Think about all the unused hard drive space sitting on computers around the world. Now just imagine you could rent that out. This is what the team Siacoin is currently doing. If you wanted to right now, you could go store your files on Sia's decentralized private cloud for a tenth of the cost of Amazon Web Services (AWS or Amazons S3), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, or Dropbox. Not only that your files are encrypted and secure, your files are broken up into pieces and stored on dozens of nodes across the globe. No one can tamper with them and they won't be accidentally leaked onto the internet, which just happened with Verizon. In this case Verizon had 14 million customers private info like cell phone numbers and account Personal Identification Numbers (PINs) were breached. This is another reason why centralized data storage is not secure and has many flaws. The first major flaw is single point of failure. If the building holding your data storage loses power, gets damaged, floods, etc. your data is gone. Also your data can be tampered with by anyone in the building, even if it is encrypted. Recently Amazon S3 went down and so did many parts of the internet during that time period. These just show you the many issues faced with centralized storage.
Below is a comparison of the prices.
Sia's goal is to be the backbone storage layer of the internet. You can host and be paid in Siacoin for completeing the obligation of hosting, or you put data on the Sia cloud and pay the users in Siacoin. Not only that, you control your files, you own the key to them, so only you have access to your data, no one else. For instance, say you want to store a 40 megabyte (MB) file on the Sia decentralized cloud. When you put it on there, it is broken into 40 pieces and encrypted. So your data is spread across 40 nodes and you only need four pieces of the 40 to recover your data. This kind of redundancy makes it nearly impossible to cause a network to go down. It would have to all simultaneously go down.
Siacoin has competitors also in the world of blockchain decentralized cloud like Storj, Maidsafe, and Filecoin. Storj just made an major announcement that they were partnering with Filezilla, which will make Storj available to 15 million monthly users. Though Storj has had some issues internally, including their CFO/COO James Prestwich stepping down. Filecoin is about to have it's Initial Coin Offering (ICO) on July 27th, though it is going to be different from other ICO's. Filecoin's ICO is only open to accredited investors -- those making over $200,000/year or have a networth over $1 million -- keeping away less sophisticated investors who tend to cause more volatility in prices. It is going to launch it's ICO on Coinlist, whose goal is to make investing in token sales easier and mainstream. Maidsafe is still in alpha as we speak. Overall all four of these have the same goal of storing data on a decentralized cloud at a much cheaper rate than the current offerings in centralized storgage. This could bring major disruption to companies like Amazon whose main source of profitability is from AWS per Business Insider.
At the rate we store data now, it is very possible more than one of these four could be storing your data in the future. We store data now more than ever. Businesses focus so much more on analytics than they did 20 years ago.
One thing that stood out to me about Siacoin is the amount of participation their team has with the community. Whether it is on reddit or slack, the CEO and the developers are always there answering questions and are very transparent. For instance back in June, Sia made a big announcement that they would be making a Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) miner called Obelisk for miners to mine Sia. This left a lot of members confused in the community (read more about by clicking on the link that will take you to reddit if you are interested.) Also, they answered a bunch of questions on why even make an ASIC, with reasons including to prevent more than one entity having the ability of doing a 51% attack. This is when a group of miners controls more than 50% of the hash rate, or computing power. This would allow the attackers to prevent new transactions from gaining confirmations, allowing them to halt payments on some or all users. Along with that their team is very focused on being the backbone storage layer of the internet and recently Sia just passed over the 1000 host mark.
A year from now it will be interesting to see where all four of these decentralized cloud storage stands. It wouldn't surprise me to see these four take over the cloud business in the next five years due to the fact that they are so much cheaper and secure than the current option which is centralized storage.
If you liked this post, please share it!
Thank you!
Disclaimer: this author currently has a stake in Siacoin.
If you had to rank those four competitors from most likely to succeed to least likely how would you do it? I suppose that if the space pans out they will all do well.
