -- Apple is to Iphone as Nebulous is to Sia) is 5 million dollars. I expect it to be a lot higher once we've got a beta that's easy to use and stores files securely.

So wake up guys,Sia project is amazing,but sianote is just a joke.What a pitiful ROI,that's why I ignore it.

Currently Sianotes are being sold for ~$250 USD each. 1250 are then worth about $312,500, meaning at current network prices, the total host income for storage (which will also be about the amount of money spent on storage) is estimated to be about $62,000,000. This is over the entire history of Sia. Sianotes are far from worthless, especially if you expect Sia to sell more than $62,000,000 of storage over its entire lifetime. We (the devs) certainly do.

Let me know if any of you are confused about something. I'm happy to continue clarifying.

[stereotype]

Let me know if any of you are confused about something. I'm happy to continue clarifying.

Do you still plan to sell another 25% block of shares? How much?

Also, does the investor bring anything more, other than money?

[Taek]

Do you still plan to sell another 25% block of shares? How much?

We aren't sure. I do imagine that we'll be raising a Series A round at some point, which will involve selling a bunch of corporate stock. If the Sianote price is high enough, we may also sell some more Sianotes to fund ourselves. But we are not committing to anything.

Also, does the investor bring anything more, other than money?

Yes, we've actually been very happy with what he's done for us so far. We'll be moving into office space that he is providing for us for free by the end of the week. He's intro'd us to other people and has a large network of investments in companies like Dropbox and Uber. We believe that in the long run, being in his office will be one of the best things for our company at this stage. His value is a lot greater than the cash we've received, which is why we agreed to have him on board. I also think that when we do decide to raise a Series A, he'll be instrumental in getting more investors on board.

[msin]

We aren't sure. I do imagine that we'll be raising a Series A round at some point, which will involve selling a bunch of corporate stock. If the Sianote price is high enough, we may also sell some more Sianotes to fund ourselves. But we are not committing to anything.

Since you are clear to separate Nebulous corporate equity from Sianotes. I think it would be good for investors or others who are interested to understand how much of Nebulous revenue will rely on Siacoins generated by Sianotes that Nebulous controls. Your posts could come across as Sianotes are somewhat of an afterthought and not the main revenue source for Nebulous.  I believe investors want to know that although they don't own part of Nebulous, they do own part of the revenue stream.  i.e. You don't own part of Google, but you do own a % of revenue generated by Google Ads.

[Taek]

Especially in the first two to four years, we expect Sianotes to provide the primary source of revenue for Nebulous. We control the majority of the Sianotes, but we have also sold a substantial portion of this revenue stream to our early investors.

[msin]

Especially in the first two to four years, we expect Sianotes to provide the primary source of revenue for Nebulous. We control the majority of the Sianotes, but we have also sold a substantial portion of this revenue stream to our early investors.

   
It's important for investors to know that the mission of Nebulous is to make Sianotes valuable.

[Tobo]

I also think that when we do decide to raise a Series A, he'll be instrumental in getting more investors on board.

Will this Series A be open to the holders of Sianotes to purchase?

[msin]

I also think that when we do decide to raise a Series A, he'll be instrumental in getting more investors on board.

Will this Series A be open to the holders of Sianotes?

If you are an accredited investor, maybe, but why would you want to own equity in Nebulous?  Valuation of Nebulous will be based on (potential) revenue from Sianote as Taek just stated, so just buy Sianote and you will be cutting out the middle man and gaining direct access to Nebulous' revenue stream.  That is what is exciting about Sianote; the fact that there will be a company dedicated to making decentralized Siacoin and Sianote valuable.

[Tobo]

If you are an accredited investor, maybe, but why would you want to own equity in Nebulous?  Valuation of Nebulous will be based on (potential) revenue from Sianote as Taek just stated, so just buy Sianote and you will be cutting out the middle man and gaining direct access to Nebulous' revenue stream.  That is what is exciting about Sianote; the fact that there will be a company dedicated to making decentralized Siacoin and Sianote valuable.

Sianote is great. But it is only one product of Nebulous, the main product in the beginning. In the future, Nebulous will have multiple products which sianotes will not cover.

[msin]

If you are an accredited investor, maybe, but why would you want to own equity in Nebulous?  Valuation of Nebulous will be based on (potential) revenue from Sianote as Taek just stated, so just buy Sianote and you will be cutting out the middle man and gaining direct access to Nebulous' revenue stream.  That is what is exciting about Sianote; the fact that there will be a company dedicated to making decentralized Siacoin and Sianote valuable.

Sianote is great. But it is only one product of Nebulous, the main product in the beginning. In the future, Nebulous will have multiple products which sianotes will not cover.

I believe other products will be built to complement Sia and help it grow.  Sia is going to be decentralized, Nebulous will have no control over Sia network, but will benefit from it's success.  Nebulous is a US company, so if you are a public investor, then you can invest, but you are subject to US accredited investor laws.  We are talking about big $, Series A for a tech company is typically $5-10Mil, not a couple BTC invested by an anonymous investor on BTT.  Also, what is your exit strategy, you can't just sell equity in a private company, you have to wait for it to go public or get acquired to actually earn $ on your equity.  To me it doesn't make sense to focus the discussion on investing in a US company here, leave that to the VC's.

[Taek]

Fun math from the Nxt thread:

For an annual return of $10,000 per Sianote, $2.565b annualy would need to be spent over Sia. As a monopolist, this should be on the upper bound of achievable.

2,565,000,000 * 0.0000039 = $10,003.5

If we can gain a near-monopoly over cloud storage by 2018, each Sianote should be raking in an income of around $10,000 per year for it's owner. Obviously a near-monopoly is a very lofty goal, but given our prices and competitive advantage, it's not out of the question.

[msin]

Fun math from the Nxt thread:

For an annual return of $10,000 per Sianote, $2.565b annualy would need to be spent over Sia. As a monopolist, this should be on the upper bound of achievable.

2,565,000,000 * 0.0000039 = $10,003.5

If we can gain a near-monopoly over cloud storage by 2018, each Sianote should be raking in an income of around $10,000 per year for it's owner. Obviously a near-monopoly is a very lofty goal, but given our prices and competitive advantage, it's not out of the question.

You are assuming $2.5bil revenue is considered a monopoly # for cloud storage in 2018. I think annual revenue for cloud storage will be absolutely massive by 2018, making $2.5bil much more achievable. 

[Taek]

Status Update:

We're still in the process of revamping the internals of the alpha. Now that we're a bit away from the release, we've realized a few things that we could have done better. If you check the branch 'review' on my github profile, you'll see that we've changed about 2000 lines of code, with another maybe 1500 yet to be changed. I'm not exactly sure when this will be done, but I'm expecting it'll be before next week starts.

We've been slowed down a lot by moving to Boston. We've only just found a place to live, and we don't move in for another few weeks. It's been pretty hectic, but at this point most of the transition stuff has been taken care of. We've somewhat moved into our new office (it's very nice!) and should be able to turn the throughput back up to what we were seeing a few weeks ago.

I've already mentioned it, but we found a new algorithm to do erasure coding that makes certain barriers crossable, but kills us on the minimum redundancy. It's looking like the minimum acceptable redundancy is going to be closer to 2.5 instead of 1.2. That's double what we were saying, which means storage prices will more or less double. 

The problem isn't the redundancy and stability, but rather the amount of bandwidth it takes to repair a piece that has gone offline. At redundancy 1.25, you need to get the whole file in order to replace a single piece. A single piece is only 1/100th of the file at 1.25 redundancy, which makes it _very_ expensive. Above a redundancy of 2.5, we can actually switch algorithms such that to replace a 1MB piece, you need at most 2MB of bandwidth. This is much cheaper, and much more realistic.

The (sorta) upswing on this is that at a minimum redundancy of 2.5, I can make much bolder statements about nobody ever losing a file. At redundancy of 1.2, an attacker controlling 20% of the network can at-will knock out around half of the 1.2 redundancy files on the network. At a redundancy of 2.5, an attacker will need somewhere around 30% of the network before being able to attack any files, and will need something like 66% of the network to have a fifty percent chance of knocking out a target file.

We'll do another release probably on August 1st, which will look very similar to the current release (alpha v2) but will be substantially less buggy, have greatly improved network features, and hopefully will be available on all operating systems.

[ownerbest]

Hi Taek, When will sia do the second round IPO?

[Taek]

Not for a while. December is probably the earliest, but it might be a full year before we do another major sale. We've got all of the money that we need for the next stage of Sia.

[msin]

Hi Taek, When will sia do the second round IPO?

Buy Sia on Nxt AE.

[td services]

Hi Taek, When will sia do the second round IPO?

Buy Sia on Nxt AE.

Is there a deadline to receive the Sianotes from sending to the BTC address in the OP? I had a problem with NXT after an update so I didn't send a NXT address to receive the Sianotes, and am currently migrating wallets to a new computer. I'm not planning to sell anytime soon, so I haven't been in a hurry to receive them, but I want to make sure I don't miss a deadline to have them included in a Genesis block or otherwise receive a distribution.

[Taek]

The deadline has long passed. There are a few people who opted for me to hold their Sianotes for them (instead of sending them to an Nxt address). If you are one of those people, you've got a way to contact me and you should use that route.

Otherwise, the only way to get Sianotes are through the AE. It seemed like the cleanest solution available, and I think that it's still the least complicated way to crowdfund a cryptocurrency.

[Taek]

Seems about time for an update on how things are going.

We're moving steadily, though we've been slowed down a bit at this point. Sia is a complex protocol and the program that implements it is starting to increase in complexity. We want a program that's as secure as possible and that means we're making careful design decisions. This is slowing us down, but I think it's the right thing to do. By taking our time now, we're saving a lot of headaches 3 months down the road. August 8th still seems possible for an updated release.

I spend a bit of time last week looking into secure clock synchronization techniques, as these are important to Sia's functionality. Turns out that it's a really difficult problem, and that computer clocks can drift by as much as 10 minutes every day. This has impacts on our decisions about block rate, and makes it seem like the best approach is to assume that one machine will have multiple siblings operating on different quorums, but all using a single logical clock. Doing things this way actually brings in a ton of security, especially if honest hosts are expected to intentionally drift their quorums in the direction that most benefits them.

We don't expect to have any clock synchronization stuff implemented in the next few weeks, nor do we expect to have efficient redundancy implemented in the next few weeks. Instead, K will be forced to equal either 1 or 2 (meaning very high amounts of redundancy), which will simulate the amount of bandwidth that the more efficient algorithms will consume when siblings go offline or leave the quorum.

Our general goals for the next release:

1. Release when ready, as opposed to picking an exact date.
2. Have a 'test-net' with 3-5 machines that we control operating in consensus. The test-net will be open, meaning that you guys can join in as siblings.
3. Be able to upload and download individual files that have a certain, small size cap. The cap is probably going to be a few hundred kilobytes, which pretty much means images and documents only at this point.

It should be noted that uploads will probably take a few hours at this point, because there will be no acceleration. Downloads will be instant.

[msin]

Thanks for update.

[super3]

Those of us at Storj are happy to see this moving forward.

[Taek]

Congratulations on your crowd sale btw. I know it's not 9800 btc, but 560 btc is nothing to shake a stick at. I wish you guys the best luck.

[super3]

Congratulations on your crowd sale btw. I know it's not 9800 btc, but 560 btc is nothing to shake a stick at. I wish you guys the best luck.

Thanks. Yeah, its pretty great. We will have a few tricks up our sleeves, and we don't need too much funding in the beginning. 

[PondSea]

Hello Taek,

Would you be able to give us an update on the progress? I am deliberating with myself if i should buy more Sia currently or not. 

Out of interest would you be hiring more devs to work on this so you can get the product out faster?

[Taek]

Yeah, been planning on making an update.

This week was pretty rough, we just moved into our new place (finally) but it was a wreck. We've spent the last few days cleaning up and haven't had time for Sia.

At this point, we're approaching on releasing a test-network, which will a bunch of isolated (IE not talking to each other) quorums of hosts. We'll need a bunch of testers, 20 is probably enough at this point. What we're mostly testing for is network stability. The theory says that we'll be mostly stable, but our local tests have shown a lot more instability than we've been expecting. I'm going to keep tweaking the algorithms but these partial-scale tests are going to give us much better information on what sorts of failures to expect.

We'd want some sort of arrangement where a standard home connection, with all the instabilities that accompany it, could expect something like 90%+ efficiency on Sia (meaning that all of their downtime, plus the fact that they have to share a connection during peak hours doesn't cost them more than 10% income, and doesn't result in them bouncing from quorum to quorum because they keep getting kicked). I have a feeling that our current setup is going to result in a high rate of people getting kicked, but I'm not exactly sure which links in the chain are going to be the weakest. Testing will help a lot, and it will help us figure out where to spend our energy.

I'm not exactly sure when the test suite will be ready. We're already building out a cli, and pretty much all of the functionality is in place, it's just not fully wired together. I was hoping to have it ready by now but we got thrown off with all the moving (we're only two guys and we live together, so all of Sia got affected).

As for hiring more developers, we're close to hiring at least 1 engineer. The thing is, looking into hiring is going to take away a lot of our development time, and training the new guy/teaching him Sia is also going to soak up a lot of dev time. So what I think we'll do is get the test network up, spend 1 or 2 weeks fixing all of the super-big problems, and then we'll have 2-4 weeks to focus on hiring while we wait for smaller or subtler problems to reveal themselves.

Realistically, the new dev won't start working for probably 3-6 months. And then they won't be truly useful for another 3-6 months after that.

Sia is a new complex system, and the codebase is going to need a lot of time and love before it's as stable as Bitcoin. Bitcoin spent several years in incubation. I'm hoping we can be a lot faster than that, but we'll need to see. The good news is that we've got enough funding to last about 2 years, even if we hire 2 additional people. I do think though that we'll have a pretty strong beta up by the end of the year.

As always, happy to answer any questions or go into detail on anything you guys are curious about.

[grandpa_seth]

Thank you for the update and for providing them candidly. You guys have convinced me in the ginormous potential sia has. I am hypnotizing you right now. You are special. You will dominate cloud storage by solving problems others can not. You will make me millions thereby making yourself hundreds of millions. You will make sure Disney does not ruin Star Wars. The last one being the hardest to accomplish.

[super3]

Ping us at Storj when you get a more solid CLI done. We can hack something together so people can store their files on Sia via Metadisk, and any drive farming software can be throw into the DriveShare GUI.

Your quorum stuff is legit, so we can probably help you on the app and frontend portion and let you guys dig into the cool data stuff. Good luck!

Happy to help test and give you more technical feedback.

[msin]

Thank you for the update and for providing them candidly. You guys have convinced me in the ginormous potential sia has. I am hypnotizing you right now. You are special. You will dominate cloud storage by solving problems others can not. You will make me millions thereby making yourself hundreds of millions. You will make sure Disney does not ruin Star Wars. The last one being the hardest to accomplish.

This is the best post on BTT today.  Trust me, I've read them all.

[grandpa_seth]

Thank you for the update and for providing them candidly. You guys have convinced me in the ginormous potential sia has. I am hypnotizing you right now. You are special. You will dominate cloud storage by solving problems others can not. You will make me millions thereby making yourself hundreds of millions. You will make sure Disney does not ruin Star Wars. The last one being the hardest to accomplish.

This is the best post on BTT today.  Trust me, I've read them all.

Thanks msin. This thread was derailing too much with sia development updates and discussions on the future of crypto cloud storage.

[djtanner]

So is storj in competition with siacoin? Which should I invest in? Or should I buy both?

[mthompson362]

So is storj in competition with siacoin? Which should I invest in? Or should I buy both?

No, Sia and Storj are not in competition. We at Storj do not believe in competition and would love integrating with Sia along with sharing ideas.

[msin]

So is storj in competition with siacoin? Which should I invest in? Or should I buy both?

No, Sia and Storj are not in competition. We at Storj do not believe in competition and would love integrating with Sia along with sharing ideas.

Can you explain from a technical standpoint how you are not in competition?  I understand you don't believe in competition, but if Sia considers you competition, then you are competitors.

[MadGhost]

So is storj in competition with siacoin? Which should I invest in? Or should I buy both?

that depends on the market value of the coin

[mthompson362]

So is storj in competition with siacoin? Which should I invest in? Or should I buy both?

No, Sia and Storj are not in competition. We at Storj do not believe in competition and would love integrating with Sia along with sharing ideas.

Can you explain from a technical standpoint how you are not in competition?  I understand you don't believe in competition, but if Sia considers you competition, then you are competitors.

Well even looking at the past replies in this thread between super3 (Storj founder and lead developer) and Taek shows there is no sense of hostility or competition. As super3 mentioned, we could later on integrate Sia into Storj by allowing people to store on Sia via our application Metadisk, and any drive farming software could be used with our DriveShare GUI. Not to mention how interesting the quorum aspect of Sia is; Storj would be happy to help with applications and frontend and so on.

[msin]

So is storj in competition with siacoin? Which should I invest in? Or should I buy both?

No, Sia and Storj are not in competition. We at Storj do not believe in competition and would love integrating with Sia along with sharing ideas.

Can you explain from a technical standpoint how you are not in competition?  I understand you don't believe in competition, but if Sia considers you competition, then you are competitors.

Well even looking at the past replies in this thread between super3 (Storj founder and lead developer) and Taek shows there is no sense of hostility or competition. As super3 mentioned, we could later on integrate Sia into Storj by allowing people to store on Sia via our application Metadisk, and any drive farming software could be used with our DriveShare GUI. Not to mention how interesting the quorum aspect of Sia is; Storj would be happy to help with applications and frontend and so on.

Yes, I was just wondering from a technical perspective if you are trying to accomplish the same thing, but sounds like you are not really.  Storj seems like a good group of devs.

[grandpa_seth]

So I have to consider buying some storjcoin too now? I would very much appreciate if one of the storj guys could give an honest description for the layman as to why storjcoin will have value and what is it? I already know the reasons why an investment in sianotes can potentially make a big return. Can someone at storj explain storjcoin's goal pretty please?

[super3]

So I have to consider buying some storjcoin too now? I would very much appreciate if one of the storj guys could give an honest description for the layman as to why storjcoin will have value and what is it? I already know the reasons why an investment in sianotes can potentially make a big return. Can someone at storj explain storjcoin's goal pretty please?

It would be unfair to Sia to clutter their topic with an advertisement for Storj. Our website should address most questions: http://storj.io or http://storjtalk.org. We also have a few topics on Bitcointalk as well.

[grandpa_seth]

Thanks for the links super3. I wasn't thinking.

[Taek]

Just to add my 2 cents, I don't consider Storj to be in competition. Their specific goals are different enough from ours that their extreme success would not be detrimental to the success of Sia at all.  And vice-versa. As Sia gets further along, we'll be looking to integrate with Storj more than we currently have.

[skrtel37]

Is this going to be as expensive as storj?? Or something normal

[skrtel37]

Half a day and not a single response...doesn't make me confident

[Vega]

Half a day and not a single response...doesn't make me confident

That's all right, your confidents it not required.
They don't want your money.

There was a funding round months ago, and may or may not be another one, but not for a while for sure.
Also they were not selling coins but pieces of future profits, so price is not really comparable to storj.

[Tobo]

Is this going to be as expensive as storj?? Or something normal

You can buy Sianote at Nxt AE. Here is the current price - https://nxtblocks.info/#section/assets_exchange/market/11593659039925686857

[Taek]

Sorry skrtel I wasn't quite sure what you meant by your question. I also was sure what you meant by storj being expensive.

Sianotes from our inital fund are available on the AE as Tobo said, be sure to read siacoin.com/sianotes so that you understand what you are buying, if you decide to invest. The price is set by the market, and not by anything that we control (unless we decide to raise more funds).

We're currently very happy with the amount of funding that we have and aren't looking to raise any more money until we've got a clear need for it (IE after launch when we're looking to grow, grow, grow).

[Momimaus]

Some news?

[Taek]

Yeah. We've got a longer annoucement planned for later this week but I'll give some brief info.

First, sorry that the alpha re-hash is taking so long. We've gotten quite far though, and the resulting code is stable and I'm very happy with it. The only thing left right now is file uploading and proof of storgae, which is mostly complete but not yet fully integrated. I'm sorry again that this is taking much longer than previously anticipated, but we're going to have our next release soon.

Second, we're on the verge of making an employement announcement. I don't want to say too much about it because we don't have all the details together, but the announcement will basically say that we're looking to hire someone, and then it'll list all of the traits we wish from this employee, as well as give a job description. We're looking to hire exactly 1 person, and they will be a software developer more than anything else.

I've become increasingly cautious about giving exact dates because I've learned that business never moves as fast as you would like, but things are certainly progressing.

[Momimaus]

Alright. Thank you.

[Jungian]

Can someone explain the difference between this and Storj?

[Tobo]

Can someone explain the difference between this and Storj?

Sia is the platform, the infrastructure. Storj is the application which can be built on the Sia platform.

[super3]

Can someone explain the difference between this and Storj?

Sia is the platform, the infrastructure. Storj is the application which can be built on the Sia platform.

This is incorrect. Storj builds both.

[Taek]

Another update because we're getting close. The code is nearly done. Uploads and downloads are finished and tested. Proof of storage is finished but untested.

So two things really remain before we can enter the final stage of preparing for the next release: proof of storage needs to be tested, and we need to add auto-repair to the quorum. Right now a file won't repair itself if nodes go offline, which consequently means that new nodes will not always be able to complete proof-of-storage, if they have to prove that they have a file which they were never able to repair. The other consequence of this is that right now, although we perform proof of storage, if someone fails a storage proof they are not kicked from the quorum, instead it's merely noted that they failed.

After that, things will be more or less complete, for the alpha stage anyway. We'll do some general testing, set up a test network, and then throw together all of the PR stuff (like updating the website, create a 'how to use' guide, etc.). At that point alpha v2 will be live, with a test network!

For the next release, we'll be working primarily on 2 things: getting time synchronization correct, so that nodes can remain synchronized in a way that is secure for the network (ntp is not secure, and if an attacker can convince your clock to drift by more than a few minutes you will be kicked from Sia - not good!), and getting sets of quorums to communicate with eachother, so that there's one big Sia network instead of tons of little fractured Sia quorums. I'd imagine that we'd call it alpha v3 because it still won't have implemented the pricing model for storage, nor have any way of introducing new coins into the economy (instead it'll be 100% premined), and it still won't have secure random number generation. You can probably expect alpha v3 by Halloween, but honestly I have no idea.

