Sia has been under development for longer than Storj. Conceptually I've been working on it since about July 2013. Coding started in December 2013, but we had to throw the whole project away about 3 times before we understood what we were doing. We did a crowd fund in May 2014, which also predates Storj's crowd fund. Then we went under the radar for 12 months while we worked away at the codebase. Had to throw everything away again in October, but we've finally got something that's going to work up to something between 50k and 1m users. That's good enough for us to keep the current project, but we'll have to keep improving on it as we approach that 1m mark. I'm not really sure where the next optimizations are going to be, but as super3 keeps saying you basically have to move as much as possible off-chain. Blockchains simply don't scale. Even Bitcoin is going to give up past ~50 million users.

We'll figure something out when the time comes. We've got a lot of ambition and 1 million users is a good starting place. That would fund a lot of R&D at the very least.