I don't think Sia's a bad investment but people simply do not understand what they buy.
So let's think about Siacoin: it's basically a platform where you can store and buy unused space on hard drives.
Now, let's think who is the consumer of such product:
-average Joe: so, average Joe needs space to backup some of his files. He can get 15-GB for free. If it's not enough he can easily rent one terabyte for around 7$/month. Still not enough? Dropbox can provide him with unlimited space for 15$/month.
How in the hell can Sia address him with complicated and unreliable storage?
Dropbox can guarantee a 99.9999% up-time if not more, average Joe hosting on sia network? Generally below 95% (which automatically excludes most business cases for data storage).
Look at complicate to use Sia for the guy is: he's expected to go on exchange, buy bitcoins, trade them with sia, install wallet, create keys, withdraw to the exact wallet, find host.
Now he can finally pay:
Let's see Sia's rates:
5,80$ average for 1TB/month and this does not include bandwidth. And the average uptime of sia hosts is way below 90 % and you have a serious risk of losing your data.
Dropbox can offer you 1 TB a 7$ without all of that hassle and 6TB (200 GB/day) of bandwidth.
Now, ask yourselves, can Sia (at the moment) compete with those prices?
No.
And if you think it could in the future, I have an answer for that later.
Can Sia offer the same support, up-time, ease of use, backups, commenting, phone support, office integration, live sharing, ecc?
No.
I could go long and long and tell you why Sia isn't absolutely an option for business and enterprise. Business can either store data in house or put it in a clod where it's easier and safer to use and has virtually no downtime (also Sia's is absolutely not fit for database and big-data, it's more of a backup service). How much upload bandwidth average Joe has also? I can download at very fast speeds gigabytes of data from amazon/Dropbox, only limited by my network. But how do you actually expect somebody to host files on your computer with your limited bandwidth? Also, most business can get tax reductions for their business costs (it's the case in Italy, my country). Who's gonna bill "Saint Mary's hospital" for 150 terabyte of storage on sia network?
Really, tell me what's the real case use of siacoin.
Now, let's take this from the point of view of the hosts (the actual users like me and you that want to be paid for giving up the space on their disks).
Only 2 % of the sia storage's used right now.. and check how much space: 25.7 Terabyes as I write. I have 4 terabytes on my own computer.
That is, the entire sia network right now stores the equivalent of 10 desktop computers, and the equivalent of 600 $ worth of hard drives.
But let's talk about the hosts. A 1 terabyte hard drive costs around 45 $ and earns you 5.80$ a month. That's an 8 months ROI, quite high for cryptos right now, and I'll ignore the fact that to run a hard drive you actually need a computer around it, constantly up. You're also fighting to host this data with thousands of users constantly undercutting it.
Now, if you have more than 36 hours of downtime a month (so below 95%) your likelihood of being a host goes very low for months (because Sia network ranks you very poorly).
So you invested 45$, probably more, for a small chance to host somebody's files for around 5$ a month hoping he'll also download and upload a bit so you get also siacoins for bandwidth (maybe another 5 $, top).
This may start looking good, but honestly, are you gonna give up on gaming because somebody's uploading 10 hours.
And the current marketcap for Sia coin is more than half a billion USD.
So, all in all we have:
-a technology that does not appeal neither to the average consumer nor most certainly business users for whom data has very high value (even if it's the third backup of a database or something).
-a technology that hardly rewards average Joe. Nobody's storing their files on sia network right now, probably only few people that have thousands of sia mined/bought at 30 sats that want to test the technology. Also, you can make 3/4 times more by mining bursts on your computer.
-a market cap of 500 billions for a real network use of 27 terabytes. You can get 30 terabytes on Dropbox for 15 $, not 500 billions. You can rent 27 terabytes of space on amazon for 337 dollars/month with reduced use (and holy fuck who'd use sia network for constant up/down streams, it's not going to host databases).
So you expect the price to go higher?
Maybe, but Siacoin has really no appeal to anybody. To conclude:
to be profitable for customers (with all the bandwidth, support, integrations, up-time, limitations standard services do not have) it must be unprofitable for hosts (and it already is) while both of them are on a full-of-hassle with no benefits platform.
