SiaCoin: Sia is an attempt at a decentralized cloud storage platform

For those who don't know SiaCoin, Sia is an attempt and effort to build a decentralized cloud storage platform. By using encryption technology, encrypted contracts, and duplicate backups, Sia can unite a group of computer nodes that do not trust and know each other into a cloud storage platform with unified operating logic and procedures. This platform will be faster, cheaper, and more reliable than traditional cloud storage platforms. And because these untrusted computer nodes are distributed all over the world, Sia can become an effective distribution network for files and their contents without adding costs. File uploaders can freely choose the nodes they use, which means they can avoid nodes in a certain area, or only use those they think are trustworthy. Decentralization means dividing an uploaded file into many small pieces and storing each small piece on different computer nodes. Among these nodes storing files, only a small number of nodes need to be trusted to make the uploaded file safe and reliable.

Siacoin Cloud Storage Coin,In the Sia platform, files exist as '.Sia' objects, which are small objects that contain a series of encryption keys and hosting nodes. A '.Sia' object is actually a pointer to a larger file in the platform system. Currently, the size of a '.Sia' object is between 2kb and 20kb, but there is a lot of room for improvement. There are two ways to make '.Sia' objects smaller. One is that you can make a '.Sia' object smaller and let it point to one (or more) larger '.Sia' objects. In this way, you will actually store a large number of '.Sia' objects in the platform system, and then perform a two-phase search when retrieving files. The second method involves the formulation of a standard protocol for creating smaller '.Sia' objects when randomly seeding at the beginning. In this way, we can actually reduce the size of the initial '.Sia' object to a single hash, and then this hash can point to any object or a group of objects. It will be the ultimate solution for storing file objects on the Internet. Sharing a file with a friend can be as simple as uploading the file to the Sia platform, then giving your friend a 32-byte (or 16 or even 8 bytes for a smaller version) '.Sia' object, which will allow your friend to find your file object on the Sia platform.

Siacoin Cloud Storage Coin: One of Sia's biggest advantages is that it introduces a free market mechanism for cloud storage. Today, becoming a cloud storage provider means building a brand, establishing reputation, customer service and support systems, and often an entire ecosystem. Sia eliminates all of these costs. If you have a hard drive and an Internet connection, you only need to connect your computer to the Sia platform to start accepting cloud storage contracts and business. Others don't need to know who you are or trust you, and you don't need to advertise yourself and deal with customer service. It's a bit like Bitcoin mining, you just need to simply connect your computer and you can start making money. People with cheap resources can make huge profits by providing cheap cloud storage to all parts of the world. In the Sia system, there are no fixed suppliers, privacy rules (because privacy in Sia is thorough and automatic), only a free market built purely for storage and bandwidth. We believe this will lead to a sharp drop in existing market prices. In the test platform, we can already see that the storage fee is very low (based on the current price in the test platform, even with a standard 8x backup, its price is only 3% of the traditional cloud storage price).

Distributors of file content (like Netflix, Spotify, or YouTube) can benefit from using Sia's content distribution network. Current content distribution networks are expensive and highly duplicated, running on many servers that are controlled by a single center. Sia can outsource cloud storage to untrusted hosting nodes by paying them and using cryptographic contracts to enforce market supply and demand agreements. When using Sia, the distribution network for file content is built into Sia. It can also provide 10% protection against controversial services. For example, Comcast tried to throttle Netflix traffic. In Sia, all traffic is the same, and it will be difficult for Comcast to screen and throttle certain traffic. Sia's free market model will also mean that for bandwidth-intensive services, distribution costs can potentially be substantially reduced, because cheaper nodes will be preferred, which means that expensive hosting nodes may not get any business at all (thereby increasing pressure to lower prices).

There are some interesting possibilities with future superfast Internet. A superfast Internet connection would be as fast as a solid-state drive connection. Using Google Fiber or something similar, your computer could use no hard drive, but download everything directly from the Internet at the same speed as if it were using a hard drive. You could potentially store your entire computer's software on Sia, eliminating the need for other storage options such as hard drives, and still achieve the same results. This means you could boot up and run your personal operating system and setup from anywhere in the world, without the need for any hard drives such as USBs or CDs, all you need is a simple Internet connection. This is unlikely to work with traditional operating systems because of the extreme lag, but if you could set up a ramdisk operating system (the entire operating system is in RAM) and sync it with a cloud storage service from time to time, you wouldn't have to suffer the speed penalty of not using a hard drive.

One of the potential benefits of Bitcoin is to remove advertising from the Internet and replace it with a paywall. Bitcoin could make this paywall much simpler and more convenient than any existing paywall. It would allow a user to pay a fraction of a cent to spend a certain amount of time on a paywalled (but ad-free) site, and then potentially never come back to that site again. With Bitcoin, this could be done in a decentralized fashion, where the site and the user wouldn't need to be on the same paywall company - they would just need to be on the same decentralized paywall network. It would take a relatively short time to launch such a service. However, there is a big problem with the move from a free service to a paid service. Even if it removes the ads, it requires you to actually spend money, which creates a huge psychological barrier, even if the fee is only a few cents a month. Psychologically, people don't like paying a lot of tiny amounts.

In the Sia ecosystem, this payment model is enforced from the beginning. There is no free storage in this decentralized system, nor is there a free 5GB trial, no matter how cheap it is. Small amounts of free usage are not compatible with Sia. Storage and usage on Sia are metered. Fortunately, there are many successful examples of metered payment in our society today. The first important example is the pay-as-you-go model. Your utility company uses this model. Every time you turn on a light, take a shower, or run the dishwasher, your utility company actually charges you a small fee. Over the course of a month, these small fees add up to a significant amount, but you get used to it and generally have a good idea of ​​when your bill will be expensive. You are happy to pay your utility bill at the end of the month. Another model is pay-as-you-go. Filling up your car with gas is a good example. Every time you drive, you realize that you will use gas and soon you will need to fill up, and when you do you pay a large amount of gas. But you'll still be happy to drive it because you know it's good value for money.

In both cases, the key is that you don't pay as you use the service, but you pay at regular intervals. You know you're spending money every time you use it, but you only have to pay once at the end of the month. When you're short on money, you limit your spending to avoid a large bill. These models work well with human psychology. Sia uses a gas-filling model to calculate spending. When you start using Sia, you top up your account (equivalent to gas), and you know how long you'll have to use it. When you're running low, you get a 'low gas' warning to let you know you need to refill. Because Sia has built-in payment channels, downloading data from unknown servers and entities doesn't require any setup time. As long as both the uploader and the storage host are on the same global payment network (which is made up of many mutually untrusting entities), they can transfer money to each other instantly and securely. This payment network can facilitate both uploading and downloading.

It can also make the online browsing experience much better. Sia's paid network is not limited to decentralized storage services, and content and data do not need to be downloaded directly from Sia's decentralized network. When using Sia, you can access and manage paywalls on centralized websites to eliminate ads and bring more revenue sources to website maintainers.

Currently, the core focus of Sia is a decentralized cloud storage system, more specifically a decentralized object store. We are focused on making Sia a simple, efficient, and secure platform. On this platform, you can put and retrieve all kinds of files, and upload a query consisting of only a hash. Uploading should be easy, keeping files safe should be easy, and transferring files between computers (such as between you and your friends) should also be easy. Finding the files you want should be easy, and most importantly, users should never have to worry about whether the uploaded files are still there. Although the Sia platform is still in testing, it is moving forward in great strides. We are full of expectations and confidence in the future, and we hope that you are too. (siacoin cloud storage currency)