[msin]

Thanks for the update, looking forward to testing.

[Taek]

Another update.

File repair is finished, which means the groundwork for alpha v2 is complete. What's next is testing, followed by establishing a test network for the public.

I imagine that the internal testing and fixing will take a few days, but I'm getting excited.

Just so you know what we've got ready:

+ Ability to create wallets (with a small, introductory amount)
+ Ability to send money to other wallets
+ Transaction malleability protection (meaning you can only use each transaction once)
+ Ability to upload a file to your wallet (I don't know how big, but 1MB tops, probably closer to 256kb. This will of course get much larger in later versions)
+ Ability to download files from your wallet
+ Ability to save a wallet to a file, back it up, move it between computers, etc.
+ A consensus algorithm that does not get disrupted by dishonest machines
+ A network-joining process that can be disrupted by dishonest machines - this will be fixed in later versions, I don't see it being an issue right now.
+ Files that auto-repair and have high redundancy
+ A toy file-usage charging and compensation system. You lose money for having a wallet + files, and you gain money for being a participant. But it's not much money and the cost is constant, regardless of supply and demand. It's a very basic system.

We've also got an entire scripting system built, but our client doesn't allow you to interact with the scripting system. Maybe we can introduce support for that in an alpha v2.1. The biggest problem is figuring out an easy way to enable users to create their own wallets and their own script bodies and script inputs. Furthermore, documentation of the scripting system is minimal, containing only a full list of instructions along with some mildly commented example scripts. If there are multiple people who are interested in making their own scripts, we will make it a priority to enable playing around with the scripting system, but otherwise it's a low priority because I don't predict anyone wanting to play with it just yet.

[Momimaus]

Great. I am really looking forward to that.

[Taek]

Right now the alpha is linux only. We're sort of expecting to keep it this way until the beta. Is this fine for everyone, or does anyone feel it's very important to release the alpha for Windows?

Keep in mind that the alpha isn't terribly functional. It's mostly for people who want to experiment, and isn't intended to be used as a file storage solution yet.

[astor]

Just read your whitepaper.  I am impressed by the guts, but not by your solution.

Maybe some of these issues have been discussed in this long, long thread, but:

- Your quorum is not a quorum when put in a tree!
-  Assuming that attackers are randomly distributed is nonsense (sorry).  The sybil attack is as old as time.
- Thus your binomal distribution calculations are simply wrong, because the assumptions are wrong (sybil attack).
- The whitepaper does not describe what the consensus tree looks like.  Judging from the calculations in section 10, it seems like it could be a binary tree.
- A honest party cannot prove dishonesty with a properly programmed attacker using a simulated storage and controlling the (attacked) random generator (section 10).
- The number of messages required to keep consensus is very high. 
- Did I mention sybil attacks?  There is no protection!
- Section 6, what the cost of fetching a block from another participant needs to be is completely wrong in the whitepaper.   It is off by 5 orders of magnitude! (by 100.000x!).  This p0wns the consensus protocol, or this will indeed be an incredibly expensive storage platform.
- You allow changing the voter set in the consensus protocol without having consensus it seems.
- The proof of storage algorithm is way too naive when much, better algorithms exist.
- Nothing in the protocol requires a node from EVER SERVING DATA!
- Who is going to "fine" misbehaving nodes?  The only thing you will see are invalid quorums where data is held hostage.

This is like a swiss cheese!  Who reviewed this?

[Taek]

Just read your whitepaper.  I am impressed by the guts, but not by your solution.

Maybe some of these issues have been discussed in this long, long thread, but:

- Your quorum is not a quorum when put in a tree!
-  Assuming that attackers are randomly distributed is nonsense (sorry).  The sybil attack is as old as time.
- Thus your binomal distribution calculations are simply wrong, because the assumptions are wrong (sybil attack).
- The whitepaper does not describe what the consensus tree looks like.  Judging from the calculations in section 10, it seems like it could be a binary tree.
- A honest party cannot prove dishonesty with a properly programmed attacker using a simulated storage and controlling the (attacked) random generator (section 10).
- The number of messages required to keep consensus is very high.  
- Did I mention sybil attacks?  There is no protection!
- Section 6, what the cost of fetching a block from another participant needs to be is completely wrong in the whitepaper.   It is off by 5 orders of magnitude! (by 100.000x!).  This p0wns the consensus protocol, or this will indeed be an incredibly expensive storage platform.
- You allow changing the voter set in the consensus protocol without having consensus it seems.
- The proof of storage algorithm is way too naive when much, better algorithms exist.
- Nothing in the protocol requires a node from EVER SERVING DATA!
- Who is going to "fine" misbehaving nodes?  The only thing you will see are invalid quorums where data is held hostage.

This is like a swiss cheese!  Who reviewed this?

Alright lets go through this bit by bit. First off, the whitepaper hasn't been updated since May, so there are a few things I'll say here that are probably in conflict with what's actually written in the whitepaper. But most of the problems you bring up are not issues, you've merely misunderstood how we've addressed the problem.

First, and most important, the sybil attacks:

We don't assume that attackers are randomly distrubuted. We randomly distribute nodes as they enter the network. I actually don't see where this is discussed in the whitepaper- though it was in a previous version I may have forgotten to add it to this one. When a sibling joins the network, they replace a random existing sibing. The sibling that got replaced goes into the new quorum. This ensures that attackers are randomly distributed throughout the network - you have no control over where you are added when you join.

This is one of the reasons you have to pay a fee when joining the network. It makes it expensive to join multiple times and pick only the random slots that favor you. A large attacker with lots of resources can get lots of rerolls, but each reroll will be expensive and they need exponetentially more rerolls as they try to stack a particular quorum with a higher and higher percentage of corrupt nodes. Does this make sense? The attacker needs the down payments to keep rerolling, but they also need enough storage once they decide to stay in a quorum, because they will be performing storage proofs.

====

What does the consensus tree look like? It'll probably be a binary tree, but that hasn't actually been decided. Could be 4 children per parent, or more. But probably just a binary tree.

====

For section 10, I'm not exaclty sure what problem you are discussing, but if an attacker creates a dishonest block, then an honest host inside of the attackers quorum will be able to prove that the block is dishonest (by showing a snapshot, and the previous honest blocks). An honest host can prove that a particular block is dishonest once a dishonest block has been created.

====

The number of messages required to keep consensus is high: yes unfortunately. At 128 nodes per quorum, assuming ~4kb per heartbeat, each participant will be doing on average somewhere around 512kb of bandwidth, and in attack cases could be doing up to 64mb of bandwidth per block. These are both bounded in ways that make consensus possible, but it's pretty expensive. I'm expecting the block rate to end up at around 1 per day, so participating nodes would be looking at consuming around 15mb of bandwidth per month, per 64GB of storage they are contributing. (The 64GB is a flexible number, we may up it to 256GB or something larger to reduce the total bandwidth the network is consuming).

Attack conditions are pretty severe, but we have a set of (undiscussed) approaches to the problem. DOS attacks are probably Sia's biggest weakness right now.

====

Section 6 has a dated way of doing proof of storage. Today, we use merkle trees + a saved-hash structure. It ends up adding a total of about 700 bytes per message to the consensus algorithm. Each heartbeat will have ~1kb of mandatory stuff, leaving 3kb for optional stuff. 3kb may end up not being enough, but remember that's 3kb _per sibling_, _per quorum_, which means that each quorum has a total of around 350kb per block that can be used for transactions, and there are going to be many quorums.

====

"You allow hanging the voter set in the consensus protocol without having consensus"

I'm not sure what you mean by this.

====

Nothing in the protocol requires a node from ever serving data:

this is something that isn't discussed in the current whitepaper. There will be monetary incentives for serving data, and barring that, there will be a proof-of-data-transaction, which is a complicated and expensive process but forces a node to either serve data or be kicked. This currently isn't a high priority, I want to make sure the storage stuff all works before we move onto things like bandwidth, cost, and actually uploading files to users.

====

Fining misbehaving nodes:

a node that misbehaves will be kicked from the network, and have it will not recieve it's initial "down payment" as a refund. This is how nodes are fined. If a node gracefully leaves the network (there are a few cleanup things it needs to do - not fully discussed yet).


====


I realize that a lot of the details are left out. We're planning on releasing another paper in the next few months, namely an explicit specification for single-quorum consensus. (IE what the alpha v2 is going to look like). There's a lot of work left to do. Things that we are consciously leaving out for now:

+ People downloading wallets
+ Storing files that the network can't automatically repair (to defeat storage pool concerns)
+ The explicit way that things are priced
+ The explicit way that nodes in different quorums can look each other up

These are all important, and will be fully and formally defined eventually, but we're focusing on the more core problems first.

The things that we care about most right now:

 + Maintaining consensus in a way that is fully fault-tolerant
 + Preventing sybil attacks
 + preventing random number manipulation
 + secure proof of storage
 + transaction malleability
 + scalability

It's going to be much easier for me to discuss Sia with you if we focus on one problem at a time. I think the one you are most worried about is Sybil attacks, so lets focus on that until you are convinced that Sia is secure against them. (or until I am convinced that I've missed something important). Or if you want to focus on something else specifically (like total bandwidth consumption), we can do that. But just 1 problem at a time so the discussion can be more focused.

[astor]

Just read your whitepaper.  I am impressed by the guts, but not by your solution.

Maybe some of these issues have been discussed in this long, long thread, but:

- Your quorum is not a quorum when put in a tree!
-  Assuming that attackers are randomly distributed is nonsense (sorry).  The sybil attack is as old as time.
- Thus your binomal distribution calculations are simply wrong, because the assumptions are wrong (sybil attack).
- The whitepaper does not describe what the consensus tree looks like.  Judging from the calculations in section 10, it seems like it could be a binary tree.
- A honest party cannot prove dishonesty with a properly programmed attacker using a simulated storage and controlling the (attacked) random generator (section 10).
- The number of messages required to keep consensus is very high.  
- Did I mention sybil attacks?  There is no protection!
- Section 6, what the cost of fetching a block from another participant needs to be is completely wrong in the whitepaper.   It is off by 5 orders of magnitude! (by 100.000x!).  This p0wns the consensus protocol, or this will indeed be an incredibly expensive storage platform.
- You allow changing the voter set in the consensus protocol without having consensus it seems.
- The proof of storage algorithm is way too naive when much, better algorithms exist.
- Nothing in the protocol requires a node from EVER SERVING DATA!
- Who is going to "fine" misbehaving nodes?  The only thing you will see are invalid quorums where data is held hostage.

This is like a swiss cheese!  Who reviewed this?

Alright lets go through this bit by bit. First off, the whitepaper hasn't been updated since May, so there are a few things I'll say here that are probably in conflict with what's actually written in the whitepaper. But most of the problems you bring up are not issues, you've merely misunderstood how we've addressed the problem.

First, and most important, the sybil attacks:

We don't assume that attackers are randomly distrubuted. We randomly distribute nodes as they enter the network. I actually don't see where this is discussed in the whitepaper- though it was in a previous version I may have forgotten to add it to this one. When a sibling joins the network, they replace a random existing sibing. The sibling that got replaced goes into the new quorum. This ensures that attackers are randomly distributed throughout the network - you have no control over where you are added when you join.

This is one of the reasons you have to pay a fee when joining the network. It makes it expensive to join multiple times and pick only the random slots that favor you. A large attacker with lots of resources can get lots of rerolls, but each reroll will be expensive and they need exponetentially more rerolls as they try to stack a particular quorum with a higher and higher percentage of corrupt nodes. Does this make sense? The attacker needs the down payments to keep rerolling, but they also need enough storage once they decide to stay in a quorum, because they will be performing storage proofs.

My simulation says otherwise.  Simulating an 8TB attack on a 8PB storage (1%), I could get a quorum majority using a 1% attack with only 43.7 trials per participant.  For a 0.1% attack, I need 480 trials per resource.

To avoid this attack, you're going to have to make it so expensive to join that nobody will be able to afford it ;-)

This is not a normal binomial trial, but a process where the attacker chooses *where to withdraw* a participant.  You only control the random placement.

Besides, the whitepaper states that the fee will be returned for well-behaving participants, so the sybil attack is essentially free.  You might want to update that.

====

What does the consensus tree look like? It'll probably be a binary tree, but that hasn't actually been decided. Could be 4 children per parent, or more. But probably just a binary tree.

I don't see a description of how the quorum works for the tree.  What is described is a gossip protocol, but how will the tree reach *global* consensus on, say, the random generator?

====

For section 10, I'm not exaclty sure what problem you are discussing, but if an attacker creates a dishonest block, then an honest host inside of the attackers quorum will be able to prove that the block is dishonest (by showing a snapshot, and the previous honest blocks). An honest host can prove that a particular block is dishonest once a dishonest block has been created.

How?  Can you spell out how the honest host will prove this?  I'm saying that an attacker that controls the quorum can redefine what users store so that any proof of storage can be trivially calculated.  For example the attacker simply defines that the users all store a long string of 0s.  Calculating any merkle-tree challenge is then trivial.

Just so I understand, you're doing merkle-tree proofs on the reed solomon parts?

====

The number of messages required to keep consensus is high: yes unfortunately. At 128 nodes per quorum, assuming ~4kb per heartbeat, each participant will be doing on average somewhere around 512kb of bandwidth, and in attack cases could be doing up to 64mb of bandwidth per block. These are both bounded in ways that make consensus possible, but it's pretty expensive. I'm expecting the block rate to end up at around 1 per day, so participating nodes would be looking at consuming around 15mb of bandwidth per month, per 64GB of storage they are contributing. (The 64GB is a flexible number, we may up it to 256GB or something larger to reduce the total bandwidth the network is consuming).

Attack conditions are pretty severe, but we have a set of (undiscussed) approaches to the problem. DOS attacks are probably Sia's biggest weakness right now.

====

Section 6 has a dated way of doing proof of storage. Today, we use merkle trees + a saved-hash structure. It ends up adding a total of about 700 bytes per message to the consensus algorithm. Each heartbeat will have ~1kb of mandatory stuff, leaving 3kb for optional stuff. 3kb may end up not being enough, but remember that's 3kb _per sibling_, _per quorum_, which means that each quorum has a total of around 350kb per block that can be used for transactions, and there are going to be many quorums.

Let me guess... if you still prove 64k blocks, then 700/16 = 44 levels of you have a 60bit addressable storage system (might be a bit excessive?).  If you have something like that, I don't see how that affect my comment.  I'm saying that if you prove 64k out of 8GB, then fetching that 64k must be 125.000 times as expensive as the reward for storing those 64k for the same amount of time.

Let's say a participant can choose to fetch the 64k from some other participant for cost 125.000, or store 64k*125.000 = 8GB for cost 125.000.

Let's assume a user is accessing random blocks, and churning through 8GB of storage once a month.  With a block frequencey of 1/day, there is a 3% chance that the user will fetch the 64k block that is being proven, and where accessing the block must cost > the cost of storing 8GB for the block interval.  So for a block interval of 1/day, the increased cost for this user is 3%/month.

(To offset this, I will do my own 31:30 reed salomon on top of your system so I can avoid touching the "poisoned block" during that day and avoid the cost)

But this assumes that you're only proving 64kB per day.  That's a pretty low figure. 

====

"You allow hanging the voter set in the consensus protocol without having consensus"

I'm not sure what you mean by this.

Sorry, *changing*.  Letting participants leave or join a quorum outside of the quorum protocol itself typically breaks the protocol.

====

Nothing in the protocol requires a node from ever serving data:

this is something that isn't discussed in the current whitepaper. There will be monetary incentives for serving data, and barring that, there will be a proof-of-data-transaction, which is a complicated and expensive process but forces a node to either serve data or be kicked. This currently isn't a high priority, I want to make sure the storage stuff all works before we move onto things like bandwidth, cost, and actually uploading files to users.

====

Fining misbehaving nodes:

a node that misbehaves will be kicked from the network, and have it will not recieve it's initial "down payment" as a refund. This is how nodes are fined. If a node gracefully leaves the network (there are a few cleanup things it needs to do - not fully discussed yet).


====


I realize that a lot of the details are left out. We're planning on releasing another paper in the next few months, namely an explicit specification for single-quorum consensus. (IE what the alpha v2 is going to look like). There's a lot of work left to do. Things that we are consciously leaving out for now:

+ People downloading wallets
+ Storing files that the network can't automatically repair (to defeat storage pool concerns)
+ The explicit way that things are priced
+ The explicit way that nodes in different quorums can look each other up

These are all important, and will be fully and formally defined eventually, but we're focusing on the more core problems first.

The things that we care about most right now:

 + Maintaining consensus in a way that is fully fault-tolerant
 + Preventing sybil attacks
 + preventing random number manipulation
 + secure proof of storage
 + transaction malleability
 + scalability

It's going to be much easier for me to discuss Sia with you if we focus on one problem at a time. I think the one you are most worried about is Sybil attacks, so lets focus on that until you are convinced that Sia is secure against them. (or until I am convinced that I've missed something important). Or if you want to focus on something else specifically (like total bandwidth consumption), we can do that. But just 1 problem at a time so the discussion can be more focused.

[Taek]

My simulation says otherwise.  Simulating an 8TB attack on a 8PB storage (1%), I could get a quorum majority using a 1% attack with only 43.7 trials per participant.  For a 0.1% attack, I need 480 trials per resource.

To avoid this attack, you're going to have to make it so expensive to join that nobody will be able to afford it ;-)

This is not a normal binomial trial, but a process where the attacker chooses *where to withdraw* a participant.  You only control the random placement.

Besides, the whitepaper states that the fee will be returned for well-behaving participants, so the sybil attack is essentially free.  You might want to update that.

8TB is only .1% of 8PB. I'm not sure if your simulation did 1%, or 0.1%, but I'll look a lot closer at this. And for the record, a quorum is safe all the way up to 80% dishonesty. We do suffer the weakness where an attacker can choose who to withdraw.  I'm not sure if you've included this in your simulation, but when you withdraw turbulence in introduced in the quorum you withdraw from to fight quorum manipulation. Withdrawing (still on the fence about the exact number) a host resulted in (1 or 2? I forget) additional participants being replaced at random. This feature was meant to protect the quorum that was being withdrawn from, but it will also protect on a much lesser scale the distribution of hosts in the network as a whole. The down payment cost is probably going to be in the ballpark of 1 week of earnings. The fine for leaving is going to be the cost of moving everyone around in your absence, and can't be avoided. The cost is reduced if you limit the amount of recovery bandwidth that is used (IE you upload your whole XGB to the next guy, instead of forcing them to do file repair).

43 trials per participant will cost something like 10 months of storage to pull off. At 1% of the network it's not terribly prohibitive but it's not trivial either. But keep in mind again that you only shot for quorum majority, which will not break Sia. Sia is designed to function at high probability even when 80% of the quorum is compromised. This works because of how quorums communicate to each other (and I'm actually re-writing this process right now, because this is what we're going to be implementing after the alpha release). When a quorum creates a new block, it talks to its siblings by having each host ping (3 or 5, haven't decided) random hosts in the sibling quorums. It's a low number to keep message volume down, but even at 3 messages per block per sibling, a quorum with only 20% honesty is going to have 60 chances of informing the other quorum. Assuming you've been manipulating around this quorum specifically, each of those 60 chances is going to have ~50% likelihood of reaching someone honest, giving a very comfortable margin. Even if the other quorum is also highly manipulated, (4/5)^60 still yields a favourable probability of each quorum learning about every block the other quorum creates.

And further, once a group of dishonest hosts have infected a quorum, they've only got 1 chance to pull off a dishonesty attack. As soon as it's made known that two conflicting blocks have been announced by the opposing quorum, the losers will be ejected from the quorum. If the block with the majority is fully honest (which can happen), the 20% honest hosts will be kicked from the quroum, but they will take an additional (20% or 40%) of the dishonest hosts along as a part of the quorum-protection. So the dishonest quorum will lose it's advantage. If the dishonest block release actually breaks rules (which is what you'd expect, why would you produce a conflicting honest block? - you don't gain anything if you're still following the rules of the network), then 100% of the dishonest hosts will be purged from the network. In this case, the turbulence doesn't need to trigger because it's clear that the hosts being kicked are dishonest, instead of being unsure. The 20% honest hosts can stick around then.

This still has problems that I'm aware of. Because the network redundancy for files is only about 2.5, a dishonest group achieving ~66% control of a quorum could potentially corrupt files. Additionally, depending on how the turbulence fees are set up, you could use the auto-turbulence to 'drain' quorums where you have the majority, effectively giving you an extra N rerolls on getting dishonest hosts into your target quorum, without having to pay for them.

My goal would be to make it prohibitively expensive for someone with less than 33% of the network to reach greater than 66% control of any quorum, and prohibitively expensive for someone with 49% control of the network to reach greater than 80% control of any quorum. We're busy this week, but next week I'll take some time out and research this better. I imagine someone's got a better way to manage random distributions than what we are using.

I think I would define 'prohibitively expensive' as 1 network-year of cost. So if the network is 8PB, 'prohibitively expensive' would mean spending the same amount it would cost to rent all 8PB for 1 year. But it's also worth looking at incentive. The 33% attack is only to be able to corrupt files, and typically if you are doing this you have a specific set of files that you want to corrupt. It's much harder to target a specific quorum than it is to target whichever quorum you are getting luckiest with. But additionally at 33% of the network you've got a huge profit incentive, and you're burning profits trying to attack the network.

I'll come back in a few weeks with a more mathematically oriented exploration of attacks regarding the random distribution process. I do realize that in it's current conception, it's not bullet proof.

I don't see a description of how the quorum works for the tree.  What is described is a gossip protocol, but how will the tree reach *global* consensus on, say, the random generator?

I'm still thinking about the exact best approach. One solution I had that was functional was that each 'meta-quorum' has a nominated 'leaf-quorum' which performs the consensus and picks the exact values. Whatever block this 'leaf-quorum' creates is propagated and is used by the whole network to guarantee consensus. I think though there might be a way to achieve global consensus without nominating an explicit quorum. It's worth noting that global consensus is really only required for figuring out the macro-operations, like what the cost of storage is, and how many coins moved from meta-quorum A to meta-quorum B. If you are working in a binary tree, that means you really only need to be in consensus with your single sibling, and then you need a way to announce to your children what the consensus was. Your children don't have to all receive the block at the same time, they just have to know that "meta-quorum level 3, block #5100 was _this_". If one sibling gets it a block or two earlier than the other, it's not going to disrupt global consensus.

