But what kind of timeframe do you think this could be accomplished in, potentially?
This would be possible if Sia becomes the standard for decentralized crypto storage. It will take years.
We have a lot of ambition and believe that Sia has the potential to be the standard for all cloud-based storage. It's very competitive, reliable, cheap, fast, and it's decentralized. Various estimates place the total cloud storage market around $20 billion annually by 2018, and I think that Sia can be a huge chunk of that. 2018 I think is the earliest that we'd start to see mass-adoption, and then by 2020 we could probably be the biggest player on the field.
It's a long timeline.
even if sia coin just managed to become a 30m $ USD market cap coin .... it is still going to be 30x from ipo price.
That's true, but I would be very disappointed if Sia only managed a $30m valuation at peak. That would mean that the storage never really took off. If people actually started using Sia for their high-priority files, $250 million is the lowest value that I could imagine. We're here to play the long game, and we want to become a vital component of everyday internet infrastructure. If we could pull that off, there would be a lot of money involved.
When you are ready to raise money for the real ipo which you have mentioned should be at least 10x more expensive are you going to continue
using the NXT asset exchange under the same asset? If you do so only now asking for a much higher price than the pre ipo you will have pre ipo asset
holders undercutting your price to make their profit and you will not raise as much. Can you explain what your plan for this is?
I would assume that they will not use Nxt AE as Siastock will be ready to be issued directly to investors at that point.
I don't think undercutting is going to be an issue, but the Siastock that's already been sold will be available to anyone who's willing to pay whatever the sellers are selling at. We'll have Sia up and running before we raise our next round, which means we'll be converting Sianotes into Siastock and then selling Siastock directly. We'll have a better grasp of the mechanics of that though when we're closer to that point.
I think using the Nxt AE for Siastock even after the IPO would increase exposure for both Nxt and Sia .. Sia isn't going to be used as a currency, It's going to be a much needed storage service for people who care about encryption and privacy. There's already a big community for Nxt, might as well take advantage of that.
Sia isn't meant to be used directly as your primary tool for transferring money. But you'll still need Siacoin (a currency) to access storage, and the Sia network will need a simple and trust-free way to distribute fees among the holders of Siastock. I don't think at that point the Nxt AE makes sense anymore. We'll know a lot better when we're further along.