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.