There is a 'reassure' protocol that will probably exist, which operates a lot like a 'trust but verify'. When you receive a meta block, you send random messages (and also receive random message) that verify everyone got the same block. This also helps to speed block propagation. If one quorum receives a different block from the rest, it's going to have 3 communications per honest host to figure that out.

====

For section 10, I'm not exaclty sure what problem you are discussing, but if an attacker creates a dishonest block, then an honest host inside of the attackers quorum will be able to prove that the block is dishonest (by showing a snapshot, and the previous honest blocks). An honest host can prove that a particular block is dishonest once a dishonest block has been created.

How?  Can you spell out how the honest host will prove this?  I'm saying that an attacker that controls the quorum can redefine what users store so that any proof of storage can be trivially calculated.  For example the attacker simply defines that the users all store a long string of 0s.  Calculating any merkle-tree challenge is then trivial.

"Controlling the quorum" is a very non-trivial task. That means you can create dishonest blocks without having the honest blocks propagate.

Lets walk through the steps:

1. A quorum creates a dishonest block, which either doesn't do proof of storage, or pays out money that the wallets didn't approve of, etc.
2. This quorum has honest hosts inside of it. These honest hosts will create an honest block, most likely without any signatures from the dishonest hosts. So there's this really empty, but honest block that's floating around.
3. The honest hosts contact their sibling quorum with 3 messages each, informing the sibling quorum of the block.
4. The sibling quorum bounces back a dishonest block.

There's now a dispute in progress. The sibling quorum will only accept a block if it can see the finer details of how the block was created (usually just hashes and macro-data are passed around, but now we have to demonstrate where the hashes came from).

5. The honest host provides the full block information. If the dishonest hosts cannot provide full information, they lose and are kicked. If they provide full, but dishonest, information:
6. The sibling quorum sends back the full block that the dishonest hosts received.

Important things to note:

each block has both a hash of the parent block, and a hash of the parent 'state'. The parent state is something that's saved infrequently into a snapshot, which can be used to rebuild the state and get the same original hash. Each block also contains the state hash after it was created. This means that the dishonest block _must_ align itself with the previous state, or it'll just be ignored as early or late.

7. The honest host uses its snapshot to build up the 'state' that the quorum was in prior to the dishonest block, and it sends the state to the sibling quorum. The sibling quorum can now use the previous state (which it can verify by hashing) plus the transactions in the dishonest block to prove to itself that the block is dishonest.

This process is bandwidth intense, depending on the size of the state, but the bandwidth required can be reduced by using merkle trees again. The honest host only needs to isolate the parts of the dishonest block that are dishonest.

Just so I understand, you're doing merkle-tree proofs on the reed solomon parts?

Right. So each host has some encoded-and-redundant piece that they need to maintain, and the merkle-root of that piece is known by everyone. A random 32byte piece within the slice they are holding is chosen, and they have to provide the information needed to prove on that piece.

Let me guess... if you still prove 64k blocks, then 700/16 = 44 levels of you have a 60bit addressable storage system (might be a bit excessive?).  If you have something like that, I don't see how that affect my comment.  I'm saying that if you prove 64k out of 8GB, then fetching that 64k must be 125.000 times as expensive as the reward for storing those 64k for the same amount of time.

Let's say a participant can choose to fetch the 64k from some other participant for cost 125.000, or store 64k*125.000 = 8GB for cost 125.000.

Let's assume a user is accessing random blocks, and churning through 8GB of storage once a month.  With a block frequencey of 1/day, there is a 3% chance that the user will fetch the 64k block that is being proven, and where accessing the block must cost > the cost of storing 8GB for the block interval.  So for a block interval of 1/day, the increased cost for this user is 3%/month.

(To offset this, I will do my own 31:30 reed salomon on top of your system so I can avoid touching the "poisoned block" during that day and avoid the cost)

But this assumes that you're only proving 64kB per day.  That's a pretty low figure.  

There's a way to simplify this further. Each proof covers 1 day of storage. So if you're downloading something, you have to pay for XGB * 1 day cost of storage, in case you end up downloading whatever is being proved in the current or next block. You have to pay this fee (initially), because the network can't be sure what storage will be targeted in the next block, but an attacker who is attempting to manipulate consensus can. At 64GB, and $5/TB/mo, this amounts to around 0.5 cents. At 1TB this is closer to 16 cents. Still manageable. If you are unlucky, you lose the 16 cents. If you are not unlucky, you get it back. Assuming that a user fetches a whole sector at a time (and that the sector is always the max size of 2MB), a user has a 2MB/1TB chance of losing that 16 cents, or 2*10^(-6) chance of losing the 16 cents. Not a big deal. The cost of downloading 2MB * 51 hosts (assuming the standard network redundancy of 2.5) is probably going to be higher than your expected payout of 0.000032 cents for getting unlucky.

Sorry, *changing*.  Letting participants leave or join a quorum outside of the quorum protocol itself typically breaks the protocol.

I don't think it would break our protocol. It's designed to cope with arbitrary (and malicious) failures of nodes. Nodes can only join the quorum if they go through the random process, but nodes can leave the quorum whenever without breaking consensus. You don't need a minimum number of signatures to create a block. The algorithm insures that all remaining honest hosts will arrive at the same block during consensus, regardless of how many nodes have left (had failures) in the middle. Nodes who are joining can't jump in on the current block, they have to wait until they are confirmed by the network, and then they join at a designated block.

[msin]

Astor seems like a good potential dev for Sia.

[Taek]

Astor, if you are interested, we'd be willing to interview you and see if you are a match for the team.

The protocol is largely incomplete, where in many places we've chosen the 'proof-of-concept' solution as opposed to the most optimal solution, because there's a lot of work that needs to happen before Sia is a fully optimized protocol. If you have a strong coding background (in any language), we'd be intereted in having you as an employee.

[Taek]

Going back to the random distrubution problem (it was bothering me enough):

The solution is to forcibly randomize one non-joining person in every single quorum. This is going to be super hand-wavy, but the overall gist is this:

When you join Sia, you are put in a random place where someone already exists. In addition, the quorum that you join has 1 additional person swapped out with someone random in the network.

If you control 1% of the network, and 50.5% of the quorum, all your random trials will only have you maintain 50.5% control of the quorum:

You roll the dice until you get a hit on your target quorum. Your target has 1 removed (the guy you replace), which has a 50% chance of being your own. Then one more is removed randomly. So in total, 2 are removed (-1.01 total for you), and you get +1 (because you are guaranteed to have hit the target quorum), and then you get +0.01 from the new guy (because the new guy has a 1% chance of being you; you control 1% of the network). So essentially by doing this, we prevent someone with 1% of the network from every being able to target a quorum.

What about 33%?

This equilibrium is around 2/3. You gain +1, then you lose 2 random. At 2/3, you lose an expected 4/3 quorum members. But then when bringing in the extra new guy, you have a 1/3 chance of it being yours. So the equilibrium allows a person at 33% to hold a 66% majority on a target quorum, though it's expensive to keep rolling to stay that high. At this point, files are at risk of being corrupted, because 66% is enough to corrupt files stored at the standard network value.

What about 50%?

The equilibrium is 75%, which still isn't enough to hit the 80% that's required to disrupt meta-quorum consensus. Though it's pretty uncomfortably close, requiring only a bit of luck to get to the 80%. Even at 80% though, you still only have a fraction of a percent of a chance of pulling off a corruption attack.

An even safer alternative is to swap out 2 random siblings for each new sibling that enters the network. This is more expensive to the quorum, and results in more overall bandwidth being used, but your equilibrium values fall a lot farther.

1% attack struggles to get past 1/3.
33% attack struggles to get past 55% (which is now ~safe from file corruption attacks)
50% attack struggles to get past 66% (now very safe from meta-quorum disruption)

=====

On the other end of the equation, you can try to kick out honest hosts from a quorum to stack it in your favor. But we have a convenient weapon: you can't kick out arbitrary honest hosts, you have to kick out _all_ honest hosts. It's an all-or-none procedure. When hosts are kicked from the network, you can replace them using the same entry process described above to keep the equilibrium values at the same points.

This does get a little messy, because a malicious party can keep kicking out full sets of honest hosts each time they get the majority in a quorum. That will add lots of load to the network, and is an effective DOS strategy, which we don't have a good solution to yet. Swapping out hosts is expensive, and it's one thing when the new guy is paying for it (like in the first situation), but it's a harder problem when you are kicking 20% (or 45%) of hosts who produced an honest block. Do you charge the whole quorum evenly (for not being well connected?)? You can't be sure which set is dishonest and you have to go with majority. So who pays for turbulence, or how can you force the two honest blocks to merge without introducing more error points into the consensus algorithm?

There might be a way to force multiple honest blocks to merge, but I'm highly wary of this approach because it could also be abusable in a way that results in forked quorums.

=====

I'm glad you brought this up, because our random distrubution algorithm did need a second look.

[Taek]

Apologizing for the triple post, but I'm happy to announce that we're ready to release the alpha v2!

We believe that we've sorted through all of the major issues, although file sizes are limited to 768kb, and you're not going to be able to be a participant on the network unless you have a public IP address or have manually set up port forwarding on your router. It's also linux only.

You can download the binary at siacoin.com/download.html, or fork the 'release' branch of our github repo.

It's definitely rough around the edges but everything seems to work without any major errors.

Let me know what you guys think and feel free to ask for help. I'll be poking my head into the IRC channel every now and then over the next few weeks, but the forum is still probably the best way to get my attention.

[msin]

Great, thanks for the update.

[Taek]

A different update. I completely reworked the way that Sia handles files. This means we're going to need a completely new whitepaper, though only a few of the major concepts have changed.

The biggest benefit is that the total amount of bandwidth required to make Sia work has dropped dramatically. A downside is that now, when you add value to a file (for storing it), you can't remove it ever.

On the other side of things, we're working on building an ncurses-like interface for Sia, because the command line is pretty annoying. I'm hoping that'll be done soon, and we'll have an alpha 2.1, where nothing substantial has changed but at least there's an easier-to-use frontend.

I'm not sure when I'll have the next whitepaper ready. Maybe 2-3 weeks?

[Djinou94]

Cannot wait for the new whitepaper

[marek3ball-orig]

Some good news? Storj is running fast .

[mladen00]

interesting concept

[Tobo]

CfB (Nxt core developer) is working on a distributed computing project. It might be able to help Sia on the efficiency of network computing.

- Jinn is a general purpose processor based on ternary logic with hardware support for distributed computing. This project also includes the Jiniri Limited (single-node) and Jiniri   Unlimited (multi-node) emulators, in addition we are creating a monetized proof-of-concept game.

- http://www.jinnlabs.com/

[Breasal]

CfB (Nxt core developer) is working on a distributed computing project. It might be able to help Sia on the efficiency of network computing.

- Jinn is a general purpose processor based on ternary logic with hardware support for distributed computing. This project also includes the Jiniri Limited (single-node) and Jiniri   Unlimited (multi-node) emulators, in addition we are creating a monetized proof-of-concept game.

- http://www.jinnlabs.com/

Wow, this would be incredible if Jinn and Sia could collaborate! It seems that both the tech and their level of "coolness" as disruptors make them a pair made in heaven imo.   

[msin]

CfB (Nxt core developer) is working on a distributed computing project. It might be able to help Sia on the efficiency of network computing.

- Jinn is a general purpose processor based on ternary logic with hardware support for distributed computing. This project also includes the Jiniri Limited (single-node) and Jiniri   Unlimited (multi-node) emulators, in addition we are creating a monetized proof-of-concept game.

- http://www.jinnlabs.com/

Wow, this would be incredible if Jinn and Sia could collaborate! It seems that both the tech and their level of "coolness" as disruptors make them a pair made in heaven imo.   

Jinn is a very ambitious project, and if successful, many crypto projects will be using it (Ethereum, NxtAT, etc..)

[Taek]

I'll be in touch with CfB soon.

I've been looking at our whitepaper and thinking that it might need to be spread into multiple papers. There are a lot of core concepts that don't depend on each other. It's intentionally designed this way to keep complexity low, which is critical for a cryptosystem, but that also means that we can probably split Sia into multiple papers, and this should really help with the credibility of the system as a whole. Additionally, it's a lot easier for someone to read a single paper about Proof-of-Capacity than it is for someone to read the entire Sia paper, especially if they're only interested in the capacity piece.

I've also been reading a bit about Peter Todd's treechains concept, and it seems like that might be a valuable approach to doing things. Treechains are still early on in life but it might be a big step forward for cryptocurrency. As Peter Todd said: (paraphrasing) "Bitcoin is like the telephone. The infrastructure is very smart and the applications are dumb. Treechains are like the Internet. The infrastructure is very dumb and the applications are very smart." Having a much less inherently useful yet much more flexible infrastructure sounds very valuable.

[Breasal]

https://forum.thesupernet.org/index.php?topic=163.0;topicseen

[Tobo]

I've also been reading a bit about Peter Todd's treechains concept, and it seems like that might be a valuable approach to doing things. Treechains are still early on in life but it might be a big step forward for cryptocurrency. As Peter Todd said: (paraphrasing) "Bitcoin is like the telephone. The infrastructure is very smart and the applications are dumb. Treechains are like the Internet. The infrastructure is very dumb and the applications are very smart." Having a much less inherently useful yet much more flexible infrastructure sounds very valuable.

This treechains concept sounds like your guys' quorum consensus. Are they similar to each other?

[Taek]

Treechains are not particularly similar to the quorums that Sia builds, Sia's quorum's [were] built out of a paxos-like message passing system. Treechains are a bunch of merge-mined POW blockchains that follow some special rules to build a tree.

Unforturnately everything that I thought was working for quorums is still broken. The problem is that when you have hundreds or millions of quorums, an attacker with 50% strength will be able to compromise at least a handful of quorums in the 70-80% range, and the attacker can pull successful attacks on those. It'd be easy to solve that problem if you could provide a proof-of-public-data, but the only way to prove that is to have the data yourself. Otherwise you're trusting whoever says the data is public or not public, and you'd have to go with the majority, which sometimes is an attacker.

We could weaken our assumptions to 33% global corruption of storage, and then increase the quorum size, and then it's much less likely for an attacker to break 51% strength in any quorum. But then you have failure modes that might destroy everything. IE if an attacker does manage to break 51% control of a particular quorum, he'll be able to continually inflate (by lying) the amount of storage he has, and eventually take 51% control of every quorum.

The source of the problem comes from the fact that not every node knows about every transaction. With a file storage system, you have to be able to handle many, many, many transactions, or have some way to allow the system to change state without using a transaction. But if you're doing proof-of-storage, and someone edits a file, the rest of the network has to know that the file has been edited so that they can change how they read a storage proof. Therefore, I don't think it's possible to edit a file without having a transaction. If most of the files are computer backups or large static files (videos, music, etc.), it might be okay but the real goal is to support files like web pages. Ideally you'd never need an HDD again (an SDD + large amount of RAM would be sufficient).

So I guess we have two options then:

1. Everyone sees every transaction
2. Not everyone sees every transaction

In the case of 1, the amount of transactions would need to be limited, and you'd have fees and they'd get pretty large. Something like this could potentially be done right on top of Bitcoin. This would probably only be useful for large _and_ important files. I don't really see Netflix using something like this, but it could be a worthwhile alternative to bittorrent (which suffers from the same problem of having files that are very hard to edit).

In the case of 2, you have to have some way of knowing that everything is okay, even though you can't see all of the transactions. The general strategy is to have a large but finite number of people verifying each piece of information, and you randomly assign who gets to verify what. You have some metric for protecting against sybil attacks during your assignment. (storage in our case). The problem is that if you're relying on something like a blockchain, you need to assume that each subset of verifiers is able to stay honest.

Consider the situation where 51% are dishonest. They are the majority, and so they can tell the network that things look like X. The network doesn't know, so it just has to accept X as true. The 49% honest people complain, saying that things actually look like Y. The dishonest group can be completely dishonest (change balances and such), because they don't ever tell anyone what Y is (Y is just a hash to keep things scalable). They just keep it to themselves and successfully corrupt the network.

So say you give the honest hosts some tool to claim that Y doesn't exist and is a made up hash. Then, in honest quorums you can have a dishonest set of hosts claim that the honest hosts are releasing data which doesn't exist. The network now needs to verify somehow that the honest hosts really have made the data public and aren't actually dishonest hosts in disguise. The only way to do this is for the network to download all of the data and verify for itself that the data exists. But now dishonest hosts will always claim that they can't see the data, and the rest of the network is always forced to download the data to verify that it's publicly available. So you end up with a situation that's not any different from a single blockchain.

Moon math aside, there doesn't seem to be any way around this. That's where Sia is stuck right now. The quorum's in the currently available whitepaper suffer from a related problem. Someone who manages to take control of >50% of a large number of quorums can start kicking out honest hosts, which will result in fines for the honest hosts and also result in a higher percentage of the hosts across the network as a whole being dishonest. Sia becomes pretty vulnerable once someone gets around 33% of the network.

=======

So let's say that we accept our limitations of 33%. What happens when someone breaks 33%? Unfortunately, they get a lot of power. In Bitcoin, when someone breaks 50% they control the blockchain for a while, they can attempt double spends and they can block transactions, but they can't spend other people's money. But in a network where the majority of hosts don't see all of the data, someone who manages to break a portion of the data CAN spend money from other wallets. They just lie about the state of the network, because they don't have to provide signatures of accuracy.

Even if we were able to prove that the dishonest hosts hadn't dishonestly spent a wallet's money (eg without a signature) (this proof could be done using snarks/scip), the dishonest hosts could still refuse to reveal what data had made it into the blockchain. The biggest issue here is that honest transactions could make it into the blockchain, and while the snarks would verify that everything was legal, honest hosts might not be able to know if their transactions had gone through. A dishonest party could prove that they had the network in a legal state without ever revealing what that state is. So the rest of the world just sees this giant black void that they can't reason about or make transactions through. The wallets within it might as well not have any coins.

 

=======

So, what do we do? I'm going to keep looking at this but it doesn't seem like highly scalable storage is going to work in a decentralized way on today's technologies. I don't think it's reasonable to assume that nobody will ever get to 33% control (even without pools) because Bitcoin has a single factory that's got something like 25% of the mining power. Sia might fall to the same thing. It would be highly desirable to have some sort of response to the failure mode, such that if the honest set of people once again got above 67%, the network could quickly restore to a functioning, fully informed state.

Another big issue with proof-of-storage-for-consensus is that it's not progress free. You have to announce that you have the storage, you have to download files (and people have to be willing to upload the files to you - another issue we aren't certain how to solve). A malicous party controlling the network can just refuse to accept you as a contributor, and it won't matter how much storage you have because you will be ignored. This doesn't happen on Bitcoin because any random person can submit a proof of work. In Sia, this isn't currently possible.

=======

Dark days for Sia =/. But filecoin is also broken, permacoin is not efficient, maidsafe is opaque and very difficult to audit, and storj is underspecified. Cryptography is very hard, something I didn't properly appreciate until the past month or two. But Sia is not dead yet, we're just back to square 1 for the time being. The money hasn't run out yet and we won't give up until it does. Our total expenses since doing the crowd sale have been about 1/2 of what we raised. (through the crowd sale. We also have venture funding although that's in a completely different pool of money. Our responsibilities following the crowd sale is to make Sia, our responsibilities following venture funding is to make Nebulous Inc. a succesful corporation).

In the worst case, I think we will be able to create a less powerful system for peer to peer storage. Instead of selling storage to a broader network, you'd sell storage to individual peers. The peers would need to be responsible for picking reliable and honest hosts, which they could achieve by using reputation, randomness, and redundancy.

  sorry guys I hope the next major update has more positive news. As always, happy to walk you through anything and explain exactly what's broken. Also happy to highlight questions you have about other systems, though it's very time consuming to take a close look.

[msin]

Disappointing to hear, hope you can find a solution.

[Tobo]

Thanks for the update. Never thought it would be easy for doing something like this.

Anyway, there is an interesting article - http://www.coindesk.com/ibm-executive-block-chain-internet-of-things/

Another one - http://www.wired.com/2014/10/overstock-com-assembles-coders-build-bitcoin-like-stock-market/

[brooklynbtc]

Disappointing to hear, hope you can find a solution.

Agreed, but to be honest this is not the worst thing I could hear. Hope you guys stick with it and see what you can pull out of the ashes.

[Taek]

Anyway, there is an interesting article - http://www.coindesk.com/ibm-executive-block-chain-internet-of-things/

That's an interesting article. Why would you ever want to open your house via a blockchain? Why wouldn't you just use a private key and do it _not_ on a blockchain? Or is there value to being able to scan the block history and know that no unauthorized actions have ever succeeded? I think that some of these examples are completely unnecessary though.

=========

Been thinking about alternative ways to construct a system like Sia. One option that was brought up was to have many - thousands - of parallel blockchains that are all merge mined with bitcoin. Each blockchain would manage it's own quorum. The challenge would be trying to figure out how to make sure that each blockchain sufficiently composed of random individuals. They couldn't do anything illegal or hidden, but it would be much easier for an attacker to compromise a large percent of a blockchain. Perhaps you'd have a single 'master' blockchain which managed hosts only, sending hosts of various keys to different blockchains. I'll be looking into this further, but it seems like a possible option.

One way would be to have a single blockchain. I believe this is similar to what storj is doing. Transaction fees would likely be very high, and the blockchain would likely be very heavy. But some decentralized storage is better than no decentralized storage. Proof of upload might be tricky, but that should be the only issue. All the other progress we've made with Sia should be able to apply here.

Finally, we could look at Peter Todd's tree chains and see if they could apply. Treechains are in the baby stages of a protocol, it's nothing that could be defined as usable yet. We could try to accelerate that and turn it into something useful, but I don't think we'd have anything ready any time soon.

The other, _other_ finally is that we could build a centralized system that employs all of the components we've talked about. Proof of upload would be really easy in the centralized case (you just send it to our servers, and then you've proven the upload!), and we'd just apply proof of storage, proof of capacity, and some form of transparent quorum-level consensus that gets validated through a centralized node. This is obviously not a decentralized file system, but it would operate in the same way that Sia originally was going to operate.

