WHAT IS SIA
Sia, a platform for decentralized storage. Sia enables the formation of storage contracts between peers. Contracts are agreements between a storage provider and their client, defining what data will be stored and at what price. They require the storage provider to prove, at regular intervals, that they are still storing their client’s data. Contracts are stored in a blockchain, making them publicly auditable.Sia uses a cryptocurrency, Siacoin, to enable decentralized payments via file contracts. All payments on the network happen in Siacoin, which is a critical component of our cryptographic SLAs. Siacoin allows us to do things that would not be possible with Bitcoin or traditional online payments.
IDEA BEHIND FILE CONTRACTS- THE SIA HEART
A file contract is an agreement between a storage provider and their client. At the core of a file contract is the file’s Merkle root hash. To construct this hash, the file is split into segments of constant size and hashed into a Merkle tree. The root hash, along with the total size of the file, can be used to verify storage proofs.Decentralized, cloud storage based on Blockchain? Obvious $$$ here. Buy it while it's cheap! #SC #Siacoin #CryptoTrading pic.twitter.com/vAqjv69aKw— Bully Bro (@Bully_Bro) June 10, 2017
CLEAR INTENTIONS FROM FOUNDERS
Sia is a product of Nebulous Incorporated. Nebulous is a for-profit company, and Sia is intended to be- come a primary source of income for the company. Nebulous intends to generate revenue from Sia in a manner proportional to the value added by Sia, as determined by the value of the contracts set up between clients and hosts. This is accomplished by imposing a fee on all contracts. When a contract is created, 3.9% of the contract fund is removed and distributed to the holders of siafunds . Nebulous Inc. will initially hold approx. 88% of the siafunds, and rest 12% is held by the early crowd-fund backers.SIACOIN GENERATION
The primary currency of Sia is the siacoin. The initial supply of coins were given to miners as a block subsidy. The first block had 300,000 coins minted. This number decreases by 1 coin per block, until a minimum of 30,000 coins per block is reached. The primary goal of Sia is to provide a blockchain that enforces storage contracts. The mining reward, however, is only indirectly linked to the total value of contracts being created.
HOW SIA DIFFERS FROM BITCOIN TECHNICALLY
Sia’s primary departure from Bitcoin lies in its transactions. Bitcoin uses a scripting system to enable arange of transaction types, such as pay-to-public-key- hash and pay-to-scripthash. Sia opts instead to use an M –of– N multi-signature scheme for all transactions, eschewing the scripting system entirely. This reduces complexity and attack surface. Sia also extends transactions to enable the creation and enforcement of storage contracts.Three extensions are used to accomplish this: contracts, proofs, and contract updates. Contracts declare the intention of a host to store a file with a certain size and hash. They define the regularity with which a host must submit storage proofs. Once established, contracts can be modified later via contract updates.
Sia is currently implemented as a blockchain- based altcoin. Future support for a two-way peg with Bitcoin is planned. A 2-way peg (2WP) allows the transfer of bitcoins from the Bitcoin blockchain to a Secondary blockchain and vice-versa.
The “transfer” is a technical illusion: bitcoins are not actually transferred, but temporarily locked on the Bitcoin blockchain while the same amount of equivalent tokens(here, siacoins) are unlocked in a secondary blockchain. The original bitcoins can be unlocked when the equivalent amount of tokens on the second blockchain are locked again (in the secondary blockchain). This is essentially the 2WP promise.
SIA JUNE RELEASE-EXPECTATIONS
This month SIA is planning for a big release with many changes planned. Below are few of them.- Ability to repire file without having it locally
- Simple file sharing with other sia users
- Initial blockchain synchronization time to be reduced
- Support for partial downloads
- Ability to recover files from outdated backup files
In the past 5 weeks, the number of contracts on the Sia blockchain has grown from 9,000 to almost 14,000 pic.twitter.com/99EgIBCLBY— Sia Tech (@SiaTechHQ) April 20, 2017
SIACOIN WITHDRAWAL & DEPOSIT ISSUES
Sia team made the decision two years ago to cap the transaction pool at 2 MB, due to significant performance issues above that size, and postponed the engineering work that would allow for a larger pool. SIA admitted that they planned for growth, but were not expecting so much growth, so fast, without warning.
Siacoin entered May 2017 with a market cap of nearly $30M, and quickly increased to over $350M by June 2017. As users transferred their coins out of exchanges, and became hosts and renters on the Sia network, the number of transactions significantly grew. This created deposit and withdrawal issues, mainly in exchanges like poloniex and Bittrex.
The issues were hot fixed and now they are planning to increase transaction pool size to 5MB with the ability to automatically grow further if there are large quantities of high-fee transactions. We will also be creating a fee market, similar to Bitcoin, so that miners can prioritize transactions based on fees. With the upgrades implemented, the Sia network should be able to safely scale by an order of magnitude.
LONG TERM-CAN DISRUPT AMAZON S3 AND DROPBOX
The storage space industry is mostly dominated by Amazon S3 and Dropbox. The long term vision of SIA is to compete with market leaders. It is not simple but not impossible. Recently SIA announced their integration with Nextcloud, the popular open-source alternative to Dropbox and Google Drive. Nextcloud users now have the ability to expand their storage capacity with private, decentralized cloud storage by integrating with Sia. This is considered as the right step for sia's long term vision.
Even if SIA is able to take away 20% of AMAZON/DROPBOX market share, it would be disruptive in nature and siacoin holders have reasons to rejoice. Decentralization is the mantra in today's world and sia powers with a simple but most powerful use-case of decentralized blockchain technology.
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