Hey Boxmining... I dig your vids and I like the mix of stuff you cover, and it's more informational that just rah, rah, buy, buy, you know?
I got interested in Sia a week or so ago and bought enough to give it a test run. I'm not a super techy guy, so I figured if I could get it to work, and if it is cheap to use, it could be a long term use-case, and therefore a longterm hodl.
For casual users who want a decentralized version of Dropbox (and to not use a company that has a war criminal on its board of directors), you'll have to do some hefty lifting...
Download the wallet and properly store its ~30 word seed phrase. You will later need to type it back in perfectly just to do stuff.
AFAICT, you have to download the wallet and the whole blockchain, and keep it up to date in order to upload files ( and probably retrieve them too). It took me about 2-3 days to sync the blockchain (maybe a bit less if the app didn't crash overnight once).
Buy SC coins on an exchange... which means you should already be schooled enough to have BTC and navigate exchanges. Then send them to your sync'd up Sia-UI wallet.
Buy a contract which will tie up some of your SC. The price for contract is given, but the actual amount you will be paying to store files isn't clear at this point. Maybe I'll figure it out later. I'm not sure how long it makes to confirm a contract... mine has been running for about 1/2 hour.
As an early adopter and a cheap dude looking for crypto storage, this stuff is cool, but NOT convenient.
I'll keep using it, and when and if I see some better user-experience versions, I'll consider hodling more SC.
It's definitely a prototype project and doesn't have the convenience of say dropbox. dropbox has multiple well working apps on multiple platforms, which makes it more convenient for the mass market.
I've seen Sia being used by small business owners and such due to cost savings if they have large amounts of data.
Are file transfers fast enough to be useful for a biz? Maybe a photographer or something like that?
I have it running and have some files uploaded. It is pretty cool and I love not relying on Google, Dropbox etc. The only way to get around these central points of failure to to *bypass them. That's the whole point of crypto, right?
ive just been testing transfer speeds using the 1.3 wallet and sadly it is very slow even using my 300meg connection, (i uploaded about 2 gig of lo res photos to test). I think this will get better as the wallet is developed and am currently a host myself making a menial amount of coins per week but im glad to be helping the network and look forward to the future! (my current Sia stash is 80,000SC - Hodl like crazy)
i've seen a few reddit posts where examples of usage. It depends on their purpose - achieving vs file transfer between clients.