We'll be considering all four throughout the week and let you know what happens.

[Tobo]

The 4th option makes sense to me. There is no necessary for a storage system to be decentralized as long as it is distributed to lower cost and increase the efficiency.

You always can make it better and more automated and more decentralized when the new technology is available in the future.

[marek3ball-orig]

I don't understand technical details. However your version with one server for uploading. How it is compared to the Nxt's MGW exchange where there are three or more servers to run the system. In the future any technical person could make his own MGW server to run the exchange more decentralised.

This is only my simple explanation. Could this be compared to your solutions?

[Gaman]

One way would be to have a single blockchain. I believe this is similar to what storj is doing. Transaction fees would likely be very high, and the blockchain would likely be very heavy. But some decentralized storage is better than no decentralized storage. Proof of upload might be tricky, but that should be the only issue. All the other progress we've made with Sia should be able to apply here.

I think decentralized solution is better than centralized solution.  Because in a centralized solution, there is a central point of weakness.

[Lordoftherigs]

well that's a bummer but nobody was expecting this will be an easy road. You already have some viable alternatives.

If you find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn't lead anywhere.


by some smart guy

[Taek]

I think I've had a change in design philosophy. The original Sia was this gigantic system that was many levels of crypto and had many moving parts. It was too much to do all at once, and now we've paid the price for it. I think I would rather release a series of less ambitious decentralized cryptocurrencies that build on each other, and call the entire set of cryptocurrencies "Sia".

One of the original goals of Sia was to have a global price on storage, set by supply and demand. More available storage => price drop. More files being uploaded => price gain. This creates a place for people to manipulate the price though. That means the system needs a method for protecting storage against price manipulation. And the only way I know how to do that causes turbulence on the network, which means a greater amount of bandwidth used per file upload, which means a greater overall cost to storage. It also adds complexity.

I'm thinking about creating a first coin that's just a list of hosts and files, and some sort of method for you to confirm that they're storing your stuff, but allows hosts to get paid even if you aren't around to challenge them. Clients would be in charge of figuring out where to store their files and how to manage redundancy, and they'd need to negotiate on a per-host basis to set the prices of things. You end up with really free form decentralized storage, but a potentially powerful platform if the clients are smart enough. And we can put it on a single, heavyweight blockchain.

Then we can release another cryptocurrency that does something similar, but has a global price and methods for protecting that price from manipulation. And the two can coexist and we can see which one does better, all while building out a parallel-blockchain solution. And then some time in the distant future we can maybe release something with tree chains. If we get enough funding we can pursue centralized alternatives as well. (Centralized funding would be through typical VC stuff, for legal reasons it'd be a bad idea to try and crowd fund that).

I guess I'm feeling optimistic. Hopefully by Christmas we can have some sort of blockchain and a client with decent mechanisms for microchannel payments (used when downloading), atomic cross-chain trading (converting bitcoins to and from siacoins without a third party), and some sort of filesystem integration. Pretty much all of that except the filesystem already exists (at least theoretically) within Bitcoin.

Thanks for all the support, you guys are great.

[Tobo]

James is working on some storage stuff. I wonder if it is something interesting or not- https://nxtforum.org/unity/mofnfs-fully-encrypted-decentralized-m-of-n-file-storage/msg113973/#msg113973

[Taek]

I can't tell if it's interesting based on the post. I don't think a dht would be useful for the types of things that Sia is doing. I don't understand what the intention of the rest is, but things like erasure coding (M of N) and encryption (all the ciphers he listed) are relevant to us. I don't know what the rest of the architecture does though, I haven't been keeping up with James' designs.

Please make sure to inform us if/when these new ideas/paths change anything in respect to Sianote.

We have a responsibility to our funders to make the sianote valuable. This has to be done on decentralized storage. All decentralized storage systems that Nebulous Inc. releases in the future will somehow incorporate the sianote, filling the responsibilities stated on our website. If we end up releasing two or five or fifty-thousand decentralized file storage coins, sianote holders can profit from all of them.

Sianotes will not extend to any centralized solutions, should we develop any. Right now we're still prioritizing decentralized storage.

[Gaman]

The other, _other_ finally is that we could build a centralized system that employs all of the components we've talked about. Proof of upload would be really easy in the centralized case (you just send it to our servers, and then you've proven the upload!), and we'd just apply proof of storage, proof of capacity, and some form of transparent quorum-level consensus that gets validated through a centralized node. This is obviously not a decentralized file system, but it would operate in the same way that Sia originally was going to operate.

We'll be considering all four throughout the week and let you know what happens.

Sianotes will not extend to any centralized solutions, should we develop any. Right now we're still prioritizing decentralized storage.

Are you saying if you decide to build a centralized system like the one above, sianotes are worthless? and you are free from obligation to sianotes holders?

[Taek]

I'm saying Sianotes will not apply to anything centralized that we build. There are legal problems with doing that. Distributing money via a decentralized cryptocurrency isolates us from a lot of regulation. We aren't giving you the money, a protocol is. We have no control over the protocol (once it's been created) and that makes it a regulatory grey area.

But if we do control the streams, we're giving you direct access to money that's in our control. Suddenly there are regulatory problems. Are you workers? Stock holders? Why do you get access to this unique stream of revenue for the company? It's very different, and it will cost us more in legal hassle than we raised in the crowd fund

That said, I don't think building a centralized system makes sense right now. Where is the miner incentive? If we did something centralized, how would we be that much different from the competition? The original advantage to Sia was that you'd start out with a bunch of crappy storage rigs, but miners would get increasingly aggressive and innovative with building cheaper and better micro datacenters. If we centralized things, nobody would put up with the initial cheap and crappy service. We'd have not way to grow into the fully fledged and highly efficient mining system that 4 years of Bitcoin innovations has brought.

A lot of people don't realize it, but you are never going to make money from consumer grade hardware, at least not in the long run. It will be exactly like Bitcoin mining. At first mining on your spare hard drive space might make sense, but only if you have hundreds of gigabytes, and as soon as the system is popular people are going to be buying dedicated storage that's cheap and doesn't use any power. And then mining on a laptop for storage will be the same thing as mining on a laptop for Bitcoin: waste of effort. But it takes people who are willing to innovate to get that far. And I don't think people would be willing to innovate for a centralized service, especially when it's initially a lot more expensive than S3 or DropBox.

It's also worth talking about what our obligations are to the people who crowd funded us. The first thing to note is that when you crowd fund a project, it is possible for that project to fail. You take a risk on the project, and it's not a guaranteed return. That said, we still have a lot of the money that you guys gave us during the crowd sale. It would be many levels of dishonest to stop working on the things that you guys are paying us to do. Once your money runs out, we have other investors whom we have different obligations to, but we're not at that point yet. Even more, it seems like both your interests and our other investors are aligned at the moment; we want to see lots of growth in the cryptocurrency world and centralization is not the way to do that.

We'll see where the future goes. Right now we're still focused on releasing a decentralized platform for storage, and I think that legally we're locked into that because of the crowd sale. I don't know what will happen if the crowd sale money runs out. We've got around 90 Bitcoins left (additionally ~200k nxt), which may not sound like a lot compared to what we raised, (just over 200), but a lot of our expenses were one-time. (moving out of college was expensive, we've now settled in Boston and our monthly cost is a lot lower). Additionally, Bitcoin seems to be going up again (fingers crossed). If it goes up to the $1k or $2k mark in the next 6 months, those 90 btc are going to stretch a lot farther. Hopefully it will be enough for us to get a decentralized storage solution out the door, especially if we simplify things a lot.

I don't think it's worth a ton of conversation right now because we've got at least 6 months left on our current funds, more if the market starts doing better (I'm optimistic).

[Breasal]

Sorry, I must speak up here. I see many words but noting near what was promised when I funding Sia. You plan to wait out another six months in Boston (one of the most expensive cities in the US) and still have no product!

How about putting up a buy wall on those NXT sianotes for 2500? I think that's the right thing to do, don't you?

[grandpa_seth]

Sorry, I must speak up here. I see many words but noting near what was promised when I funding Sia. You plan to wait out another six months in Boston (one of the most expensive cities in the US) and still have no product!

How about putting up a buy wall on those NXT sianotes for 2500? I think that's the right thing to do, don't you?

I understand what Breasal is saying and how he feels. I would say putting a buy wall is appropriate if you have given up on sia. It does seem like despite your somewhat optimism on completing a decentralized sia, you do seem to be giving up on sia being potentially a huge cloud storage solution for the masses and guys like netflix. If you feel currently that sia no longer has the potential to make sianote holders a large return and you are just going through the motions then I would vote for buying them back with your remaining funds.

Clearly David, you are very intelligent and honest. So I would believe you if you tell us that Sia still has the potential to be a great investment for sianote holders. But if you are just fulfilling your crowdfunding obligation to release a storage coin that you don't truly believe in then I would rather have my sianotes bought back at a loss.

[dadingsda]

+1 grandpa_seth
Couldn´t say it better. Sia was one of my top 5.  But better stop it now than waste our money - PLEASE!

[Tobo]

+1 grandpa_seth
Couldn´t say it better. Sia was one of my top 5.  But better stop it now than waste our money - PLEASE!

I have to agree with this. It is better to stop doing it if the devs don't whole heartily believe in it.

[grandpa_seth]

Don't get me wrong. What I'm hoping will happen is Taek replying with "Hey guys, there is a misunderstanding. This is a big bump in the road and the road will take longer than expected, but sianotes will still be extremely valuable one day because I'm confident I will find the solution. I just need some time to sort it out."

[Breasal]

Don't get me wrong. What I'm hoping will happen is Taek replying with "Hey guys, there is a misunderstanding. This is a big bump in the road and the road will take longer than expected, but sianotes will still be extremely valuable one day because I'm confident I will find the solution. I just need some time to sort it out."

Yea, maybe this is the case but none the less sianote holders should see an effort made to place a buy wall imo. A buy wall speaks louder than what you have just written (with all due respect). If the sia team is so confident in producing a product, then they will have no problem placing this. Conversely, if they are "giving up" then they should put up a wall with remaining funds.

[Taek]

Boston was a logical choice given our proximity to other startups, our angel investor, and MIT + Harvard. The other choice would have been Silicon Valley, which is even more expensive. Also, the rent is not as bad as the pundits would have you believe, and beyond that cost of living is pretty tame. The public transportation is good and cheap, the food is decently cheap (grocery store food, restaurants are expensive but we don't eat out much), and that's about all a budding startup needs.

Don't get me wrong. What I'm hoping will happen is Taek replying with "Hey guys, there is a misunderstanding. This is a big bump in the road and the road will take longer than expected, but sianotes will still be extremely valuable one day because I'm confident I will find the solution. I just need some time to sort it out."

It would definitely be foolish to give up on the same week that you break your core technology. We broke our core technology 4 days ago and wanted to be upfront about it. The Sia that you've read about won't work. But that doesn't mean that there aren't other options available to us. It's also entirely possible that we'll find some alternative way to build Sia that gives it all of the same powers without being broken. It's clear that a large redesign is needed, and that any new product must have minimal complexity to have a decent chance, but there's no reason to give up hope yet.

Especially because I believe that decentralized storage is something that the world really needs. With the original Sia I was hoping to replace all cloud storage, but providing a reasonably cheap source of decentralized storage is still a huge value-add to the Internet. Even a simple blockchain scheme would potentially be enough to replace much of Bittorrent, which should provide an income that far exceeds the original investment in the Sianote. Decentralized storage is not dead, even if it seems as though it won't be replacing centralized storage outright.

How about putting up a buy wall on those NXT sianotes for 2500? I think that's the right thing to do, don't you?

Putting up a buy wall is something we could consider, but you need to realize that there are two sides to the equation. Not everyone will want that to happen, I'm sure that there are a decent percentage of sianote holders who would rather see this all the way through. I think a buy wall would be responsible if Luke and I as a team had given up on making the Sianotes viable. But we haven't, we still believe that we can make something valuable, even if our sights have been lowered a few notches. We certainly aren't just going through the motions. We want this to succeed more than any of you, so much that we've given up our previous career paths and left many of our friends.

but sianotes will still be extremely valuable one day because I'm confident I will find the solution."

Going to shoot as straight as possible with this one. Two weeks ago if you had asked me what I though was a reasonable end-game price of the Sianote, I would have said somewhere between $20,000 and $100,000 each, with potentials to hit $500k or $1m in the same way that Bitcoin has the potential to break $1m (eg very unlikely, but not impossible). Today, given our current set of potential solutions, I'm much more inclined to say that the end game value is in the $1000 to $5000 range. That assumes that Sia is the primary solution for decentralized storage, but is unable to compete in flexibility with centralized storage.

At the moment I'm not convinced that it's possible for decentralized storage to compete with centralized storage. But at the same time I'm not convinced that it's not possible either. I'm convinced that it's a very difficult problem and my previous approach to the problem is not a secure approach, and that a new approach is needed.


==================


So what will things look like going forward:

1. No buy wall, not until Luke and I are both convinced that we can't make decentralized storage happen. And we're very far from being convinced of that.
2. I've narrowed down the previous four options I listed to the following two:
    a. We pursue a simple blockchain model for decentralized storage. It will be a lot different, and it will be unfriendly to small files in the same way that Bitcoin is unfriendly to small transactions. But it will be useful for large files, and it will potentially be competitive with centralized storage. For large files. I believe we can get Sia to a point that's still "enterprise friendly", which was among the original goals.
    b. We spend some more time exploring consensus models that would enable small files with rapid updates to also be useful.

And actually, being enterprise friendly may be all we need to pump the value of the Sianote up to $10k+. But it's a new system and I need a lot of time to think about the design and implications of such a thing.

I appreciate all your feedback and opinions. Me knowing what you think helps us make decisions moving forward.

[apenzl]

[Tobo]

Sounds good. Thanks!

[grandpa_seth]

I believed Sia was a good investment because of the potential "enterprise friendly" goals. So I am for that. $1,000-$5,000 as the potential best case scenario upside isn't really a lot considering the risk and how much we paid. But hopefully, Sia will be bigger than even that estimate. Well, my unofficial vote is to continue the project. I bought mostly at post ipo prices which is a lot of $ but I believe as long as you guys still live and breathe Sia its a good investment. Thanks guys.

[gs02xzz]

Interesting article - http://blogs.wsj.com/accelerators/2014/10/10/weekend-read-the-imminent-decentralized-computing-revolution/

[Taek]

Got enough ideas down to put together a new whitepaper. We've opted for a dumb protocol that has smart clients. Our v1 is going to look a lot like Bitcoin, except that it's also going to have a list of hosts and a list of files. You upload files to one host at a time, and the host must agree to store the file, you can't just upload arbitrarily. This allows the hosts to protect themselves against illegal files.

Clients will contact a bunch of hosts at a a time, and store things redundantly. The blockchain will force hosts to perform proofs of storage. Clients and hosts will have a bunch of tools that allow them to negotiate price, but I don't think that the price will be able to change throughout the lifetime of the file. Hosts can agree to pay penalties if they lose the file or fail to perform storage proofs.

That's about all of the details I have right now but I'm optimistic. Our long term plan is as follows:

1. Create new whitepaper
2. Have experienced people look at it, such as the core devs
3. Launch an alpha and test things.
4. Launch a _beta_ product that is fully functioning, and has sianotes. We hope this is done in Q2 2015.
5. Grow and support the _beta_ product.

6. Create new whitepaper, incorporating more dramatic changes. There are a lot of things that I think could be improved, but they are all ambitious, and I think it would be foolish to try and complete any of them in the next year. This whitepaper will probably not be done until 2016.
7. Have it reviewed, hype it.
8. Create alpha, test
9. Create 1.0 for Sia. This step probably won't be complete until mid 2017.

====

So the idea is to do something easy and very similar to Bitcoin for our first product, but being transparent about the idea that it's not the final iteration. We want to get something out because we believe it will take a long time to have something more sophisticated that is also properly secure. I think we will be able to return to quorum-style scalability, which will once again enable many many small files.

Having a file storage beta that's making us money will give us experience, we'll know the types of features that are missing that are most useful after we have a cryptocurrency. We'll know where the most severe bugs are.

There is a possibility that we simply upgrade the beta to the 1.0 after a few years. This is hugely dependent on the miners being in agreement though. Altcoins like Nxt have had some success doing regular hard forks. If it looks like we can safely hardfork our beta product, we'll probably prefer that approach.

I'm very much into the idea of smaller iterations where we try new things each iteration. A cryptocurrency that does that is essentially centralized around the developers however. We'll start with this first whitepaper, have a big launch and start supporting actual decentralized storage apps. And then we'll figure out where to go from there based on what people like and don't like, and what they want or don't want.

Thanks for sticking with us. Working on a new whitepaper, no eta.

[grandpa_seth]

I'm kind of liking this. It shows you are committed to this for the long term which I think was the concern for some recently. As long as you guys are still trying to make Sia a huge revenue making machine for Nebulous then Sianote holders will mutually benefit obviously.

[Taek]

I had a sort of zen minimalist moment yesterday. We have a new specification for Sia, and it's really really simple. Even simpler than Bitcoin, because we simplified the way the scripting system works.

It's pretty much the most minimal possible protocol that allows decentralized storage to happen. There are hosts that announce they have storage, and there are files that hosts agree to store, and the hosts submit proof-of-storage on the files to get paid. If they don't submit proof-of-storage, then the uploader gets refunded automatically.

And that's pretty much it, happening on a blockchain. It's so simple that we should have an alpha ready to go within a few weeks, maybe 4 to 6. I'm actually really excited about this new protocol, because it's simple enough to implement quickly and powerful enough to allow a full structure of decentralized storage.

We do sacrifice a few things:
1. There is no global network price. Hosts set their own price.
2. There is no automatic file repair. Clients will need to manage file repairs themselves. This means they need to be online to make the repairs, but that means running 'repair' every few months instead of needing to be online all the time.
3. There is no 'sublinear consensus'. Sia is a single blockchain and will need to deal with blockchain bloat in all of the same ways that apply to other altcoins. This shouldn't be a problem until we have multiple millions of users.

That's basically it. We slimmed things down to the very core requirements: decentralized storage that doesn't require you to be online all the time. Turns out you can do this with only a few simple changes to the Bitcoin protocol. We should still be completely compatible with enterprise customers, which I think is where the majority of our users will eventually come from. Without sublinear consensus, I'm having troubles imagining that we'll be useful for files below 10GB in size, but that's a problem for the future. Enterprise customers are unlikely to need files less than 1TB in size (replace file with 'cloud disk' --> 'file' is a misleading term). A 2.0 down the line will probably address this (requiring either a hardfork or a different cryptocurrency). We want to delay sublinear consensus because right now there are no good solutions to decentralized storage. We can change this without decentralized storage and we think it's more valuable to release something simple now than something complex and potentially insecure after we spend 3-6 more months planning it out.

We're planning on releasing a whitepaper alongside a beta implementation. The beta implementation will be fully usable, but we're going to premine 99% of the coins on the beta, as sort of a "NOT FINISHED YET" red flag. After a few months of beta, we'll decide how much needs to change for a 1.0, and we'll release a 1.0 that has sianotes and no premining.

Luke and I are ecstatic. Wanted to share my enthusiasm. I know it's been a roller coaster, but that seems to be the expectation for startups and early stage investing.

[msin]

I had a sort of zen minimalist moment yesterday. We have a new specification for Sia, and it's really really simple. Even simpler than Bitcoin, because we simplified the way the scripting system works.

It's pretty much the most minimal possible protocol that allows decentralized storage to happen. There are hosts that announce they have storage, and there are files that hosts agree to store, and the hosts submit proof-of-storage on the files to get paid. If they don't submit proof-of-storage, then the uploader gets refunded automatically.

And that's pretty much it, happening on a blockchain. It's so simple that we should have an alpha ready to go within a few weeks, maybe 4 to 6. I'm actually really excited about this new protocol, because it's simple enough to implement quickly and powerful enough to allow a full structure of decentralized storage.

We do sacrifice a few things:
1. There is no global network price. Hosts set their own price.
2. There is no automatic file repair. Clients will need to manage file repairs themselves. This means they need to be online to make the repairs, but that means running 'repair' every few months instead of needing to be online all the time.
3. There is no 'sublinear consensus'. Sia is a single blockchain and will need to deal with blockchain bloat in all of the same ways that apply to other altcoins. This shouldn't be a problem until we have multiple millions of users.

That's basically it. We slimmed things down to the very core requirements: decentralized storage that doesn't require you to be online all the time. Turns out you can do this with only a few simple changes to the Bitcoin protocol. We should still be completely compatible with enterprise customers, which I think is where the majority of our users will eventually come from. Without sublinear consensus, I'm having troubles imagining that we'll be useful for files below 10GB in size, but that's a problem for the future. Enterprise customers are unlikely to need files less than 1TB in size (replace file with 'cloud disk' --> 'file' is a misleading term). A 2.0 down the line will probably address this (requiring either a hardfork or a different cryptocurrency). We want to delay sublinear consensus because right now there are no good solutions to decentralized storage. We can change this without decentralized storage and we think it's more valuable to release something simple now than something complex and potentially insecure after we spend 3-6 more months planning it out.

We're planning on releasing a whitepaper alongside a beta implementation. The beta implementation will be fully usable, but we're going to premine 99% of the coins on the beta, as sort of a "NOT FINISHED YET" red flag. After a few months of beta, we'll decide how much needs to change for a 1.0, and we'll release a 1.0 that has sianotes and no premining.

Luke and I are ecstatic. Wanted to share my enthusiasm. I know it's been a roller coaster, but that seems to be the expectation for startups and early stage investing.

Good to hear, looking forward to updated whitepaper.

[peggy2jj]

Thanks for the hard work 

[Tobo]

+1. Nice to see the progress! Thanks!

Btw, Ciyam's AT might be helpful for you to build a more complicated wallet in the future if it works - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=826263.msg9231765#msg9231765

[Taek]

On the distribution of Sianotes into the new protocol:

What I'm leaning towards right now is releasing Sia with sianotes built in, and then manually moving everyone's sianotes to the new protocol.
To have them moved over, you'll send the sianotes to an Nxt address that I provide (if it seems reasonable, it'll be an unusable address).
You'll send them with some message indicating what Sia address you want your sianotes sent to.

