What is Sia Coin? (SC)

One of the big pains of getting into cryptocurrency is finding a project you feel you can back. An altcoin project must have a viable concept, shot at disrupting a large market (typically a current monopoly or oligarchy) and a way to bring tangible value and generate revenue for the entire decentralised network to sustain itself.

Combing through coin roadmaps and white papers you will find a most of them say nothing special but every so often you'll find a coin that actually makes you stand up and think this is a bold idea. Sia is one of those for me. No this is not a gimmick coin for the Australian singer Sia it's actually a potential cloud storage competitor.

Please note: I've personally taken a large position in Sia coin and may sound like a shill at times so take this post with a grain of salt.

The cloud storage market is one of huge upside potential with the market at 74.94 Billion US dollars by 2021 but it is currently dominated by large players like Microsoft Azure, Amazon Webservices and Google Cloud. Having the big boys running away with the majority of the market share allows them to dictate pricing and while the cloud is cheaper and more convenient than running your own servers for many businesses, the margins these companies take are huge.

Sia coin aims to disrupt this current cloud gravy train by decentralising cloud storage and allowing everyone to use, supply and even earn on this network, similar to what Golem is doing with CPU and GPU power.

What is Sia Coin (SC)?

Sia began in September 2013 as a project by David Vorick and Luke Champine when they were both undergraduate computer science students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. The original Sia project was conceived at HackMIT 2013. Sia is a cooperative decentralised file storage network platform that uses the Siacoin token, smart contracts, and blockchain technology to safely store data on hosts distributed throughout the world. It is written in the language Go and actively developed by Nebulous Inc.

Sia leverages blockchain technology as a transaction layer for its network, allowing hosting to be purchased and sold in a secure and trustless way. Cryptographically secure smart contracts ensure the encryption and transfer of data, leaving no room for a third party to interfere in any way. For those of you who I have already lost think of tools, you may use every day to store your files, tools like Dropbox, Google drive, etc.

Sia will provide users with a similar offering but at a much cheaper rate as data is not centralised by one company. Essentially a user like yourself would store your data on the Sia network but instead of it sitting on a companies servers somewhere in the world it will then is encrypted, multiplied, chopped into little bits, and then all those little bits are sent around to a bunch of different hosts. When you want access to your file, the appropriate bits are recompiled and you get your file.

Why you should pay attention to Sia Coin?

Market disruption

Sia could be to cloud storage what uber was to transport, or AirBnB has been to accommodation. Harnessing the power of the collective and creating a marketplace for users to sell each other storage and only pay for it if and when they need it is a unique selling point these large cloud storage providers simply cannot compete with.

Affordable storage

Sia offers extremely affordable rates at the time of writing this article it would cost you around 1.20 dollars US for a TB of data compared to 10 dollars for Dropbox and Google Drive. If you would like to see what Sia storage could cost check out the calculator here

What is Sia Coin used for?

The Sia Network aims to create a decentralized storage network by using the idle storage space of people from around the world, uniting them into a worldwide market for data storage. By building the framework and outsourcing the storage to anyone with a hard drive and an internet connection Sia has reduced overhead dramatically and can charge a much lower fee. They multiply the bits in case a node holding a piece of your file happens to be offline (even though they are incentivized not to be

Can you mine Sia Coin?

To secure the entire network Siacoin uses a Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus protocol incorporating BLAKE2b as its hash function which means it can be mined. The cryptocurrency called the Siacoin (SC) is the currency that maintains the network. Mining the initial block you were rewarded with 300,000 Siacoins.

Each block reward after that is one Siacoin smaller than the previous block reward (299,999, then 299,998, and so on). When the block reward reaches 30,000 (at block 270,000), all following blocks will give a 30,000 Siacoin reward for eternity. The block time is 10 minutes.

Can you earn Sia Coin?

Network support

Signing up for the Sia network and renting out your computers internal or your external storage space to other users will earn you Sia coin in return.

Mining

Since Sia uses proof of work to secure its network, users can set up mining rigs or join mining pools to help secure the network and get rewarded in Siacoin.

Trading

Sia users can earn digital currency via exchanges. Users can earn tokens through trading on different fiat and cryptocurrencies and take advantage of market fluctuations.

Where can you buy Sia Coin?

Sia Coin is listed on a range of international cryptocurrency exchanges and is actively traded on websites like:

• Abucoins
• Bisq
• BITHOLIC
• Bittrex
• CoinDirect
• HitBTC
• Poloniex
• Upbit

Should you invest in Sia Coin?

Sia offers some truly exciting opportunities not only for investors but for the future of cloud storage but for all its promise we have to remain pragmatic and acknowledge there are hurdles they will need to overcome. First, there are the safety and legal implications around sharding data and storing it across multiple private nodes.

Questions like, How safe is the data I store on a decentralised network? What is my responsibility for holding sensitive data as a Sia storage provider? Will need to be answered and dealt with in order to create a trustworthy network.

The next step will be looking at becoming the outright leader among other decentralised storage competitors like STORJ and IPFS. Finally, Sia will need to flex their technology muscle and land the enterprise projects and partnerships to show the viability of the network, create an anchored revenue stream and attract individual users to support the network. For more on SIA check out their official website

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Disclaimer: This article should not be taken as, and is not intended to provide any investment advice and is for educational purposes only. As of the time posting the writers may or may not have holdings in some of the coins or tokens they cover. Please conduct your own thorough research before investing in any cryptocurrency as all investments contain risk.

Tags: Blog, Cryptocurrency