That's tough to say, I would've put Storj for sure as the last because of their management issues, but with the recent news on their partnership with Filezilla, it's tough to say. Because now 15 million people just got access to Storj. I'd put Filecoin and Siacoin as 1 or 2 with Maidsafe behind them. I think Filecoin will do real well. It was very professional of them to take an accredited investors route.
I think six months to a year from now, that would be a good topic to write about and see where they are all at.
Do you think it is worth buying up some Siacoin now with a view to saving money on storage in the future??
Look at @haejin maybe you can figure it by your own out.
@investoranalysis
Nice Job!
Keep the good work up!
Thanks for sharing
Thank you very much! I really enjoy writing about this and plan on putting out more content soon.
Congratulations @investoranalysis! You have completed some achievement on Steemit and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :
Click on any badge to view your own Board of Honor on SteemitBoard.
For more information about SteemitBoard, click here
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word
STOPSiacoin seems quite interesting. Thanks for the in depth info. I will be following you now in order to learn more about sia.
Thank you for the follow! Yeah, it was in depth, but I could've went even more in depth on this article, but I felt that it would've been tougher for more people to follow along, so I tried to keep it brief, but juicy.
I'll probably be doing my next article on state of the current financial system and how we transfer money, and I will be covering Ripple and SWIFT.
Hopefully Sia will be able to grow to its fullest potential. I think Sia can change the world by offering cheap storage.
Getting sia should be more accessible, the process now is too long. You have to convert your money to BTC first and then you can buy Sia. At the same you also need to download a client and wait for it sync.
I would hope so. I think all these decentralized storage options are great, offering competition and driving prices down.
You are correct, once it is simple for people to store data on Sia, it will explode. For the time being they are a small team, but they are currently hiring more developers, so they should be able to pick up the pace.
Saw this post on reddit, Sia is one of my favorite Altcoins!(if not the favorite!)
I cant afford to invest a lot in it but i believe its going to be great tech. The dev team seams great and I always see them active on reddit, github, slack etc.
Wish i could get an oberlisk !
I could swear it was at 600 hosts only a few week ago! didnt know its now at 1000+!
Yeah, it is growing pretty rapidly and so is there developer team, I know they are hiring new guys because of the recent explosion in crypto. This is only the beginning.
If you want read my first post, I cover the current crypto bubble, though it is still far from bursting.
When I first got into crypto seriously in May, there were 730 currencies and now there are 820! You want to talk about a gold rush.
When the Obelisk got announced I thought for sure you would be able to put a few HDDs in it and mine as well as rent out space.
I didn't see that, do you have a link to that? That would be really interesting if it did though.
There's no link it would just my personal speculation. I was disappointed with the hardware when I found out it was just a miner.
Yeah, but the point of it is to prevent a 51% attack where a mining point takes control of the Hash rate. You can read more about it below, this is directly from the CEO on Sia's reddit:
Congratulations @investoranalysis! You have completed some achievement on Steemit and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :
Click on any badge to view your own Board of Honor on SteemitBoard.
For more information about SteemitBoard, click here
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word
STOPSiacoin is rallying today, anyone know what is going on?
I saw that, from what I've read, SIA went from 27 TB storage to over 50 TB of storage now in a month. There's also I good chance this is a pump and dump. A lot of people scooped up alt coins that were real cheap in the recent bear market. So now they are trying to flip them and make a quick profit.
Why price siacoin is down?
I've read news on them lately, and their hasn't been anything that would necessarily effect it's price. It's price has been going down for a while. If you are a value investor, this presents great oppourtunity to buy Sia. Too many people buy high in crypto and sell low. Don't chase coins that run up quickly, as they will come back down fairly quickly too.
In my opinion this presents a great buying opportunity for Sia, if you believe in their project and team.
Look @haejin to learn more about the behavior off the market.
Good analysis. Been mining SiaCoin with the Claymore Dual miner for quite some time now. Was wondering what their future might be, then come across this post. Hopefully decentralized storage will soon take off and take over cloud business from centralized storage. Thanks for the great info.
I consider SC to be and underestimated asset, and I think the price will grow along with the increase of files storing number at the SIA network