Once all the sianotes have been moved over, the Nxt sianotes will become completely worthless, as they've migrated. We'll probably have a deadline for moving Sianotes over, but it'll probably be 6 months to 1 year after we start moving them over. We'll be reasonable with regards to that.

At that point sianotes will be generating siacoins for everyone. They'll be transferable assets, meaning you can sell them on exchanges and stuff.

At that point we'll switch gears from being a small, moderately stealth cryptocurrency to being as public as possible. We'll probably fund one of those silly videos that startups and altcoins like releasing, because they seem to grab a lot of attention. And then we'll be a full startup. Follow our growth and whatnot.

Still no eta on the whitepaper, but it's looking a lot cleaner than the previous one. I'm liking it.

[Taek]

At       that         point          sianotes               will                 be                generating                siacoins                 for                       everyone


 

[Taek]

Sianotes enforce a tax on the network. For every coin that is spent on renting storage, a percent will be taken and distributed among sianotes holders.

This is not a transaction fee, it's not a bandwidth fee, it's purely a storage fee. We use this fee instead of premining to fund our business and give value to the people who backed Sia. This money will go directly to funding developers, which means more than just me and Luke. We're planning on building something like Mozilla that's focused around cryptocurrency. Sia is our first major source of income.

The current model for cryptocurrency startups is premining, which I think is dirty and awful. Premined currencies means that someone (IE Satoshi, Ripple, etc) owns an extraordinary amount of coins, and this gives them a lot of power to crash the network, and creates a point of trust. In Bitcoin, we're basically all trusting that Satoshi doesn't do something retarded with his stash, because he could really wreck the ecosystem.

But it's also awful for the people who own the premined currency. As a business, how am I supposed to pay my employee? Cryptocurrencies are notoriously unstable. If I premine 1 million coins, and initially they are worth 10 cents each, how many do I sell vs. how many do I keep? As I continue to sell more coins, my company benefits less and less from the value we add to the network. And (as happened in Bitcoin recently), what if we add a ton of value to the network, and the price just falls? In the time that Bitcoin went from $800 to $300, Bitcoin as a currency was made a lot more useful to society. The price was pretty much unrelated b/c people don't need to hodl Bitcoins to get the value out.

So we're isolating ourselves from that problem, and we're isolating our currency holders from that problem. Storage is a real world asset with a stable value. If the price of the siacoin falls, the price of storage in siacoins will rise. By taking a fee on storage, we get our income directly from the value we add to the ecosystem, and we get that income regardless of what the price is. If we add value by adding both suppliers and consumers, our income will go up. Price shenanigans won't affect us.

And by us choosing not to own large volumes of the currency (and by keeping it permanently inflationary), we isolate you guys from whales. We want Siacoins to be a modest-at-best long term investment, because that will keep the whales from being interested. (The Sianote is a different story - very good long term investment, very subject to price instability, manipulation, whales, etc., but you don't pay for storage with the sianote so that's okay. People who want stability and predictability can use the siacoin at the cost of it not being a lucrative investment.)

[Taek]

Yes, pretty sure we are legally bound to that number.

[Taek]

I feel like some sort of response to the sidechains thing is necessary. Sidechains aren't nearly far enough along for us to rationally consider using them. Being an altcoin still feels like the most sensible thing for us. The particular advantage that sidechains would offer to us (if the technology were ready, which I do not feel that it is) is that we could do proof of storage on Bitcoins directly. (we could still keep Sianotes). But there's a lot of complexity involved in doing that, and I don't trust myself to do it correctly at this point, especially since there's no existing reference sidechain.

Even further, I'm not sure that I want to use bitcoins directly, I think I'd rather have the siacoin be a separate asset, because there a different rules governing the siacoin economy (namely there's a sink for coins - when you create a contract, those coins are locked down for the duration of the contract, and can't be spent until either the host earns them or the host screws up and disappears). The siacoin really should have a greater stability than exists in Bitcoin once it's past the initial period of high growth. The situation where Bitcoin is improving dramatically but the price is falling for 6 months shouldn't be as possible in Sia. If the protocol usage is going up, the scarcity of the coin is also going up because people need to lock down the currency in order to make use of the storage contracts. We wouldn't want to dilute our stability by using bitcoins, as the price of bitcoin depends on a much greater number of factors (it's used in more places), and a fallout in one of those places would hurt Sia as well. I see economic isolation as a good thing in Sia's case.

For those wondering: www.blockstream.com

[Tobo]

For those wondering: www.blockstream.com

Does this mean that with the side-chains BTC will solve the scalability issue but make 51% attack issue worse?

[Taek]

Not necessarily. I think they have more clever ways of doing things so that you get scalability without much added risk.

One of their ideas was to use a sidechain for less valuable transactions. So you'd have merge mining which mostly protects the smaller transactions, but since the total amount of money being thrown behind maintaining consensus on the sidechain is smaller, it's potentially vulnerable to Bitcoin miners being bribed to attack the smaller chain. But since it's only used for smaller transactions, there's not much benefit to attacking the smaller chain.

[Breasal]

3. There is no 'sublinear consensus'. Sia is a single blockchain and will need to deal with blockchain bloat in all of the same ways that apply to other altcoins. This shouldn't be a problem until we have multiple millions of users.

Have you considered cryptonite's (XCN) mini blockchain protocol as a possible solution?

[Taek]

We've considered something like it. This post is more helpful: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=88208.0

We've got something good coming soon. I think two weeks is the most we need for our next release, which will contain a whitepaper and perhaps a bonus announcement.

[Tobo]

Nice to hear that!

[Breasal]

Good to see that Sianote has rebounded a bit on the NXT AE. Looking forward to seeing what you devs can do with Sia after all. Good luck.

[Taek]

Making an update since things are taking longer than I would have liked.

We're putting the finishing touches on the whitepaper and releasing it as a draft. It's going to be labelled 'draft' because I want there to be time for one more round of criticism and adjustment before releasing the final version of the whitepaper. I think that the final whitepaper will be released near the end of November.

While we've been working on the whitepaper, we've also been working on a beta, which will be available for all platforms. It's still just a command line tool, but you should be able to provide storage in return for beta-coins, and you should be able to rent storage using beta-coins. The code is currently in a private repo, which is why our commit activity appears to have fallen off entirely. We'll be making the repo public as soon as the beta is finished.

While the beta will be sufficient for doing things, we caution that it IS beta software, and that it hasn't been hardened as much as something like the Nxt code. You will be able to store backups and whatnot over Sia using the beta but we strongly recommend against it. We also strongly recommend against giving the beta-coins any sort of value, because the currency will be in a very vulnerable state. The early beta will not have sianotes. Sianotes will of course be in the 1.0.

I'm hoping to have the beta out before November ends.

[msin]

Making an update since things are taking longer than I would have liked.

We're putting the finishing touches on the whitepaper and releasing it as a draft. It's going to be labelled 'draft' because I want there to be time for one more round of criticism and adjustment before releasing the final version of the whitepaper. I think that the final whitepaper will be released near the end of November.

While we've been working on the whitepaper, we've also been working on a beta, which will be available for all platforms. It's still just a command line tool, but you should be able to provide storage in return for beta-coins, and you should be able to rent storage using beta-coins. The code is currently in a private repo, which is why our commit activity appears to have fallen off entirely. We'll be making the repo public as soon as the beta is finished.

While the beta will be sufficient for doing things, we caution that it IS beta software, and that it hasn't been hardened as much as something like the Nxt code. You will be able to store backups and whatnot over Sia using the beta but we strongly recommend against it. We also strongly recommend against giving the beta-coins any sort of value, because the currency will be in a very vulnerable state. The early beta will not have sianotes. Sianotes will of course be in the 1.0.

I'm hoping to have the beta out before November ends.

Thanks for the update, looking forward to beta.

[Taek]

Putting the finishing touches on the whitepaper. It will be out by Friday, and we will be updating our website and github page to reflect that.

We've also been working on a beta, which is nearly complete. We're looking for people to help us test the early beta, make sure there are no major hiccups before we open the beta to the public. You can be a beta tester on Windows, Linux, and Mac. We strongly prefer that if you join the testing, you have a machine that's online all the time. Closed-beta participants can expect to run into all sorts of juicy and frustrating bugs. Actually, the codebase is very nice and we have a minimally comprehensive test suite. Though you should be prepared for major bugs, I don't think it will be a terrible experience.

If we can get 10-20 machines in the closed test all providing and renting storage, and the closed-beta testers all agree that it's mostly ready for open-beta, we'll open the beta to the general public.

If you are interested in being involved in the closed beta, please message me. There is no financial reward for participating. We expect to be ready for closed beta by the end of November. Open beta will take as long as it takes, but hopefully by the end of the year.

Everything is a command line tool right now. We are in the process of hiring someone to write a front-end (a web client), but I have no idea when it will be ready. Something dirt-simple might be ready by the end of the year, but it might take longer depending on a number of factors.

[Tobo]

Nice update!

[msin]

Putting the finishing touches on the whitepaper. It will be out by Friday, and we will be updating our website and github page to reflect that.

We've also been working on a beta, which is nearly complete. We're looking for people to help us test the early beta, make sure there are no major hiccups before we open the beta to the public. You can be a beta tester on Windows, Linux, and Mac. We strongly prefer that if you join the testing, you have a machine that's online all the time. Closed-beta participants can expect to run into all sorts of juicy and frustrating bugs. Actually, the codebase is very nice and we have a minimally comprehensive test suite. Though you should be prepared for major bugs, I don't think it will be a terrible experience.

If we can get 10-20 machines in the closed test all providing and renting storage, and the closed-beta testers all agree that it's mostly ready for open-beta, we'll open the beta to the general public.

If you are interested in being involved in the closed beta, please message me. There is no financial reward for participating. We expect to be ready for closed beta by the end of November. Open beta will take as long as it takes, but hopefully by the end of the year.

Everything is a command line tool right now. We are in the process of hiring someone to write a front-end (a web client), but I have no idea when it will be ready. Something dirt-simple might be ready by the end of the year, but it might take longer depending on a number of factors.

I'll run beta on Win machine.  If you can give me instructions.

[super3]

Why don't you just fork Metadisk? https://github.com/storj/metadisk

[Taek]

For some reason, hadn't considered it. Your MetaDisk UI is quite beautiful.

The repo doesn't have a license though, which prevents us from being certain about the terms associated with using the software. Please add that. The majority of Sia is going to be released under the MIT license.

[Taek]

New whitepaper is live!

Check out siacoin.com/sia.pdf

[Lordoftherigs]

New whitepaper is live!

Check out siacoin.com/sia.pdf

I'm not sure I understand the numbers here.

White paper states that : ''Nebulous Inc. will initially hold 95% of the siafunds, and the early crowd-fund backers of Sia will hold the remaining 5%.''

But wasn't 15% of sianotes sold during IPO ?

Edit: is this due to fees increased from 3.5% to 10% ?
 

[bubbletea789]

New whitepaper is live!

Check out siacoin.com/sia.pdf

how to get siafunds?
--and where is siastock (from the title of his thread) in the picture?

[super3]

For some reason, hadn't considered it. Your MetaDisk UI is quite beautiful.

The repo doesn't have a license though, which prevents us from being certain about the terms associated with using the software. Please add that. The majority of Sia is going to be released under the MIT license.

Oops. Yeah that should be MIT like all our other repos.

[gs02xzz]

New whitepaper is live!
Check out siacoin.com/sia.pdf

how to get siafunds?
--and where is siastock (from the title of his thread) in the picture?

You can buy Sianotes at Nxt AE trading platform - https://nxtblocks.info/#section/assets_exchange/market/11593659039925686857

[super3]

Fixed.

[Taek]

New whitepaper is live!

Check out siacoin.com/sia.pdf

I'm not sure I understand the numbers here.

White paper states that : ''Nebulous Inc. will initially hold 95% of the siafunds, and the early crowd-fund backers of Sia will hold the remaining 5%.''

But wasn't 15% of sianotes sold during IPO ?

Edit: is this due to fees increased from 3.5% to 10% ?
 

Yes, the total amount has increased from 3.9% to 10%, the % that crowd funders hold is the same as always, "One Sianote can be directly converted to 0.00039% of host income from renting storage, or 10,000 for 3.9% of all host income from storage. Currently, there are approximately 1250 sianotes in circulation, or just under 0.5%." 10% isn't a finalized number, but I think that it's a safe number for us to pick. The risk of course as we increase the number is that people will be encouraged to use a fork instead of using us directly, but I think that our network effect in combination with our software (which will have multiple full time developers working on it being funded by the 9.5% in control of Nebulous) will bring both advantages in efficiency and usability.

how to get siafunds?
--and where is siastock (from the title of his thread) in the picture?

siastock got renamed to sianotes, because we wanted to avoid issues with the SEC. Siastock makes it sound like we were selling corporate equity, which we were not. We wanted to eliminate as much confusion as possible but unfortunately couldn't change the title of the thread. (... ... ... apparently you can... ... ... I'm not sure why I didn't change it earlier). Sianotes are the asset that's available on the Nxt AE, and are directly convertable to the siafunds that are discussed in the whitepaper.

Fixed.

many thanks

[bubbletea789]

so sianotes (on Nxt AE) can be converted to siafunds at the ratio of 1:3 ?

[Taek]

No, sianotes will convert to siafunds at a 1:1 ratio. 1 sianote converts to 1 siafund. There will be (subject to change) 25,000 siafunds total, and each one will earn 0.00039% of host income from renting storage. Nebulous will own approx. 23800 of these siafunds, converting to approx a 9.282% fee. The crowdfunders will own approx. 1200, converting to approx a 0.468% fee, for a total fee of around 9.75%. This matches the terms of the crowdfund, giving the crowdfunders exactly the fee portion that they have paid for.

[ownerbest]

Do u have any plan to issue some more sianotes at a reasonable price?

[Momimaus]

No, sianotes will convert to siafunds at a 1:1 ratio. 1 sianote converts to 1 siafund. There will be (subject to change) 25,000 siafunds total, and each one will earn 0.00039% of host income from renting storage. Nebulous will own approx. 23800 of these siafunds, converting to approx a 9.282% fee. The crowdfunders will own approx. 1200, converting to approx a 0.468% fee, for a total fee of around 9.75%. This matches the terms of the crowdfund, giving the crowdfunders exactly the fee portion that they have paid for.

Doesn´t look like that.

You just increase the available siafuns by 150% and the reason therefore is that you increase the fees? Why shouldn´t the stakeholders participate of the increasing fees?

[msin]

This matches the terms of the crowdfund, giving the crowdfunders exactly the fee portion that they have paid for.

It doesn't mean people will like it or anyone will support it.  You may just alienate much of your beta userbase and community.  I think you overestimate your network effect.

[gs02xzz]

Yes, the total amount has increased from 3.9% to 10%, the % that crowd funders hold is the same as always, "One Sianote can be directly converted to 0.00039% of host income from renting storage, or 10,000 for 3.9% of all host income from storage. Currently, there are approximately 1250 sianotes in circulation, or just under 0.5%." 10% isn't a finalized number, but I think that it's a safe number for us to pick. The risk of course as we increase the number is that people will be encouraged to use a fork instead of using us directly, but I think that our network effect in combination with our software (which will have multiple full time developers working on it being funded by the 9.5% in control of Nebulous) will bring both advantages in efficiency and usability.

What is the rationale behind the business decision to increase the fee from 3.9% to 10%? Is it still pretty affordable and attractive to the users?

[Taek]

What is the rationale behind the business decision to increase the fee from 3.9% to 10%? Is it still pretty affordable and attractive to the users?

It more than doubles our income while still having only a 10% overhead for users. Typical could storage overhead is closer to 40%, and that's the number I've been told many times that I should be charging, which seems completely absurd to me. Most people don't believe that we'll have enough money for development, let alone marketing. Typical cloud storage operations apparently are very expensive and have many more costs than just the hardware. We'll have to see how that works for Sia, but 10% seems like it'll bring in enough cash to me.

In terms of scaring away users, I'm pretty confident that our host-picking algorithms and erasure coding will put us substantially more than 10% cheaper than everyone else, including decentralized competitors like Storj, MaidSAFE, and Filecoin. You may be paying a 10% fee to use the network, but even with the fee it's going to be the most attractive option for both hosts and clients. (clients will need less redundancy, which means they are paying hosts more per raw TB, but less overall, and getting the same or even a greater level of security). We are planning on leaving ourselves room to reduce this number if it prevents us from being competitive in the marketplace.

Doesn´t look like that.

You just increase the available siafuns by 150% and the reason therefore is that you increase the fees? Why shouldn´t the stakeholders participate of the increasing fees?

It doesn't mean people will like it or anyone will support it.  You may just alienate much of your beta userbase and community.  I think you overestimate your network effect.

We are trying to maximize the value of each siafund. We believe that by making the fee 10%, we'll be able to hire more developers in a way that gives us a stronger edge than we would have from increased users due to a reduced fee. If Nebulous has twice the money, we can hire twice the developers and end up with a much stronger product. We believe that this stronger product will be the dominant factor in the number of users that we have, and that the 10% fee will be negligible, especially when compared against a 50% savings over the competition.

Meaning, we believe that by giving ourselves more income, we believe we'll also be able to boost the value of each of your siafunds (by being able to grow faster and have a stronger product) even though the percent of the fee you are receiving is the same. The percent is the same, but we think that the total volume of usage will be higher.

=====

Most importantly though, I feel very obligated to stick to the 0.00039% value that I've repeated many times. I've encouraged everyone to make decisions around that number and not any other number. Changing that number means we're altering what we told people to expect when they were making their investment decisions. People who chose not to buy may have decided to buy in the event that each sianote would actually be worth more than 0.00039%.  Furthermore, if we create a precedent for changing this value, you lose the security of knowing that it won't decrease. If we decide later that a 10% fee is actually bad (because Storj, for example, ends up being 10% cheaper) and we need to reduce it, do we also drop how much a sianote is worth? How will that affect people who have been investing in the sianote?

I realize that changing the total fee is a big move, but I am trying to do the right thing. If it ends up being a major source of contention, and you guys feel universally that you are being cheated because we raised our fee without including you, all that will happen is we reduce the fee back to the original 3.9%. I feel that this would hurt Sia overall because it affects the number of people that we can hire, that affects the quality of the product. But I would much rather set the total fee at 3.9% than set a precedent of adjusting the income provided by the sianote, even if the first adjustment was upwards. I don't  think that I would ever feel comfortable adjusting the number down from a previous amount (if I did decide to set it at 0.001%, I would never lower it), and that would back us into a corner if we suddenly realized that the fee was too high, because either we have to fully take the hit ourselves (to isolate our crowdfunders) or we have to lower the value of the sianote back down from 0.001%, which would violate expectations that we had set.

I'm willing to work with you guys on this, but I'm very nervous about straying from the 0.00039% value that I've repeated so many times. I don't think it would be right to adjust those expectations.

[gs02xzz]

Most importantly though, I feel very obligated to stick to the 0.00039% value that I've repeated many times. I've encouraged everyone to make decisions around that number and not any other number. Changing that number means we're altering what we told people to expect when they were making their investment decisions. People who chose not to buy may have decided to buy in the event that each sianote would actually be worth more than 0.00039%.  Furthermore, if we create a precedent for changing this value, you lose the security of knowing that it won't decrease. If we decide later that a 10% fee is actually bad (because Storj, for example, ends up being 10% cheaper) and we need to reduce it, do we also drop how much a sianote is worth? How will that affect people who have been investing in the sianote?

I realize that changing the total fee is a big move, but I am trying to do the right thing. If it ends up being a major source of contention, and you guys feel universally that you are being cheated because we raised our fee without including you, all that will happen is we reduce the fee back to the original 3.9%. I feel that this would hurt Sia overall because it affects the number of people that we can hire, that affects the quality of the product. But I would much rather set the total fee at 3.9% than set a precedent of adjusting the income provided by the sianote, even if the first adjustment was upwards. I don't  think that I would ever feel comfortable adjusting the number down from a previous amount (if I did decide to set it at 0.001%, I would never lower it), and that would back us into a corner if we suddenly realized that the fee was too high, because either we have to fully take the hit ourselves (to isolate our crowdfunders) or we have to lower the value of the sianote back down from 0.001%, which would violate expectations that we had set.

I'm willing to work with you guys on this, but I'm very nervous about straying from the 0.00039% value that I've repeated so many times. I don't think it would be right to adjust those expectations.

Sounds good to me. I think it is fine to stick to that original number becasue the investors still have the same value for their investment. I believe you guys will make sure that the project will be competitive.

[Vega]

I'm willing to work with you guys on this, but I'm very nervous about straying from the 0.00039% value that I've repeated so many times. I don't think it would be right to adjust those expectations.

I respect your decision to stick to this, however you have to acknowledge that the plan and prospect of the service has changes drastically since this percentage been set. The increase of the fee to 10% reflects this.
How about instead of increasing the percentage of the individual sianotes value, you give additional sianotes to holders? For every sianote you transfer an additional of 0.2-1 sianotes for the holders?

[msin]

I think raising the fee to that amount is a mistake, it's too high.  I would say 5% max. 

[Taek]

I think raising the fee to that amount is a mistake, it's too high.  I would say 5% max. 

Noted. The beta should give us a much better idea of what a reasonable value is. 10% is not a value that has been set in stone.

[Lordoftherigs]

Most importantly though, I feel very obligated to stick to the 0.00039% value that I've repeated many times. I've encouraged everyone to make decisions around that number and not any other number. Changing that number means we're altering what we told people to expect when they were making their investment decisions. People who chose not to buy may have decided to buy in the event that each sianote would actually be worth more than 0.00039%.  Furthermore, if we create a precedent for changing this value, you lose the security of knowing that it won't decrease. If we decide later that a 10% fee is actually bad (because Storj, for example, ends up being 10% cheaper) and we need to reduce it, do we also drop how much a sianote is worth? How will that affect people who have been investing in the sianote?

