For my first review I will be going over sia — one of the players in the decentralized storage space. The cloud storage industry is massive and companies like Sia are hoping to put a dent in the dominance Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have enjoyed over the past decade.
It took a while but I am finally picking back up on my crypto review series. If you haven't read my previous articles, please check out my intro to bitcoin.
Getting Started With Bitcoin
And my intro to the crypto review series
https://steemit.com/cryptocurrencies/@j-o-n-t/crypto-review-series-introduction
I will write about coins I am interested in, most likely I will own some (I own ~40 different coins now so that doesnt make them particularly special) but in no way is this investment advice - it is generally a way for me to align my thoughts - do your own research before investing!!
What is Sia? Basically storage — think dropbox, google drive, etc. The shtick is that it is decentralized, encrypted, peer to peer storage — although, no one party is holding the information you are storing — it is encrypted, multiplied, chopped into little bits, and then all those little bits are sent around to a bunch of different hosts. When you want access to your file, the appropriate bits are recompiled and you get your file. Think of your file as being in a T-1000 type state.
By building the framework and outsourcing the storage to anyone with a hard drive and an internet connection Sia has reduced overhead dramatically and can charge a much lower fee. They multiply the bits in case a node holding a piece of your file happens to be offline (even though they are incentivized not to be).
Now for some due diligence
Sia was created by David Vorick and Luke Champine of Nebulous Inc, a VC-funded startup in Boston.The idea of Sia was originally conceived at HackMIT 2013.
There really isnt much out there on David Vorick but not in the way that some of these scam coins have shady founders but more in the way where I am assuming he is more head down, focusing on the product. The VC firm seems legit but there isnt really any other crypto (when i checked) in their portfolio. It seems like they could use a marketing/evangelist type.
David’s online presence basically boils down to his medium posts and some youtube videos. This one also had the added benefit of talking through the different blockchain storage protocols. David jumps in at min 13. I like his tone for as much as thats worth.
They have a product & users!!
Duh
Heres what they are touting, directly from their front page
Love this — a public Trello board with their roadmap
https://trello.com/b/Io1dDyuI/sia-public-roadmap
There is a lot of useful information on their Pulse Site like the distribution of hosts.
and the current prices (I believe those are monthly)
They also seem very active in slack answering questions. It seems like David is making the rounds more now but to make the jump they will likely need to bring in some marketing folks. They are VERY open with the project which the community appreciates so if they deliver I'm sure we will continue to hear more from them.
The next step for Sia in my opinion is landing a big partner or some applications built on it to gain some notoriety. My guess is STORJ will be more consumer focused, IPFS is going to land the enterprise projects, and Sia will fall somewhere in between but be popular with the projects striving for true full stack decentralization.
I really think some of the “Next 6 Months” items could trigger a jump — video streaming gets people excited, automatic host pricing will make it less manual, and supporting over 10 TB at a time should allow for more applications to be built on it.
Feel free to recommend a coin to dive into next, and as always, please do your own research and only invest as much as you can afford to lose.
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