Sia - Siafund Redemption Deadline: June 1st, 2015

[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.