I realize that changing the total fee is a big move, but I am trying to do the right thing. If it ends up being a major source of contention, and you guys feel universally that you are being cheated because we raised our fee without including you, all that will happen is we reduce the fee back to the original 3.9%. I feel that this would hurt Sia overall because it affects the number of people that we can hire, that affects the quality of the product. But I would much rather set the total fee at 3.9% than set a precedent of adjusting the income provided by the sianote, even if the first adjustment was upwards. I don't  think that I would ever feel comfortable adjusting the number down from a previous amount (if I did decide to set it at 0.001%, I would never lower it), and that would back us into a corner if we suddenly realized that the fee was too high, because either we have to fully take the hit ourselves (to isolate our crowdfunders) or we have to lower the value of the sianote back down from 0.001%, which would violate expectations that we had set.

I'm willing to work with you guys on this, but I'm very nervous about straying from the 0.00039% value that I've repeated so many times. I don't think it would be right to adjust those expectations.

Sounds good to me. I think it is fine to stick to that original number becasue the investors still have the same value for their investment. I believe you guys will make sure that the project will be competitive.

+1 the original number needs to be maintained. Neither increased or decreased.

[grandpa_seth]

Most importantly though, I feel very obligated to stick to the 0.00039% value that I've repeated many times. I've encouraged everyone to make decisions around that number and not any other number. Changing that number means we're altering what we told people to expect when they were making their investment decisions. People who chose not to buy may have decided to buy in the event that each sianote would actually be worth more than 0.00039%.  Furthermore, if we create a precedent for changing this value, you lose the security of knowing that it won't decrease. If we decide later that a 10% fee is actually bad (because Storj, for example, ends up being 10% cheaper) and we need to reduce it, do we also drop how much a sianote is worth? How will that affect people who have been investing in the sianote?

I realize that changing the total fee is a big move, but I am trying to do the right thing. If it ends up being a major source of contention, and you guys feel universally that you are being cheated because we raised our fee without including you, all that will happen is we reduce the fee back to the original 3.9%. I feel that this would hurt Sia overall because it affects the number of people that we can hire, that affects the quality of the product. But I would much rather set the total fee at 3.9% than set a precedent of adjusting the income provided by the sianote, even if the first adjustment was upwards. I don't  think that I would ever feel comfortable adjusting the number down from a previous amount (if I did decide to set it at 0.001%, I would never lower it), and that would back us into a corner if we suddenly realized that the fee was too high, because either we have to fully take the hit ourselves (to isolate our crowdfunders) or we have to lower the value of the sianote back down from 0.001%, which would violate expectations that we had set.

I'm willing to work with you guys on this, but I'm very nervous about straying from the 0.00039% value that I've repeated so many times. I don't think it would be right to adjust those expectations.

Sounds good to me. I think it is fine to stick to that original number becasue the investors still have the same value for their investment. I believe you guys will make sure that the project will be competitive.

+1 the original number needs to be maintained. Neither increased or decreased.

I'm not sure where I stand on this but lets not make quick opinions on this. It has been explained David feels Nebulous will likely need more income to make Sia successful. I guess I default on letting the guys who started this whole thing run the whole thing. But I do agree that in order to gain adoption the fee needs to be as low as it can be. Its sort of a catch 22. Sia needs low fees to attract wary new decentralized cloud storage customers. But too low a fee might not provide enough income to hire more people. Of course nobody here is for reducing sianote investors' slice so it is a tricky problem.

My advice fwiw to Taek is listen to what we have to say but don't change the numbers to something just to please us. Compromise as much as you can confidently. Sia succeeding big time is all that matters.

[Tobo]

One Sianote could be interpreted by people as either 0.00039% of the value of this project or 0.01% of the sianotes and there might be some relationship between these two opinions originally. Anyway, I should trust the devs and devs know better than everyone else regarding what are the best things to do for this project. All I am hoping is that all the decision will be made based on the best interests of this project and the spirit of honoring the social contracts. The bottom line is that the investors can gain only when the project successes.

[Momimaus]

New whitepaper is live!

Check out siacoin.com/sia.pdf

I'm not sure I understand the numbers here.

White paper states that : ''Nebulous Inc. will initially hold 95% of the siafunds, and the early crowd-fund backers of Sia will hold the remaining 5%.''

But wasn't 15% of sianotes sold during IPO ?

Edit: is this due to fees increased from 3.5% to 10% ?
 

Yes, the total amount has increased from 3.9% to 10%, the % that crowd funders hold is the same as always, "One Sianote can be directly converted to 0.00039% of host income from renting storage, or 10,000 for 3.9% of all host income from storage. Currently, there are approximately 1250 sianotes in circulation, or just under 0.5%." 10% isn't a finalized number, but I think that it's a safe number for us to pick. The risk of course as we increase the number is that people will be encouraged to use a fork instead of using us directly, but I think that our network effect in combination with our software (which will have multiple full time developers working on it being funded by the 9.5% in control of Nebulous) will bring both advantages in efficiency and usability.

how to get siafunds?
--and where is siastock (from the title of his thread) in the picture?

siastock got renamed to sianotes, because we wanted to avoid issues with the SEC. Siastock makes it sound like we were selling corporate equity, which we were not. We wanted to eliminate as much confusion as possible but unfortunately couldn't change the title of the thread. (... ... ... apparently you can... ... ... I'm not sure why I didn't change it earlier). Sianotes are the asset that's available on the Nxt AE, and are directly convertable to the siafunds that are discussed in the whitepaper.

Fixed.

many thanks

I don´t agree at all.

You sold only 15% of all Sianotes.
During the IPO you increased the price cause it was selling out fast.
And now, you just increase the amout by 150% without compensating the stakeholders.
But you are buying back shares for 2000 at NXT ae, way below IPO price.

Are you kiding me? Looks for me just as pure greed.


We bought 1/10000 per share not 1/25000. Your 0,00039% is just Math and not the agreement. The aggreement is 10000 shares in total.
Are you really want to play us that bad?

[Taek]

But you are buying back shares for 2000 at NXT ae, way below IPO price.

Yes we are, we feel that the price was at a point that was unjustifiably low. By no means are we encouraging anyone to sell their coins.

We didn't put up a buy wall at the moment of the crash because we didn't want to see a crazy panic sell, and also because it was news that I had presented that caused the crash, felt dishonest. But then the price sat at a very low level for over a month and we felt that it was worth buying back some of our notes and driving the price back up. We feel that we've got enough cash to get through at least the beta, and we've only managed to buy 17 notes at our asking price of 2000. We were never planning on buying more than around 60, because that's all the money we're willing to spend propping the price up.

But it seems to be all the money that's needed. We are feeling optimistic and you guys should be feeling optimistic too.

In hindsight, I should have been more transparent about putting the buy wall in place. If I had said 1 week in advance that I was throwing up a buy wall (up to ~60 notes) at 2000 nxt each, you guys probably would have pushed the price above that all by yourselves.

We bought 1/10000 per share not 1/25000. Your 0,00039% is just Math and not the agreement. The aggreement is 10000 shares in total.
Are you really want to play us that bad?

The sianote directly derives its value from the volume of money being spent on storage through the Sia network, because the fees provide a payout in siacoins to the holders of the sianote. If we decided to make the fee 0%, but still keep 10,000 sianotes and give out the ~1200 that we sold in the crowd sale, that would be insulting to everyone. It's not the 1/10000 that counts or adds value, it's the 0.00039%.

Plus, as msin is suggesting, 10% might be too high, and we may need to lower the price back down to 5%, 3.9%, or even something lower like 2%. All of these price changes should not affect the crowdfund holders, because I've always stated that they will be getting 0.00039% per sianote, and that's the number that's most important when trying to put a financial price on a sianote.

[Momimaus]

But you are buying back shares for 2000 at NXT ae, way below IPO price.

Yes we are, we feel that the price was at a point that was unjustifiably low. By no means are we encouraging anyone to sell their coins.

We didn't put up a buy wall at the moment of the crash because we didn't want to see a crazy panic sell, and also because it was news that I had presented that caused the crash, felt dishonest. But then the price sat at a very low level for over a month and we felt that it was worth buying back some of our notes and driving the price back up. We feel that we've got enough cash to get through at least the beta, and we've only managed to buy 17 notes at our asking price of 2000. We were never planning on buying more than around 60, because that's all the money we're willing to spend propping the price up.

But it seems to be all the money that's needed. We are feeling optimistic and you guys should be feeling optimistic too.

In hindsight, I should have been more transparent about putting the buy wall in place. If I had said 1 week in advance that I was throwing up a buy wall (up to ~60 notes) at 2000 nxt each, you guys probably would have pushed the price above that all by yourselves.

We bought 1/10000 per share not 1/25000. Your 0,00039% is just Math and not the agreement. The aggreement is 10000 shares in total.
Are you really want to play us that bad?

The sianote directly derives its value from the volume of money being spent on storage through the Sia network, because the fees provide a payout in siacoins to the holders of the sianote. If we decided to make the fee 0%, but still keep 10,000 sianotes and give out the ~1200 that we sold in the crowd sale, that would be insulting to everyone. It's not the 1/10000 that counts or adds value, it's the 0.00039%.

Plus, as msin is suggesting, 10% might be too high, and we may need to lower the price back down to 5%, 3.9%, or even something lower like 2%. All of these price changes should not affect the crowdfund holders, because I've always stated that they will be getting 0.00039% per sianote, and that's the number that's most important when trying to put a financial price on a sianote.

Hey put the fees to a price you feel that is best for the project. I will agree with it.
BUT there are 10000 shares, you just cannot print 15000 more. Are you the FED or what?
Honestly don´t do that, it looks like a huge scam. Do you really want to ruin your reputation now.
I have never said a bad word about Sia, not even when you told us that the original project can´t be realised.
But you sold us 15% of 10000 shares. That´s what it is, not changeable at all.
Your behavior is not acceptable.

[Lordoftherigs]

But you are buying back shares for 2000 at NXT ae, way below IPO price.

Yes we are, we feel that the price was at a point that was unjustifiably low. By no means are we encouraging anyone to sell their coins.

We didn't put up a buy wall at the moment of the crash because we didn't want to see a crazy panic sell, and also because it was news that I had presented that caused the crash, felt dishonest. But then the price sat at a very low level for over a month and we felt that it was worth buying back some of our notes and driving the price back up. We feel that we've got enough cash to get through at least the beta, and we've only managed to buy 17 notes at our asking price of 2000. We were never planning on buying more than around 60, because that's all the money we're willing to spend propping the price up.

But it seems to be all the money that's needed. We are feeling optimistic and you guys should be feeling optimistic too.

In hindsight, I should have been more transparent about putting the buy wall in place. If I had said 1 week in advance that I was throwing up a buy wall (up to ~60 notes) at 2000 nxt each, you guys probably would have pushed the price above that all by yourselves.

We bought 1/10000 per share not 1/25000. Your 0,00039% is just Math and not the agreement. The aggreement is 10000 shares in total.
Are you really want to play us that bad?

The sianote directly derives its value from the volume of money being spent on storage through the Sia network, because the fees provide a payout in siacoins to the holders of the sianote. If we decided to make the fee 0%, but still keep 10,000 sianotes and give out the ~1200 that we sold in the crowd sale, that would be insulting to everyone. It's not the 1/10000 that counts or adds value, it's the 0.00039%.

Plus, as msin is suggesting, 10% might be too high, and we may need to lower the price back down to 5%, 3.9%, or even something lower like 2%. All of these price changes should not affect the crowdfund holders, because I've always stated that they will be getting 0.00039% per sianote, and that's the number that's most important when trying to put a financial price on a sianote.

Hey put the fees to a price you feel that is best for the project. I will agree with it.
BUT there are 10000 shares, you just cannot print 15000 more. Are you the FED or what?
Honestly don´t do that, it looks like a huge scam. Do you really want to ruin your reputation now.
I have never said a bad word about Sia, not even when you told us that the original project can´t be realised.
But you sold us 15% of 10000 shares. That´s what it is, not changeable at all.
Your behavior is not acceptable.

As stated in Taeks post : It's not the 1/10000 that counts or adds value, it's the 0.00039%.

That's the number you should be interested in and that number is not changing. That is what you bough and what you have guaranteed.

[jl777]

My understanding was that there were 10,000 sianotes and each represented 0.01% of revenues. Only 15% of these were put on the market. Now, it turns out there are 25,000 sianotes?

This means that each sianote is actually 0.004% of revenues, which means a 60% dilution. This is quite distressing and I do not feel is right at all. If you want to go to 10% fees, then the sianotes should be getting a higher percentage to maintain the proportion. Since such a small percentage is floating, Sia would still get 9% of revenues versus 9.5% of revenues.

This is totally against the sianote purchasers and breaks trust.

James

P.S. If this precedent is allowed, what is to prevent another 50,000 sianotes from just being created?

[Breasal]

Agree with recent comments...it is a very bad idea for Sia to create the additional assets and dilute early investors' position. Justification is weak and long term effects to investors will be a killer imo...(of course from your point of view, short term would be great for Sia team...and this comes across only as greed).

Please produce a product before even considering raising more money.

[Taek]

My understanding was that there were 10,000 sianotes and each represented 0.01% of revenues. Only 15% of these were put on the market. Now, it turns out there are 25,000 sianotes?

This means that each sianote is actually 0.004% of revenues, which means a 60% dilution. This is quite distressing and I do not feel is right at all. If you want to go to 10% fees, then the sianotes should be getting a higher percentage to maintain the proportion.

it is a very bad idea for Sia to create the additional assets and dilute early investors' position.

You were never promised a portion of NebulousLabs revenue, only of Sia host revenue. You were promised a portion of host income from storage, to the tune of 0.00039%, which is a number that hasn't been adjusted and will never be adjusted. This number has not been diluted. The creation of more sianotes can only happen in the event that we raise the overall fee. Additionally, any changes to the fee directly change the number of sianotes in circulation. If we decide to switch to a 2% fee, the number of sianotes in circulation would be reduced from 10k to just over 5k, of which the initial investors would still hold ~1200.

P.S. If this precedent is allowed, what is to prevent another 50,000 sianotes from just being created?

If we were to increase the sianote volume by another 50,000 (to say, 75,000 total), the total fee would be to the tune of 29.25%, which leaves only 71.75% remaining for hosts. If 10% was a scary fee, ~30% would almost certainly discourage people from being hosts on our system. At those margins, why not just fork Sia and use a network with 0 fees? Even at 10% this is a risk (though we do feel currently that our software will be sufficiently optimized, and that the network effect will amount to a greater than 10% boost). (Even at 3.9% this is a risk).

Since such a small percentage is floating, Sia would still get 9% of revenues versus 9.5% of revenues.

Yes, this is true, except that it creates huge problems if we decide (as msin is suggesting) that a 10% fee is too high. If we state that we've settled at a 10% fee, the income from each sianote becomes 0.001%, which dramatically changes how one would price the sianote. If we suddenly then decide that a 10% fee is too high and will negatively affect our ability to get hosts, and that we need to drop it back to 5%, what happens? Do we bring the sianote back down to 0.0005%, which dramatically lowers the expected value (still higher than the initial, but only half of what the expected return was through the recent round of trading)? Or do we leave the sianote at 0.001% and take the full 5% hit ourselves, reducing us from 90% of total fees to 80% of total fees? That's equivalent to shooting ourselves in the foot.

Please produce a product before even considering raising more money.

An important thing to realize here is that we are not raising money. Increasing the total number of fees does not impact our revenue until we actually do have a product. We have absolutely no intention of selling more sianotes in the near future, almost certainly not until well after the 1.0 has been released.


======


The value of the sianote is not derived from scarcity, it's not a currency. NebulousLabs will own the vast majority of sianotes at launch, and has no plans to distribute them. We initially sold portions of our sianotes to raise money so that we could work on Sia full time. The value of the sianote is derived from the revenue it brings in when someone uses the Sia network.  When we talk about changing the total number of sianotes, we're talking exclusively about raising the fee that we can take, without changing the fee that the crowd funders can take.

I realize this seems unfair, and can seem like we are just printing money for ourselves. We are increasing our own expected revenue without changing the crowd funders expected revenue. But realize that the crowd funders are also not the people paying for the increase in fees. The people who will be paying for the increased fees will be the people using our network to host and rent storage. This comes at a direct cost to them, but we believe that with increased revenue, we'll be able to hire more developers and maintain a better software stack. There are very hard problems that accompany a system like Sia, and having more people to work on them means a better overall system, which benefits everyone. We believe that we can grow faster if we have more people working for us full time, and I emphasize that faster growth is good for everyone, (us, the crowd funders, and the people using Sia!)

======

It has become clear to me that people have been pricing the sianote differently. I have to go now (it's thanksgiving weekend), so I'll write about pricing later today. Some people look at the 0.00039% at the primary indicator of the expected future value of the sianote, and others have looked at the fact that it's 1 out of only 10,000 in circulation as the primary indicator of the future value of the sianote, and feel that increasing the number of sianotes directly dilutes the value of the sianote. I will explore these concepts in greater detail at some point in the near future, and then after that we can continue discussion a potential raise in fees.

I will also say that nothing has been set in stone right now. I will hold fast to the 0.00039% per sianote under all circumstances, as I feel that this is the more important number. Given all of the pressure I'm receiving, I may also have to keep the 10,000 total sianotes number, which I feel is not in the best total interest of the company and it's crowd funders, but I do not want to cheat anybody. I do not believe that raising the total fee is cheating anybody, but clearly there is disagreement. Without a much greater level of support demonstrated from you guys, I will not feel comfortable raising the number of sianotes. Otherwise I will leave everything at the originally agreed upon 0.00039% per sianote, and 10,000 total sianotes.

[jl777]

It has become clear to me that people have been pricing the sianote differently. I have to go now (it's thanksgiving weekend), so I'll write about pricing later today. Some people look at the 0.00039% at the primary indicator of the expected future value of the sianote, and others have looked at the fact that it's 1 out of only 10,000 in circulation as the primary indicator of the future value of the sianote, and feel that increasing the number of sianotes directly dilutes the value of the sianote. I will explore these concepts in greater detail at some point in the near future, and then after that we can continue discussion a potential raise in fees.

I will also say that nothing has been set in stone right now. I will hold fast to the 0.00039% per sianote under all circumstances, as I feel that this is the more important number. Given all of the pressure I'm receiving, I may also have to keep the 10,000 total sianotes number, which I feel is not in the best total interest of the company and it's crowd funders, but I do not want to cheat anybody. I do not believe that raising the total fee is cheating anybody, but clearly there is disagreement. Without a much greater level of support demonstrated from you guys, I will not feel comfortable raising the number of sianotes. Otherwise I will leave everything at the originally agreed upon 0.00039% per sianote, and 10,000 total sianotes.

Typically the early investors are rewarded, that is, if you want to continue to get investor support. I remember originally you raised the price right during the fund raising process, without any real warning. Now this dilution. I see a pattern here.

Also it is disingenuous to say that dropping from 10% would hurt the sianote holders in the case where it was raised in the first place. I would not mind a floating rate, with a floor of 3.9%, but with a reasonable cap. A big part of my assessment was the market penetration that 3.9% would achieve (versus 10%+) and the sianotes representing a percentage of the revenues (not profits). For you to not understand how DRAMATICALLY going from 3.9% to 10% AND issuing 15,000 more sianotes affects current sianote holders, it is quite disturbing. Let me summarize my assessment: "The overall revenues will drop dramatically due to the higher fees, but the percentage of the much smaller revenues will be the same". Now tell me how that is even remotely fair to sianote holders, the ones that financed the earliest days and should be rewarded, not squeezed.

So, maybe the VC investor is pressuring you to squeeze the sianote holders? Things are now setup where the interests of the sianote holders are not aligned with this company. So we always have to be on the lookout for terms changing on a moments notice?

I believe I have the largest independent stake and I was not contacted about any of this ahead of time. I will be looking to divest as I do not have time to be making sure that the terms arent changing (again).

James

[stereotype]

So, maybe the VC investor is pressuring you to squeeze the sianote holders? 

Thats how i am seeing it, and was always going to rear its ugly head at some stage, i guess.

Interests have decidedly diverged, me thinks.

[Taek]

I should not have suggested this change, and I especially should not have put this change into the whitepaper without discussion first. James is worried that he was not contacted, however the truth is that everyone should have been contacted before such a proposal made it into a document as important as the whitepaper.

We value the initial money you gave us during the crowd sale. As our initial funders, you are the reason we were able to work on Sia full time. You took a big risk on us, giving us cryptoassets (a mix of Nxt and Bitcoin) valuing approximately $100,000 at the end of the fund. We were later able to use this to leverage a large VC seed round, and secure a long runway for the first stage of building Sia. You deserve better.

I've changed the whitepaper to reflect the original agreement, 10,000 sianotes total at 0.00039% each. I do not believe that I will be changing either of these numbers again.

If you are looking to sell large volume of sianotes, I am willing to consider putting up a buy wall on the exchange. The price chosen would be maintained for 2 weeks, giving everyone who wants to bail an equal shot at getting out. There would be no limit on the number of sianotes that could be sold. We've already got a buy order for 43 sianotes at 2000 each, I can increase this to whatever is necessary. This also gives other people a chance to beat my buy wall (pricing at 2001 for example) if they have confidence in the sianote.

====

We're making good progress on the closed beta software. Closed beta in the next week or two seems fully reasonable. Open beta by the end of the year also seems reasonable. When we switch to open beta, we will open-source our codebase.

Thanks to everyone. I owe all of you guys for getting this far.

[Momimaus]

I should not have suggested this change, and I especially should not have put this change into the whitepaper without discussion first. James is worried that he was not contacted, however the truth is that everyone should have been contacted before such a proposal made it into a document as important as the whitepaper.

We value the initial money you gave us during the crowd sale. As our initial funders, you are the reason we were able to work on Sia full time. You took a big risk on us, giving us cryptoassets (a mix of Nxt and Bitcoin) valuing approximately $100,000 at the end of the fund. We were later able to use this to leverage a large VC seed round, and secure a long runway for the first stage of building Sia. You deserve better.

I've changed the whitepaper to reflect the original agreement, 10,000 sianotes total at 0.00039% each. I do not believe that I will be changing either of these numbers again.

If you are looking to sell large volume of sianotes, I am willing to consider putting up a buy wall on the exchange. The price chosen would be maintained for 2 weeks, giving everyone who wants to bail an equal shot at getting out. There would be no limit on the number of sianotes that could be sold. We've already got a buy order for 43 sianotes at 2000 each, I can increase this to whatever is necessary. This also gives other people a chance to beat my buy wall (pricing at 2001 for example) if they have confidence in the sianote.

