I recently discovered Sia, and am a big fan. Sia is a cryptocurrency based cloud storage protocol for distributed cloud storage. In short: you pay a fee, upload your content which is then distributed to N different nodes on the Sia network (basically, other users on the network). Content is saved redundantly and encrypted. The cool thing is, with a short share code *anyone* can download *your* content from the network. *Except* they don't download it from you. Rather, they download it from the hosts (aka: users) on whose servers the content is stored. I really find it brilliant. It just seems the perfect file sharing tool to me.
Problem is that Sia is still in its early days. There isn't a portal for distributing share codes and such. However, the protocol and software is entirely open source, and there is a robust API with which to build new applications.
I am a developer who is tinkering with the idea of building a portal for sharing content on the Sia network. I would not really have an economic incentive to do so. I think so because history has taught us that centralized repositories of torrents, say, don't live very long. So, the code would have to be open source to make it easy for *anyone* to create their own portal.
I don't expect many here to have even heard of Sia. Still, I would like to gather some feedback from the file sharing community before diving into coding things for Sia.
First, as a starter, in the likely chance that you're not familiar with Sia, here's the GitHub repository:
https://github.com/NebulousLabs/Sia
The README there covers the basics on Sia. The people using Sia are mostly chatting in their forum at http://forum.sia.tech and on Bitcoin Talk (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1060294).
My question to you folks are:
1) Does Sia complement existing file sharing protocols?
2) Does it have the potential to replace some of the existing protocols?
3) Uploading content to Sia requires payment with Siacoins (a cryptocurrency). The cost is generally well below other cloud storage providers, like Amazon and Dropbox. Still, given that you have to *pay to play* will this be a major obstacle for Sia to be adopted by the file sharing community?
I'd love to hear some thoughts on Sia in general on this forum. Feel free to ask, by PM or otherwise, if you have any questions.
Bookmarks