siacoin - Your decentralized cloud backend

Today I'm going to talk a little about siacoin

"Welcome to a new era of cloud storage in the blockchain"

Completely private

Sia divides, encrypts and distributes your files through a decentralized network. As you have the keys, you are the owner of your data. No external company can access or control your files, unlike traditional cloud storage providers.

Much more affordable

Sia's decentralized cloud is on average 10 times less expensive than current cloud storage providers. Storage of 1 TB in Sia costs around $ 2 per month, compared to $ 23 in Amazon S3. Calculate your savings below!

Highly redundant

Sia stores small pieces of your files on dozens of nodes around the world. This eliminates any single point of failure and ensures the longest possible uptime, on a par with other cloud storage providers.

Open source

Sia is completely open source. More than a dozen people have contributed to the Sia software, and there is an active community that develops innovative applications in addition to the Sia API.

Blockchain Marketplace

Using Sia blockchain, Sia creates a decentralized storage market in which hosts compete for your business, leading to the lowest possible prices. The tenants pay with Siacoin, which can also be extracted and marketed.

an example of prices

Sia is an actively developed decentralized storage platform. Users around the world contribute disk storage from their
computers to form a decentralized network. Anyone with siacoins can rent storage from this network, and hosts are
paid for their contributions. A combination of intelligent contracts, erasure coding and encryption ensures security, privacy,
and reliable decentralized storage. You can download and use Sia today!

An intelligent contract in the blockchain guarantees through the use of cryptographic storage tests that the hosts only receive payment
if they keep the file for the entire duration of the contract. Use of deletion codes such as Reed Solomon codes
ensures high file uptime, even if most hosts on the network are unreliable or have frequent interruptions. All data is
encrypted on the client side and padded, preventing hosts from sniffing the contents of the files and even guessing what
the file may be based on the file size.

The distributed nature of the Sia network allows many optimizations in latency, performance, reliability and security.
The decentralized nature of the Sia network allows paying any person with storage, reducing the entry barrier and
reducing the total price of cloud storage.

The technology

The base of Sia is a blockchain work test. Storage contracts are a new type of transaction that applies.
by the blockchain. Sia's hash algorithm is blake2b. p2pool and multisig wallets are compatible with Sia.

When a file is uploaded to Sia, a storage contract is created that contains the Merkle root of the file, a reward for the
host, and a penalty for the host (both in siacoins). After an agreed duration, the host must demonstrate that
the file is still available by providing a random Merkle test. If the test is valid, the host receives a reward; otherwise,
the host is penalized. Random numbers are generated deterministically using the most recent block as a seed.

Sia has support for bidirectional payment channels and bidirectional contract differences. Among other things, this provides enormous
scalability and eliminates the need for confirmation or unreliable transactions. Once you join a
network payment channel , all transactions within that network will be instant and final, with no risk of double spending.

Reliability is achieved through the use of erasure coding in a mass distribution environment. The delete encoding allows a file to
be divided into many parts, so that the original file can be recovered using only some of them. For example, you can
take a 50 MB file, divide it into 200 units of 1 MB each, and then you can retrieve the original file from * any * 50
of the pieces. This method has the same overhead as creating 4 full copies of the file, but it is much more reliable
because 151 of 200 hosts are much less likely to be disconnected than it is possible for 4 out of 4 hosts to be
disconnected.

As the network grows, we will apply a statistical analysis to determine the redundancy required to provide 99.9999%
file reliability. It is likely that a 3x overload is an absurd exaggeration, and the statistical analysis will give a precise answer.
image of how much overhead is required.

Using 200 hosts to store a file means that the downloads can be massively parallel. Even if the average Sia host does not
have fast loading speeds, the mass parallelism enabled by Sia means downloads will be very fast anyway. In
addition, you can choose to connect only to the nearest and fastest data centers. This optimization
(known as CDN) is a very expensive project for a traditional cloud storage service, but for Sia it is a natural resource as a
consequence of the decentralized network.

As security is one of Sia's top priorities, all encryption is done locally; the people who save your files will not be
able to see what you have uploaded. Not only is each file encrypted separately, each * piece * of each file is
encrypted separately, and hosts are not told which parts are part of it archive.

The cryptocurrency

Sia uses a new cryptocurrency, called siacoin. The developers will mine the first 100 blocks more or less before releasing
the + mining code to the public. Apart from these first blocks, there is no preamble for siacoins. The first block
the reward will be 300,000 siacoins. Each block reward after that will be a smaller siacoin than the previous block reward
(299,999, then 299,998, and so on). When the block reward reaches 30,000, all remaining blocks will give 30,000
siacoin reward. The block time is 10 minutes. Each siacoin is composed of 10 ^ 24 indivisible units.

Only the most important features of Sia can be accessed using siacoins. All storage contracts and all Sia payments
channels require siacoins. This requirement means that as Sia grows in use, so will the demand for siacoins.
As the demand grows, the price will increase. If Sia is being used for billions of dollars of storage, billions of dollars
of siacoins will be required. The value of siacoin is inextricably linked to the amount of storage in use in Sia
red.

Sia has a second cryptocurrency, called Siafund. 3.9% of all successful payments of the storage contract go to the holders
of the siafunds. There are 10,000 siafunds in total, and the 10,000 are completely predetermined. Sia's parent company, Nebulous
Inc., owns approximately 8750 of these siafunds. The remaining siafunds were sold in a crowdfund that helped
fund the early development of Sia. The main objective of siafunding is to provide a way to finance the development of Sia
without relying on donations or prejudice. More people who use Sia mean more funds available to hire more developers.

Standard transactions are not subject to the fee, neither are failed storage contracts (when the host was offline)
or lost the file).

The business plan

The long-term goal of Sia is to be the main storage layer of the Internet. All long-term storage will be carried out
in Sia. All movies and music will be broadcast from Sia. All the images will be integrated from Sia. All companies will use
Sia as a back-end for cloud storage. Sia intends to replace Bittorrent, Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, Microsoft OneDrive,
and all back-end cloud storage services. We intend to completely disrupt a multibillion dollar industry.

Sia should be a platform from which other applications can build. The beta version has a first draft API for developers for
use, found here. >> https://github.com/NebulousLabs/Sia/blob/master/doc/API.md <<

In the coming months, we are focusing on building the API and creating a sample application that replaces
Bittorrent. If you have ideas about the things you want to build that will use Sia, contact us. Sia is
a fully open source, and you can use the API without obtaining explicit permission or paying royalties or license
fees.

The future

The promise of Sia is a decentralized network of small data centers that, collectively, comprise the fastest in the world,
the safest and cheapest cloud storage platform. Today, being an important storage player in the cloud requires having data centers,
creating confidence in the market, reaching customers and competing with giants such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
Entering this market is a multimillion dollar effort.

Sia changes that by allowing small and efficient data centers to sell their storage without confidence in the market and without a
marketing budget. Sia reduces the entry barrier, and in doing so creates a large amount of cheap storage for its users.
Anyone with an Internet connection and an inexpensive storage source can make money.

The long-term goal of Sia is to become a serious competitor to existing cloud storage platforms, including Dropbox,
Google Drive and OneDrive. We visualize a future in which even massive services like Netflix and YouTube will use Sia to offer
the best user experience to their clients.

that was an explanation about the siacoin.
thanks for reading up to here, until the next post :)