====

We're making good progress on the closed beta software. Closed beta in the next week or two seems fully reasonable. Open beta by the end of the year also seems reasonable. When we switch to open beta, we will open-source our codebase.

Thanks to everyone. I owe all of you guys for getting this far.
[/quote


So now you go back to 3,9% fee?

[gs02xzz]

I've changed the whitepaper to reflect the original agreement, 10,000 sianotes total at 0.00039% each. I do not believe that I will be changing either of these numbers again.

This is a wise decision, I think. Based on the price and demand relation, it may bring more revenue to Siafund than a higher price. On top of that, as a company, you always can build your own infrasture to mine Siacoins to make more revenue since you pay low fees.

Looking forward to the beta.

[grandpa_seth]

Well that was fun. Sia guys made a mistake but for honest reasons. Anybody calling them greedy can't read people well. There is a difference between trying to pull a fast one and
doing what they thought was best for Sia to succeed. Sometimes it takes others to make you see that what you did is more unfair than you thought. Thanks to sianote holders' recent comments this happened. Now that we all love each other again, lets make sure the world wants to use a decentralized storage solution and that Sia can hire the people it needs to gain and hold the lead.

[Taek]

We're close to being able to get closed-beta users online. We need to know how you'd like to communicate. I was thinking we could have an irc channel or a mailing list, or you could just pm me when there are problems. As is the spirit of closed-betas, there are probably going to be a fair number of problems. Anyone is welcome to participate but we're only giving the binaries to people who ask for them (as opposed to letting anyone download them). This is because we're pretty sure there will be frustrating bugs at first.

The code is largely untested, hot of the presses. You can mine, send money to others, there's a simple friends list, you can save your private keys, you can upload and download files on the network, you can contribute storage in return for compensation. Everyone will be on the same global network.

There's no encryption, there's no erasure coding. So it's a pretty inefficient system but all of the major components should be finished by the end of tonight, tomorrow at the latest. Then we'll spend a day or two compiling for Windows and making guides on how to use our system. And then it'll be ready to be shared with anyone willing to put up with mostly-untested software.

Long range: we've hired a guy to work for us this winter to create a javascript front end. We're not exactly sure what shape that's going to take, but the javascript will just be the GUI. If you've used software like i2p, it'll probably be a lot like that. (you run a server component in the background, and then you go to a specific url to interface with it). At the moment we have no plans to make a client in something like qt, but that may change based on feedback. Javascript is nice because it's automatically cross-platform, and with proper configuration you can run Sia on a headless system (like a NAS) but still connect to it from your main computer or phone.

We'll probably shift to open beta by Jan 1st, which means we'll put the binaries out for anyone to download and try, and it'll also mean that things are more thoroughly tested and that there aren't so many bugs. Hopefully by Feb 1st there will be a pretty front-end that you can use as a wallet and file manager.

[Taek]

Sia IRC Channel: #siacoin on freenode. The irc channel is not very populated right now, if you've got questions or just want to hang, it's best to idle in the channel for a while.

Just finished writing the code for the project. We'll be testing it tomorrow to get out any major and obvious kinks, and then we'll start distributing the binaries.

[Taek]

We were trying to test the file stuff on the cli and it wasn't working so well - a cli just isn't expressive enough and it's a pain to try and the more complicated actions.

So, we're in the middle of building a web frontend. It uses bootstrap and talks to the main program through golang's http server. It's actually pretty cool and has been mostly painless to create. Javascript is a bit of a nightmare to work with but has the huge advantage of running on pretty much everything.

[Taek]

Testnet is live. There's a web UI, which is much nicer than a command line although it's still pretty bare and you can't do a whole lot. But you can:

+ send money
+ become a host
+ upload & download files
+ mine

 

If you would like to join the minimal-and-buggy testnet, send me a pm.

Over the next 2-4 weeks we'll be adding a few features to the UI, but mostly increasing our testing and security.

[Lordoftherigs]

[Lordoftherigs]

Now that the Sia network is up and running even though it's a closed beta you could narrow down some specs for future Sia mining rigs.
There should be a whole section about sia storage rigs.

[Taek]

Now that the Sia network is up and running even though it's a closed beta you could narrow down some specs for future Sia mining rigs.
There should be a whole section about sia storage rigs.

I think our POW algorithm is going to be blake2, but I wouldn't buy any asics/gpus yet. As for storage rigs, we should probably create a forum that we open alongside the open beta. I've seen on the storj irc that you can get large rigs for around $46/TB, but I think that those rigs are actually designed to be much higher tolerance than you need on Sia. You might be able to push the price closer to $35 or $40 per TB.

[Lordoftherigs]

sia is now on coinmarketcap.com   

[Taek]

smaragda was asking about VPN hosting.

Right now, and for the near future, you're going to need port forwarding to be a host, and really you should have port forwarding if you're going to be a miner (otherwise you'll be mining at somewhere around a 20% reduced effectiveness).

But we've figured out a way to make port forwarding unneeded. It's a bit complicated and more than we can do for the immediate future - there are other things we want working first, but eventually we'll be able to have mining and hosting while behind VPNs. The cost to our current solution though is that it's easier for you to be censored (as a host, but not really as a miner. Worst case you'll reduce back to 20% reduced effectiveness).

Maybe as we keep thinking about it and reading about it we'll get better solutions. And again, the stuff we've got right now isn't going to be ready in the next few months, just wanted to let you know that there's at least 1 existing solution for people to host without using port forwarding.

[Wesiematic]

How is the testnet working, can you give us a little update of progress,
can we expect the start of open beta for the beginnning of the new year?

[Taek]

How is the testnet working, can you give us a little update of progress,
can we expect the start of open beta for the beginnning of the new year?

The current target date for the open beta is Jan 16th. We've actually open sourced the new set of code already, you can see it on github.

[Jookly]

very interesting.  I will try to participate in your beta if I have an opportunity.

[super3]

Anywhere I can buy Sianotes OTC?

[bubblymint38]

Anywhere I can buy Sianotes OTC?

Nxt AE

[Wesiematic]

How is the testnet working, can you give us a little update of progress,
can we expect the start of open beta for the beginnning of the new year?

The current target date for the open beta is Jan 16th. We've actually open sourced the new set of code already, you can see it on github.

Good news will try to participate in the open beta.

[super3]

Anyone want to sell OTC?

[gs02xzz]

It seems that there is a progress on quorum based crypto mechanism - https://nxtforum.org/news-and-announcements/(ann)-jinn/msg147031/#msg147031

Maybe you guys are interested in it.

[Lordoftherigs]

How is the testnet working, can you give us a little update of progress,
can we expect the start of open beta for the beginnning of the new year?

The current target date for the open beta is Jan 16th. We've actually open sourced the new set of code already, you can see it on github.

Any update on this ?

[Taek]

The current target date for the open beta is Jan 16th. We've actually open sourced the new set of code already, you can see it on github.

Any update on this ?

Yes. Jan 17th

 


In all seriousness we're pretty close to ready. We've got a nice interface this time too, thanks to our new intern Seve. We've committed to not sleeping until we're ready to go but midnight seems a bit optimistic.

[PondSea]

The current target date for the open beta is Jan 16th. We've actually open sourced the new set of code already, you can see it on github.

Any update on this ?

Yes. Jan 17th

 


In all seriousness we're pretty close to ready. We've got a nice interface this time too, thanks to our new intern Seve. We've committed to not sleeping until we're ready to go but midnight seems a bit optimistic.

Take your time

[Taek]

Okay, it's done. And by that, I mean the codebase is at version 0.2.

But we're really exhausted. We'll put up the webpage tomorrow and pass out the url and get on IRC, etc.

Unfortunately, things still don't work very well. But I think this time around you get a better idea of what stuff is going to look like when we release. Things really only work well right now if you are actively mining, and stuff like uploading and downloading can be slow and not always work. Errors aren't always terribly useful, and we haven't tested it on Windows yet but it should work nonetheless.

One of the more exciting features is updates. Now we can push updates to the client and you'll get a notification on your screen asking you to upgrade to the latest version. That'll be pretty sweet.

Looking forward to making the announcement. And I'm thinking that 0.3 will be released on March 31st.

[Taek]

http://www.siacoin.com/

Got a spiffy new website, got a fun interface, got screenshots. There's a public download link too.

Let me know what you guys think.

[msin]

http://www.siacoin.com/

Got a spiffy new website, got a fun interface, got screenshots. There's a public download link too.

Let me know what you guys think.

Great website, will try out beta.

[DreamSpace]

i tried it with Ubuntu and it looks very nice. What kind of mining process happens there or is it just simulated actually?
Uploading is not working for me, i can choose a file, but nothing happened and how can i theoretically download a file?

[Taek]

i tried it with Ubuntu and it looks very nice. What kind of mining process happens there or is it just simulated actually?
Uploading is not working for me, i can choose a file, but nothing happened and how can i theoretically download a file?

Mining is real, right now it just uses your CPU, more threads means more mining (up to a point, if you've got more threads than cores it'll probably slow down). Faster CPU means more mining, etc.

For uploading, right now it only works sometimes. Mine like, 10 or so blocks and then try again, and you should have better results. It can take a few minutes nonetheless. Once you've uploaded a file you should see it in the list of files, and you'll be able to download it.

===

We hope that in the next two weeks or so there will be an update where the uploading and downloading always works, and sending transactions is instantaneous (well, you see 0-confirmed transactions within a few seconds instead of needing to wait for a block).
We've also got a handful of bugfixes that have been made. We'll have also added encryption.

Our next release will still not allow you to see files that other people have uploaded, but we're working on that too. (just seeing the files isn't useful when they're all encrypted - we'll need a way to upload files unencrypted and then announce to the world that the files are for everyone.)

[Lordoftherigs]

Is there any update ?  I tried to upload a file but it still doesn't work...

[DreamSpace]

i think it's time for a progress report 

[Taek]

Sorry, the message boards have been slow so I haven't been checking often. Easiest way to reach me is email (it's on the github page).

We're hoping to have the next release out before March 9th. And we're hoping to launch the currency on April 10th. That's not a hard date, but it's the target we're aiming at. It won't be perfect at launch but the coins you earn from mining and hosting files (after launch) will be permanent.

Some time around launch we'll also hand out the siafunds, which I'm sure a lot of you are eager to claim. They'll start accumulating coins immediately.

*fingers crossed*

[Cyberian Forest]

Just found this coin tonight and I'm deeply interested, and have been trying to read through all of the information. You say that mining is real, so that means whatever Siacoins I am mining right now I will be able to use as currency when the project goes live? Also, what is the coincap for Siacoins? Thanks, and looking forward to the new release!

[Taek]

You say that mining is real, so that means whatever Siacoins I am mining right now I will be able to use as currency when the project goes live?

No, coins right now are not real. All balances will be reset when we release the currency. I meant to say that coins will be real & permanent after the currency launch, and that the target date for the currency launch is April 10th. Sorry for the confusion.

At launch, there will be 300,000 coins per block. After about 5 years, there will be 30,000 coins per block, and all blocks after that forever will have a 30,000 coin reward.

[marek3ball-orig]

It is clear how will look situation when I will have 100% guarantee that my uploaded file will be there one year later?

And will exist situation where I will not be sure that the file will be there?

For example person will upload passwords list and lose local copy.

[Taek]

It is clear how will look situation when I will have 100% guarantee that my uploaded file will be there one year later?

Initially we cannot promise that anything you upload will still be there in a year, especially for the early life of the network we can't be sure that the same hosts will be around for a year or more. We can however provide 'health' indications of your file and repair tools - if the 'health' of the file goes down it's pretty easy to bring it back up, but you need to click a button; it's not automatic. Eventually, I do think a 100% guarantee for 1 year will be reasonable. (but not immediately!)

And will exist situation where I will not be sure that the file will be there?

For example person will upload passwords list and lose local copy.

Files will be encrypted, with the keys stored on your disk. If you lose the keys, you won't be able to recover the file. It may be possible to have keys that are like brainwallets, so all you need to do is remember a password, but for the time being you'll have to keep the keys backed up.

====

Overall, I believe that storage on Sia will be more reliable than any other solution. But until we've got at least 20 different people constantly online as hosts, I wouldn't trust file uptime at all. We won't make any guarantees, especially while the network is young.

[Tobo]

What is the minimum hardware requirement to be a host/node of Sia network?

[marek3ball-orig]

It is clear how will look situation when I will have 100% guarantee that my uploaded file will be there one year later?

Initially we cannot promise that anything you upload will still be there in a year, especially for the early life of the network we can't be sure that the same hosts will be around for a year or more. We can however provide 'health' indications of your file and repair tools - if the 'health' of the file goes down it's pretty easy to bring it back up, but you need to click a button; it's not automatic. Eventually, I do think a 100% guarantee for 1 year will be reasonable. (but not immediately!)

And will exist situation where I will not be sure that the file will be there?

For example person will upload passwords list and lose local copy.

Files will be encrypted, with the keys stored on your disk. If you lose the keys, you won't be able to recover the file. It may be possible to have keys that are like brainwallets, so all you need to do is remember a password, but for the time being you'll have to keep the keys backed up.

====

Overall, I believe that storage on Sia will be more reliable than any other solution. But until we've got at least 20 different people constantly online as hosts, I wouldn't trust file uptime at all. We won't make any guarantees, especially while the network is young.

Then it will be really useful to have all my data locally too and running some sync software which will check status of my files and in case some file was deleted from all hosts it will inform me and I re upload file from my local disk.

[Taek]

What is the minimum hardware requirement to be a host/node of Sia network?

Any desktop or laptop less than 5 years old should be good enough. I don't think a RasPi is going to be enough, but anything with a decent amount of power should be enough.

Then it will be really useful to have all my data locally too and running some sync software which will check status of my files and in case some file was deleted from all hosts it will inform me and I re upload file from my local disk.

This is not something we'll be able to make in the next 2 months, but perhaps we can do it in the future.

[msin]

Will you plan some kind of marketing campaign?  Obviously it's pretty dead on this thread, so would be good to get the word out prior to launch. 

[Taek]

Will you plan some kind of marketing campaign?

I am not sure the best way to approach marketing. Making a post on HN and the various altcoin subreddits seems like a good place to start. I'm somewhat worried about getting too much attention too fast, though at this point I think we're ready for 100+ machines on the network. If we get more attention than that, we're in a good place anyway. I do plan on PMing and emailing everyone who has expressed interest over the past 9 months. It'd also be interesting to let the storj community know that we've appeared as a ready-to-go competitor, but I wouldn't want to be rude about it.

I'm not sure what else we would want to be doing.

[marek3ball-orig]

Then it will be really useful to have all my data locally too and running some sync software which will check status of my files and in case some file was deleted from all hosts it will inform me and I re upload file from my local disk.

This is not something we'll be able to make in the next 2 months, but perhaps we can do it in the future.

I understand that everything is not so easy. This is only from my "home user" point of view. Maybe describe real usage for end user would help to understand and see what is planed.

In case I know that I must have local copy and at least receive warning when my file is not in the cloud. Then it is better.

Or you are targeting complete different usage.

[msin]

Will you plan some kind of marketing campaign?

I am not sure the best way to approach marketing. Making a post on HN and the various altcoin subreddits seems like a good place to start. I'm somewhat worried about getting too much attention too fast, though at this point I think we're ready for 100+ machines on the network. If we get more attention than that, we're in a good place anyway. I do plan on PMing and emailing everyone who has expressed interest over the past 9 months. It'd also be interesting to let the storj community know that we've appeared as a ready-to-go competitor, but I wouldn't want to be rude about it.

I'm not sure what else we would want to be doing.

Information on Sia team/company, Use-Case for Sia, Instructions, etc.. on Website is a good start and easily distributed.  A new thread here with more info on launch.  Giveaways is always a good way to get people using.  Have a press release written up that can be distributed to Coindesk, Cointelegraph, etc.. shortly after launch.

[super3]

Will you plan some kind of marketing campaign?

I am not sure the best way to approach marketing. Making a post on HN and the various altcoin subreddits seems like a good place to start. I'm somewhat worried about getting too much attention too fast, though at this point I think we're ready for 100+ machines on the network. If we get more attention than that, we're in a good place anyway. I do plan on PMing and emailing everyone who has expressed interest over the past 9 months. It'd also be interesting to let the storj community know that we've appeared as a ready-to-go competitor, but I wouldn't want to be rude about it.

I'm not sure what else we would want to be doing.

Looks like it is progressing quite well. Shoot me PM and let figure out how we can work together.

[DreamSpace]

Sorry, the message boards have been slow so I haven't been checking often. Easiest way to reach me is email (it's on the github page).

We're hoping to have the next release out before March 9th. And we're hoping to launch the currency on April 10th. That's not a hard date, but it's the target we're aiming at. It won't be perfect at launch but the coins you earn from mining and hosting files (after launch) will be permanent.

Some time around launch we'll also hand out the siafunds, which I'm sure a lot of you are eager to claim. They'll start accumulating coins immediately.

*fingers crossed*

no problem therefore i'm asking and it sounds like good news, will test the new release if it is available.

[Taek]

We're hoping to have the next release out before March 9th.

We missed this by a few days. But I'm really happy with how it's coming along. It's become a lot easier to use.

New expected date is the 15th. It's mostly done, but I'm not sure how long it's going to take us to get executables. I think by the end of the day today we can have something ready if you're willing to follow some instructions to build it yourself.

Looks like it is progressing quite well. Shoot me PM and let figure out how we can work together.

Totally will. We're not quite ready for a lot of attention but we should be soon.

[msin]

Great, looking forward to testing next version.

[Taek]

https://github.com/NebulousLabs/Sia/releases/tag/v0.3.0

The UI isn't done yet, but if you don't mind getting your hands dirty, you can build it yourself: https://github.com/NebulousLabs/Sia-UI

You'll want to download Sia for your OS from the first link, and then run the "siad" program. After that you can run the UI and everything should work alright. We still don't have an installer. We'll hopefully have a download link for the UI by the end of the week.

====

Most of the changes have been to make everything work better. We added a few smaller features, but mostly we improved testing and made things run better. Sia now recognizes 0-confirmation transactions, which should speed up things like uploading significantly. Small files should upload in a minute or two, and download in a few seconds. Large files will probably take a lot longer. Siacoins are still betacoins, which means all balances will be reset when we launch the currency (so don't be sad if you lose them).

Until you are used to using Sia, some things might be confusing. Please feel free to ask questions and point out the confusing parts.

Given the speed that things have been moving, I'm going to say May 15th-ish for the next release. We're planning on launching the currency for the next release (including siafunds), so there will be a lot of buzz and forewarning.

[Taek]

made the initial difficulty too high, we can't mine any blocks. I miscalculated, sorry. We'll have replacement binaries up shortly.

[Taek]

Okay, fixed. UI is also ready, the downloads are at siacoin.com.

[bubbletea789]

so officially each sianote still entitles the holder to 0.00039% of the total host incomes right?

[Taek]

so officially each sianote still entitles the holder to 0.00039% of the total host incomes right?

Yes. But not on the beta network, which we're currently on the beta network.

===

As an additional announcement, the new UI releases seem to work on linux and mac most of the time, but not at all on Windows. I'm sorry for being sloppy, we'll try to have an update in the next week.

[Tobo]

The IPFS looks pretty interesting. Maybe Sia can utilize this technology in some level -  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CMxDNuuAiQ

Edit - and an interested research paper by V Buterin on blockchian scalability - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vbuterin/scalability_paper/master/scalability.pdf

[Taek]

The time has come for people to start redeeming their sianotes. Information can be found at siacoin.com/sianotes.html. You will need to download a program to generate a Sia address. (Multisig is supported). Then you need to send us your Sianotes along with a message containing the address you would like your siafunds sent to. We're going to be accepting messages for at least 6 weeks.

We hope to officially launch the currency on June 1st. Real mining will start, and siafunds will be active and earning money from storage contracts. Anybody who redeems their sianotes before the currency launch will receive their siafunds in the genesis block.

We're about 2 weeks away from releasing the final beta version (v0.3.1). When that is out, we'll make a new announcement thread and put forth substantial marketing effort.

[grandpa_seth]

The time has come for people to start redeeming their sianotes.

You guys have been working tirelessly. I am glad I have stuck with it as a sianote owner.

Its a long road but soon we can finally begin and see where in the decentralized storage world this takes us.

Just wanted to say I appreciate the work so far. As long as you stay ambitious we have

a great chance at success.

[Momimaus]

How will siafunds be traded after redemption?

[Taek]

How will siafunds be traded after redemption?

They'll be locked down until the currency launches. After the currency launches you'll have to do otc and in-thread trading until an exchange pops up. If you strike a deal with someone to trade early, pm me and we can work something out. It's possible but a pain, and probably better to wait until the currency launches.

We're looking into the legal requirements for running an exchange. It's not looking good, but there's a small chance that we'll be able to run a btc<->siax exchange. There's a much better chance that we'll be able to do low risk escrow. There's a 0% chance of us running a USD<->siax exchange.

The escrow part is actually pretty cool. You can do trading between yourself and someone you've never met in just a few seconds, and the most you ever have to trust an escrow with is a few cents. If the escrow runs away with your money, they'll get a few cents but but the rest of your multi-million dollar transaction is unavailable to them. Then you just find a new escrow until someone doesn't steal your few cents. From what I understand, the legal requirements for being escrow are much lower than the legal requirements for being an exchange. It's especially nice because we don't ever hold more than a few pennies for a few seconds and there's no blockchain bloat.

[Jookly]

I am having a little bit of trouble understanding the status of this project at this point.

Would it be possible to get a summary of where you are at or possibly update the OP to reflect whatever is currently happening?

I'd like to get involved but I am finding it difficult to follow this thread.

[Taek]

I am having a little bit of trouble understanding the status of this project at this point.

Would it be possible to get a summary of where you are at or possibly update the OP to reflect whatever is currently happening?

I'd like to get involved but I am finding it difficult to follow this thread.

I will try to provide a more detailed answer soon.

In brief:

Lots has changed since this thread's creation. The original design for Sia was fundamentally broken in several severe ways and many things had to be reconstructed. Original estimates had Sia being released something like June or August of 2014. As Sia is not released and it's almost a year later, those estimates were clearly mistaken.

