ok - im lost ... what did i miss? ...
claim? ...
#crysx
First to make it clear for others, David and Luke created Siacoin not to compete with Bitcoin or litecoin as a currency.
The sole purpose of Siacoin is to be an open source decentralized distributed cloud storage service to compete with
centralized cloud storage services. Siacoins should not have speculative value like all other coins. You mine for
consensus but the coins you get mining have value only because you sell them to people who want to store their files
on the Sia network and Siacoins are the only way to rent storage on Sia. Now anybody with storage can make money
as "mom and pop" datacenters.
The important thing to remember is the two devs created all this for profit just as Microsoft and Amazon provides cloud
storage for profit. The Siacoin project is a revenue stream for David and Luke's corporation they formed Nebulous inc.
How does Siacoin provide revenue for them? Through Siafunds. Siafunds are built into Sia and automatically receive
Siacoins as a 3.9% fee only and I mean only when a storage contract successfully completes. Siafunds do not get any
fees for regular transactions. Think of it this way. The Sia network allows anybody to buy some hard drives and provide
them as cloud storage without red tape or having to form a company. Whenever these hosts get paid for their
storage services, siafund takes 3.9% of it. Thats a damn good deal for everybody.
The devs turned down high paying jobs at Google to chase this. They were broke, so crowd funded on Nxt Asset Exchange
to get enough money to work on Sia for a year at least. It was successful and Nxt investors received 10% of Siafunds.
Nebulous owns the other 90%.
Its been almost a year since and a lot of ups and downs occurred including different iterations of Sia.
The fees Siafund collect are also not for buying yachts. Just like any corporation Nebulous needs the income to pump
back into Siacoin by hiring more people to make Sia as strong as needs to be to replace all centralized cloud services.
Ideally Nebulous will have hundreds or thousands of employees and Sia will be battle tested and trusted as the go
to storage service. If that happens then you can see how valuable Siafunds will be. And Nxt Siafund buyers would
deserve it with the risk they've been through. Buy some while you can on the Nxt AE if you want but now they are
pretty expensive. Siafunds will also be tradable within Sia according to the devs.
Read the whitepaper on
http://www.siacoin.com/sia.pdf.
Read the history of this project
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=591283.msg6486684#msg6486684I can confirm that the information here mostly correct. You can also learn more by visiting
siacoin.com/siafunds.html and
siacoin.com/sianotes.html.
What makes this coin supperior to storj ?
So, I recently talked to Shawn (the Storj founder) and from what I understand, we are a lot farther along in the development process than they are. We use a proof-of-work blockchain to enforce all of our contracts, they don't - they only use the blockchain when it is necessary. We have our completely separate blockchain, where they are using counterparty on Bitcoin. One of the biggest elements is scaling. The amount that we can scale is limited by the amount of data we can put on the blockchain. Using a lot of payment-channel style optimizations, we can get somewhere between 20k and 1 million users to fit on Sia given the current technology stack. Once we're over 1 million users, we'll have to find something else.
I'm not sure how well Storj will scale, but their test group A showed that they needed to improve a lot of things. They believe that test group B is still a few months away. We are launching on June 7th.
One of the biggest differences between Sia and Storj is that Sia intentionally stayed off the radar (we've actually been around longer than Storj - Sia was originally invented at Hack MIT in 2013) until we had something to show everybody. We surfaced briefly to do a crowd fund because we were broke. We're now ready to rock and roll, and we have a client that is functional. We also have a very clear roadmap for the next 3 months, and I believe we'll be a satisfactory replacement for Bittorrent by the end of the year. The current 500mb filesize limit should be raised to well over 1TB by August.
If you are curious, you should try out the beta and tell us what you think.
I'm not sure if Storj plans on having an API, but Sia has an API that other apps and decentralized apps can hook into for decentralized storage. Imagine if XBMC started streaming movies and music off of Sia. And imagine if Streamium used Sia to put streams in an archive. These are both things that are already possible using our API, so long as you keep files below 500mb. (and again, this limit is going to be lifted in the next few months).
I hope this helps. We think that there's a lot to love about Sia.
Is there a way I can mine Sia on a mac when it launches? Thanks
Everything that we release has been and will continue to be cross-platform. We support Windows, Linux, and Mac for all official releases.