Today we have a beta that (sorta) works, and a blockchain that's (sorta) tested. All of the features have been nailed down and finalized, and 95% of them have been implemented. All that remains is to remove the (sorta), which I expect will take about 6 weeks. We're planning on releasing another version of the beta in about 2 weeks that has a bunch of bugfixes. I'd still say that it works (sorta) well, there are a handful of problems that remain. We know how to fix most/all of them, we just need to put in the hours.

At release, you'll be able to mine for coins, rent out your hard drive, and upload files to the network. Files will be encrypted client-side. You will be able to share files using a '.sia', which is the decentralized version of a '.torrent'. It tells your program how to download a larger file from the Sia network.

For developers: there will be a documented API on how to use Sia. It's entirely possible to build separate applications such as a 'decentralized YouTube' on top of Sia. At release, we will have very little information on how to build applications that use Sia, but the API should help. We do intend to focus more on developers once the currency has launched.

[gitinahang]

I use the Windows Sia Generator. I did the address okay. But "siag keyinfomyKeyFile.siakey" for me doesn't print the info.
It says

Error: unknown command "keyinfomyKeyFile.siakey"
Run 'siag help' for usage.

[Taek]

I use the Windows Sia Generator. I did the address okay. But "siag keyinfomyKeyFile.siakey" for me doesn't print the info.
It says

Error: unknown command "keyinfomyKeyFile.siakey"
Run 'siag help' for usage.

try `siag keyinfo myKeyFile.siakey`, you need a space between 'keyinfo' and the keyfile.

[Taek]

I received a few encrypted messages. I was able to decrypt some of them, but not all of them. I've sent messages in both cases to tell you that either things worked or that they didn't.

Please check your messages, and if I was unable to decrypt the message you sent me please try again with another message. Make sure that your software is up to date and that you type in your password correctly when sending the message.

If it keeps failing we'll have to figure something else out. Feel free to pm me.

[gitinahang]

I use the Windows Sia Generator. I did the address okay. But "siag keyinfomyKeyFile.siakey" for me doesn't print the info.
It says

Error: unknown command "keyinfomyKeyFile.siakey"
Run 'siag help' for usage.

try `siag keyinfo myKeyFile.siakey`, you need a space between 'keyinfo' and the keyfile.

Now I get this is response "open myKeyFile.siakey: The system cannot find the file specified."
I am using the one for Windows and have tried it after creating a multi sig and a regular address.

[Taek]

Now I get this is response "open myKeyFile.siakey: The system cannot find the file specified."
I am using the one for Windows and have tried it after creating a multi sig and a regular address.

Your command prompt needs to be in the same directory as the key. Alternatively, you can drag-and-drop the file into the terminal and it'll automatically type in the full filepath.

The easiest thing to do:

1. open a command prompt
2. drag and drop the siag file into the command prompt. The full path will appear. (C:/stuff/morestuff/etc/siag)
3. type 'keyinfo'
4. drag and drop the key file you're checking into the command prompt.
The full result should look like:

Code:

C:/Users/You> C:/stuff/siag keyinfo C:/stuff/mykey.siakey

I'm sorry for making you guys use the command line. At some point the key generator will be integrated into the GUI but I'm not sure how long that will take.

[gitinahang]

Sorry Taek to take time away for this minor things. I see my error now thank you for the help.

[Tobo]

I use Window. When I tried to run the siag.exe I got the message of 'siag.exe is not a valid Win32 application'. Is my computer not compatible with this file?

[Taek]

I use Window. When I tried to run the siag.exe I got the message of 'siag.exe is not a valid Win32 application'. Is my computer not compatible with this file?

I can honestly say I didn't expect this to be a problem. Siag only works on 64bit windows. You'll need a separate download for 32bit windows. I'll make one and pm you a link. (if anyone else is running into the same problem, let me know. It's a super easy fix we just didn't expect it to be needed).

[td services]

Any way to copy and paste the key from the Windows command window to NXT wallet? I'm not able to highlight the key in the command window, don't want to have to type all that.

[grandpa_seth]

Any way to copy and paste the key from the Windows command window to NXT wallet? I'm not able to highlight the key in the command window, don't want to have to type all that.

Right click the top of the command window and go to edit then select mark. Now use your mouse to highlight the text you want

which would be the sia address. After its highlighted, right click the top border again and select edit and then copy.

It should be copied to the clipboard.

[td services]

Thanks! All this time I've typed everything in the command window.

[chanc3r]

Been hodling my few notes since the first sale on NXT AE....
Glad to see this project getting close to launch..

How much longer do we have to redeem the notes before launch?

[Taek]

Been hodling my few notes since the first sale on NXT AE....
Glad to see this project getting close to launch..

How much longer do we have to redeem the notes before launch?

We are aiming to launch the currency early June.

[msin]

Is there a defined redemption period for Sianotes?  Also, do you guys have a marketing plan on launch?  Might make sense to get the word out.

[Taek]

Is there a defined redemption period for Sianotes?  Also, do you guys have a marketing plan on launch?  Might make sense to get the word out.

The redemption period currently established is 6 weeks from the initial announcement. We have to check with lawyers to see if this is a legally acceptable period. We intend on being generous with people who miss the deadline but a hard legal deadline must be set so that we do not have potential obligations floating around for an infinite period of time. Therefore we hold no obligation to redeem sianotes beyond 6 weeks from the initial announcement.

Marketing plan:

We plan on making a new thread for Sia on bitcoin talk, altcoin talk, the nxt forums, and we plan on making a post on both reddit and hacker news. With this announcement we're going to distribute the next iteration of the beta (we're in the final stages of pulling it together). We are going to announce a target date for the official launch of the currency. We'll probably try to get ourselves added to calendars and such.

The beta is finally at a point where I feel comfortable trying to generate a lot of buzz. We're in the middle of pulling everything together (including the announcements) right now.

[msin]

Is there a defined redemption period for Sianotes?  Also, do you guys have a marketing plan on launch?  Might make sense to get the word out.

The redemption period currently established is 6 weeks from the initial announcement. We have to check with lawyers to see if this is a legally acceptable period. We intend on being generous with people who miss the deadline but a hard legal deadline must be set so that we do not have potential obligations floating around for an infinite period of time. Therefore we hold no obligation to redeem sianotes beyond 6 weeks from the initial announcement.

Marketing plan:

We plan on making a new thread for Sia on bitcoin talk, altcoin talk, the nxt forums, and we plan on making a post on both reddit and hacker news. With this announcement we're going to distribute the next iteration of the beta (we're in the final stages of pulling it together). We are going to announce a target date for the official launch of the currency. We'll probably try to get ourselves added to calendars and such.

The beta is finally at a point where I feel comfortable trying to generate a lot of buzz. We're in the middle of pulling everything together (including the announcements) right now.

Okay, well I'd change the OP of the thread as well as the title to: Sia (Redemption Deadline *Data*)

Sounds good on Marketing, I would also recommend reaching out to Cointelegraph and other web publications. 

[marek3ball-orig]

Maybe if you summarise redemption steps in one place, it could help too:

1) download address generator
2) how to generate address
3) length of the new address (nobody wants to send only half)
4) how can I double check that I have correct address
5) I need to keep the address as a text or generated file too?
6) send sianotes with some exact text message?
7) the message must be encrypted?

[Taek]

Maybe if you summarise redemption steps in one place, it could help too:

1) download address generator
2) how to generate address
3) length of the new address (nobody wants to send only half)
4) how can I double check that I have correct address
5) I need to keep the address as a text or generated file too?
6) send sianotes with some exact text message?
7) the message must be encrypted?

http://www.siacoin.com/sianotes.html

We'll make another page that has less information and is dedicated fully to sianote redemption.

3. There should be 64 characters total in your address.
4. To double check you have the correct address, run 'siag keyinfo myKey.siakey'. It will print the address of the key, you can verify against that.
5. You MUST keep the generated file.
6. Text message doesn't need to be exact, but you should follow the format in sianotes.html. I'm reading your messages manually, not passing them to a machine. There are few enough that it's not too much work.
7. The message does not need to be encrypted, but will provide you with stronger privacy if it is.

=====================

Teaser: https://github.com/NebulousLabs/Sia-UI/releases/tag/v0.3.0-beta

This is the release! We're preparing the announcements, but that's the download that will be given during the announcement. I encourage you to try it out early. To get coins, you either want to mine or host, or beg for coins on #siacoin on freenode. (we'll be giving them out to help the testnet get going). We're still on the testnet, the mainnet will launch sometime in early June.

[zxbball]

wallet not work?

[Taek]

wallet not work?

Everything should work. What is the error you are running into?

After you mine a block, there is a 50 block holding period before you get your coins. This is similar to Bitcoin's 100 block holding period.

Hosts can expect to take a week or more before making money.

[Cyberian Forest]

Are we still on the testnet? I seem to be having an issue with my wallet balance... I can see that I have mined many blocks but my balance is 0 in the wallet.
I just want to make sure I'm not losing Siacoins somehow in the upgrade process. I have moved over my wallet.dat from the 0.30 to the 0.31 folder.

[PondSea]

Are we still on the testnet? I seem to be having an issue with my wallet balance... I can see that I have mined many blocks but my balance is 0 in the wallet.
I just want to make sure I'm not losing Siacoins somehow in the upgrade process. I have moved over my wallet.dat from the 0.30 to the 0.31 folder.

Mainnet will be there on June so should still be in testnet.

[Taek]

Are we still on the testnet? I seem to be having an issue with my wallet balance... I can see that I have mined many blocks but my balance is 0 in the wallet.
I just want to make sure I'm not losing Siacoins somehow in the upgrade process. I have moved over my wallet.dat from the 0.30 to the 0.31 folder.

My apologies, we reset the testnet. Your old coins are gone (anything from sia-ui 0.2.0 or siad 0.3.0 is gone). This will happen one more time on June 7th when we release the full currency. After that point, coins are permanent.

[chrysophylax]

Are we still on the testnet? I seem to be having an issue with my wallet balance... I can see that I have mined many blocks but my balance is 0 in the wallet.
I just want to make sure I'm not losing Siacoins somehow in the upgrade process. I have moved over my wallet.dat from the 0.30 to the 0.31 folder.

My apologies, we reset the testnet. Your old coins are gone (anything from sia-ui 0.2.0 or siad 0.3.0 is gone). This will happen one more time on June 7th when we release the full currency. After that point, coins are permanent.

just saw your other thread - and was pointed back here ...

seems like a good project ...

ill readup more on it ... but what is involved in teh mining of the coin when released? ...

will watch this ...

crysx

[Taek]

Are we still on the testnet? I seem to be having an issue with my wallet balance... I can see that I have mined many blocks but my balance is 0 in the wallet.
I just want to make sure I'm not losing Siacoins somehow in the upgrade process. I have moved over my wallet.dat from the 0.30 to the 0.31 folder.

My apologies, we reset the testnet. Your old coins are gone (anything from sia-ui 0.2.0 or siad 0.3.0 is gone). This will happen one more time on June 7th when we release the full currency. After that point, coins are permanent.

just saw your other thread - and was pointed back here ...

seems like a good project ...

ill readup more on it ... but what is involved in teh mining of the coin when released? ...

will watch this ...

crysx

I have created a new thread here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1060294.0

Unless I am in violation of some forum rule or general etiquette, I would like to make that thread the official Sia thread. Sia has changed substantially since the original creation of this thread, and a significant amount of time has passed.


To answer your mining question, the developers are planning on mining the first 100 blocks or so. After that mining will work much like Bitcoin, anyone can mine and get the full block subsidy. All of coins mined in the first 100 blocks will be used for giveaways, public file uploading, fountains, and other community growing uses. The coins will not be used to line the developers pockets.

[chrysophylax]

Are we still on the testnet? I seem to be having an issue with my wallet balance... I can see that I have mined many blocks but my balance is 0 in the wallet.
I just want to make sure I'm not losing Siacoins somehow in the upgrade process. I have moved over my wallet.dat from the 0.30 to the 0.31 folder.

My apologies, we reset the testnet. Your old coins are gone (anything from sia-ui 0.2.0 or siad 0.3.0 is gone). This will happen one more time on June 7th when we release the full currency. After that point, coins are permanent.

just saw your other thread - and was pointed back here ...

seems like a good project ...

ill readup more on it ... but what is involved in teh mining of the coin when released? ...

will watch this ...

crysx

I have created a new thread here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1060294.0

Unless I am in violation of some forum rule or general etiquette, I would like to make that thread the official Sia thread. Sia has changed substantially since the original creation of this thread, and a significant amount of time has passed.


To answer your mining question, the developers are planning on mining the first 100 blocks or so. After that mining will work much like Bitcoin, anyone can mine and get the full block subsidy. All of coins mined in the first 100 blocks will be used for giveaways, public file uploading, fountains, and other community growing uses. The coins will not be used to line the developers pockets.

i have seen ( and commented also ) on that thread as well ...

i think its quite interesting that you have been working on this for so long - yet its all been low key from what i can tell ...

if mining is as easy as pointing the farm to it - you will have our farms support ... though im unaware whether the algo used is already in the miners currently being used ...

would you rather we continue posting on the other thread - or stay on this one? ...

btw - you can just request that this forum be locked after you put your last post stating that the new thread is in motion and active ...

#crysx

[Taek]

would you rather we continue posting on the other thread - or stay on this one? ...


#crysx

Other thread please

[Technologov]

Is there a way to trade Siastock (Siafund) ?

[dedmaroz]

is any FPGA miner for this coin?

[super3]

Anyone selling any Siafund?

[clickerz]

Siacoin is gaining on poloniex now As of this writing its +142. Anyone trading siacoin here?

[MaGNeT]

Would it be possible to make a Synology and/or QNAP app to run a node / share storage / earn SIA?

[samspaces]

Would it be possible to make a Synology and/or QNAP app to run a node / share storage / earn SIA?

Better post this in the original thread.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1060294.new#new

[basyaru]

New SIA mining pool:
http://sia.nanopool.org

[miningpoolhub]

Hi
I opened new Siacoin mining pool.

Siacoin Mining Pool Hub
https://siacoin.miningpoolhub.com/


- 0.9% fee
- Support Claymore's stratum miner. (v5.2 or higher)
- vardiff support.
- ran pool more than 2 years. stable.


Come and mine with us.

Thanks.

[whenwhatwherewhyhow]

Hi,

What is the transaction fee for sending sia?  My coins seem stuck in an uncomfirmed state.  I used 10 siacoins for the fee...

[kjadB]

Hi,

What is the transaction fee for sending sia?  My coins seem stuck in an uncomfirmed state.  I used 10 siacoins for the fee...

post this in the original thread.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1060294.new#new

[Dafar]

Siacoin is gaining on poloniex now As of this writing its +142. Anyone trading siacoin here?

Yup, enjoying the Siacoin gains

Just did a brief overview of what this coin does, was impressed, thought 100 sats was way too cheap. Not sure where the price should belong though. Any ideas? Is there a cap to SC supply?

[CarmaSleeper]

Hello, guys.
What is wrong with SIACoin on Poloniex and Bittrex?
On Poloniex SIA is in Temporary Disabled status by 7 days. On Bittrex some miners also can't do deposit.
Technical Support on Poloniex does not respond to requests within 5 days.

[Aerys2]

I hope these problems will bé solved quickly, Sia deserves better

[FoBoT]

Can you please check your website http://www.sia.tech/sianotes.html 404 Not Found nginx/1.4.6 (Ubuntu)

I hope the price of this coin can move to 1000 sats as i am holding bunch of it at poloniex.

[Ridley69]

Hello, guys.
What is wrong with SIACoin on Poloniex and Bittrex?
On Poloniex SIA is in Temporary Disabled status by 7 days. On Bittrex some miners also can't do deposit.
Technical Support on Poloniex does not respond to requests within 5 days.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1060294.msg19230977#msg19230977

[self1sch]

There is a new Sia Thread, just saying:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1060294.new#new

[jl777B]

Treechains are not particularly similar to the quorums that Sia builds, Sia's quorum's [were] built out of a paxos-like message passing system. Treechains are a bunch of merge-mined POW blockchains that follow some special rules to build a tree.

Unforturnately everything that I thought was working for quorums is still broken. The problem is that when you have hundreds or millions of quorums, an attacker with 50% strength will be able to compromise at least a handful of quorums in the 70-80% range, and the attacker can pull successful attacks on those. It'd be easy to solve that problem if you could provide a proof-of-public-data, but the only way to prove that is to have the data yourself. Otherwise you're trusting whoever says the data is public or not public, and you'd have to go with the majority, which sometimes is an attacker.

We could weaken our assumptions to 33% global corruption of storage, and then increase the quorum size, and then it's much less likely for an attacker to break 51% strength in any quorum. But then you have failure modes that might destroy everything. IE if an attacker does manage to break 51% control of a particular quorum, he'll be able to continually inflate (by lying) the amount of storage he has, and eventually take 51% control of every quorum.

The source of the problem comes from the fact that not every node knows about every transaction. With a file storage system, you have to be able to handle many, many, many transactions, or have some way to allow the system to change state without using a transaction. But if you're doing proof-of-storage, and someone edits a file, the rest of the network has to know that the file has been edited so that they can change how they read a storage proof. Therefore, I don't think it's possible to edit a file without having a transaction. If most of the files are computer backups or large static files (videos, music, etc.), it might be okay but the real goal is to support files like web pages. Ideally you'd never need an HDD again (an SDD + large amount of RAM would be sufficient).

So I guess we have two options then:

1. Everyone sees every transaction
2. Not everyone sees every transaction

In the case of 1, the amount of transactions would need to be limited, and you'd have fees and they'd get pretty large. Something like this could potentially be done right on top of Bitcoin. This would probably only be useful for large _and_ important files. I don't really see Netflix using something like this, but it could be a worthwhile alternative to bittorrent (which suffers from the same problem of having files that are very hard to edit).

In the case of 2, you have to have some way of knowing that everything is okay, even though you can't see all of the transactions. The general strategy is to have a large but finite number of people verifying each piece of information, and you randomly assign who gets to verify what. You have some metric for protecting against sybil attacks during your assignment. (storage in our case). The problem is that if you're relying on something like a blockchain, you need to assume that each subset of verifiers is able to stay honest.

Consider the situation where 51% are dishonest. They are the majority, and so they can tell the network that things look like X. The network doesn't know, so it just has to accept X as true. The 49% honest people complain, saying that things actually look like Y. The dishonest group can be completely dishonest (change balances and such), because they don't ever tell anyone what Y is (Y is just a hash to keep things scalable). They just keep it to themselves and successfully corrupt the network.

So say you give the honest hosts some tool to claim that Y doesn't exist and is a made up hash. Then, in honest quorums you can have a dishonest set of hosts claim that the honest hosts are releasing data which doesn't exist. The network now needs to verify somehow that the honest hosts really have made the data public and aren't actually dishonest hosts in disguise. The only way to do this is for the network to download all of the data and verify for itself that the data exists. But now dishonest hosts will always claim that they can't see the data, and the rest of the network is always forced to download the data to verify that it's publicly available. So you end up with a situation that's not any different from a single blockchain.

Moon math aside, there doesn't seem to be any way around this. That's where Sia is stuck right now. The quorum's in the currently available whitepaper suffer from a related problem. Someone who manages to take control of >50% of a large number of quorums can start kicking out honest hosts, which will result in fines for the honest hosts and also result in a higher percentage of the hosts across the network as a whole being dishonest. Sia becomes pretty vulnerable once someone gets around 33% of the network.

=======

So let's say that we accept our limitations of 33%. What happens when someone breaks 33%? Unfortunately, they get a lot of power. In Bitcoin, when someone breaks 50% they control the blockchain for a while, they can attempt double spends and they can block transactions, but they can't spend other people's money. But in a network where the majority of hosts don't see all of the data, someone who manages to break a portion of the data CAN spend money from other wallets. They just lie about the state of the network, because they don't have to provide signatures of accuracy.

Even if we were able to prove that the dishonest hosts hadn't dishonestly spent a wallet's money (eg without a signature) (this proof could be done using snarks/scip), the dishonest hosts could still refuse to reveal what data had made it into the blockchain. The biggest issue here is that honest transactions could make it into the blockchain, and while the snarks would verify that everything was legal, honest hosts might not be able to know if their transactions had gone through. A dishonest party could prove that they had the network in a legal state without ever revealing what that state is. So the rest of the world just sees this giant black void that they can't reason about or make transactions through. The wallets within it might as well not have any coins.

 

=======

So, what do we do? I'm going to keep looking at this but it doesn't seem like highly scalable storage is going to work in a decentralized way on today's technologies. I don't think it's reasonable to assume that nobody will ever get to 33% control (even without pools) because Bitcoin has a single factory that's got something like 25% of the mining power. Sia might fall to the same thing. It would be highly desirable to have some sort of response to the failure mode, such that if the honest set of people once again got above 67%, the network could quickly restore to a functioning, fully informed state.

Another big issue with proof-of-storage-for-consensus is that it's not progress free. You have to announce that you have the storage, you have to download files (and people have to be willing to upload the files to you - another issue we aren't certain how to solve). A malicous party controlling the network can just refuse to accept you as a contributor, and it won't matter how much storage you have because you will be ignored. This doesn't happen on Bitcoin because any random person can submit a proof of work. In Sia, this isn't currently possible.

=======

Dark days for Sia =/. But filecoin is also broken, permacoin is not efficient, maidsafe is opaque and very difficult to audit, and storj is underspecified. Cryptography is very hard, something I didn't properly appreciate until the past month or two. But Sia is not dead yet, we're just back to square 1 for the time being. The money hasn't run out yet and we won't give up until it does. Our total expenses since doing the crowd sale have been about 1/2 of what we raised. (through the crowd sale. We also have venture funding although that's in a completely different pool of money. Our responsibilities following the crowd sale is to make Sia, our responsibilities following venture funding is to make Nebulous Inc. a succesful corporation).

In the worst case, I think we will be able to create a less powerful system for peer to peer storage. Instead of selling storage to a broader network, you'd sell storage to individual peers. The peers would need to be responsible for picking reliable and honest hosts, which they could achieve by using reputation, randomness, and redundancy.

  sorry guys I hope the next major update has more positive news. As always, happy to walk you through anything and explain exactly what's broken. Also happy to highlight questions you have about other systems, though it's very time consuming to take a close look.

Just a reminder