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0 3 0 0 5 0 What is Sia (Siacoin) and why do we think it could change the way we look at data storage? Sia is a decentralized cloud storage platform that uses a blockchain to facilitate payments. Is Siacoin a good investment and how to buy Siacoin? Read on and find out more. Disclaimer: The content below should not be taken and viewed as investment advice, but only information and opinions. This article is for information and illustrative purposes only. What Is Siacoin? Is a cryptocurrency and technology (Sia) that was innovated at MIT at a hackathon in 2013 by and of Nebulous Inc, a VC-funded startup in Boston.

Its name is Sia, and it is fueled by its cryptocurrency called Siacoin (SC). Sia is a cloud storage platform. Sia didn’t start with an ICO or pre-mining. Feel free to skip to the. SIACOIN is a decentralized cloud storage platform that is built. The mining is veered towards SIACOIN though the use of. Sia is a decentralized cloud storage platform similar in concept to Dropbox and other. Siacoin (SC) $ - USD. N/A Try Cloud Mining. SiaCoin (Sc)!! Bitcoin Forum. Its basically just online cloud storage? Oh wait doesn't dropbox do that for free?

You might have heard about Amazon and Dropbox. They are both centralize cloud storage platform and the data is stored on a third party server. Conversely, Sia is a decentralized remote cloud storage that put control of personal data back into the hands of its users.

It removes the centralized server, which reduces the storage costs and at the same time protects the user’s data privacy. A group of data is contained by keys that only the uploader holds. Sia put the users in the control, rather than the server itself. The distributed nature of the Sia network enables many optimizations in latency, throughput, reliability, and security. Data files on the Sia network are securely and automatically encrypted with industrial-grade algorithms, using blockchain technology to track and ensure full integrity of the network. The encrypted files are spread across multiple nodes. Nodes are simply referred to data communication equipment.

The decentralized nature of the Sia network enables anyone with storage to get paid, lowering the barrier to entry and reducing the overall price of cloud storage. Their technology could be backing the next Dropbox or Amazon AWS.

Siacoin’s blockchain technology could be the solution to the high hosting and storage costs of Amazon and Dropbox. Breaking into this market is a multi-billion dollar endeavor. The long-term goal of Sia is to be the backbone storage layer of the Internet.

Sia uses a cryptocurrency, Siacoin (SC). Siacoin is the designated cryptocurrency used on the Sia decentralized data storage platform which is essentially a peer-to-peer network of hard disk drives individually connected to the network allowing the disk space on those hard drives to be used or recovered for data storage by people all over the world. All payments on the network happen in Siacoin, which is a critical component of the cryptographic Service Level Agreement (SLA). Siacoin allows them to do things that would not be possible with Bitcoin or traditional online payments. Should I Buy Siacoin (SC)? Is It a Good Investment? The Siacoin (SC) is the token used in the smart contracts to pay the hosts.

When a smart contract is created, the renter and the host both put Ssiacoins into the contract. The host gets the Siacoins only if they still have the data when the contract expires. Siacoin is subject to speculation and there have historically been large price movements. Because the host adds collateral to file contracts, the host assumes most of the risk of a volatile price. Price increases can only benefit the network, but price drops can impact the host’s revenue.

Severe price drops, where the price cuts in half or worse, can put files at risk of being dropped by hosts, but even large price drops such as 25% do not put data at risk. If you take account all the hard drive waste we have that lies useless all over the world, the price of Sia cloud memory being fraction of the today’s standard and income that can be easy enough to be generated by anyone just by connecting computers to the network. The developers of Sia have a clear vision of next few coming years of the technology. Taking into consideration that world’s 90% of the data is produced in last 2 years, we can imagine the amount of data to be produced in next few coming years.

Buying Siacoin means that you buy a future on a peer-to-peer storage network called Sia. If Bitcoin replaces gold bars, Siacoin replaces hard-drives. Siacoin is a storage currency that can be considered as crypto-commodity with strong fundamentals and P-o-W mineable. I personally believe that the Sia project has a bright future.

Therefore, I acquired Siacoins and added them to my long-term cryptocurrency investment portfolio. Where to Buy Siacoin? There are several major exchanges you can buy Siacoin.

#1 Bittrex Based and fully regulated in the USA, Bittrex is the go-to spot for traders who demand lightning fast trade execution, stable wallets, and industry-best security practices. #2 Poloniex Poloniex is a US-based cryptocurrency exchange offering maximum security and advanced trading features. Start trading in minutes. All it takes is a few simple steps. #3 Yunbi YUNBI is a future-oriented exchange for blockchain assets. Founded in Beijing, 2013, and built with the code released by Peatio Open Source Project, YUNBI adheres to the principles of integrity, transparency and being open-sourced, offering customers a safe and easy trading platform.

Note: It is fairly easy to buy Siacoin on Bittrex, Poloniex, and Yunbi. Simply follow their instructions for setting up an account and depositing funds. As these cryptocurrency exchanges offer a different environment for acquiring Siacoin in that you must buy it by fulfilling other traders’ sell orders. This means that prices may vary, sometimes widely. How to Buy Siacoin? There are very few direct fiat gateways into Siacoin, for those who reside in countries that don’t have direct access to Siacoin.

That means the vast majority of people who buy Siacoin did it with Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the first coin that most people buy so it’s hard for a different crypto to overtake the value. STEP 1: BUY BITCOIN There are many ways to buy Bitcoin. Perhaps the easiest way is through.

Once you have purchased some bitcoin, you are ready to buy some Siacoin! Buying Bitcoin is straightforward. Registration is pretty straightforward, requiring things like your name, email, and a verification of your identity (eg: pictures of your driver’s license, etc). Once your account is created and verified, you’ll need to add a funding source like a bank account and/or a debit card. Once this is set up, you can buy some Bitcoin.

The reason I encourage my readers to buy BTC from Coinbase because you will get $10 free BTC once you trade your first $100 through Coinbase. You can read the full article on and. Those in Europe will use a euro exchange like, while those in Japan will use a yen exchange like, etc. STEP 2: Set Up the Trade on Shapeshift Exchanges of Bitcoin and Siacoin can be done through. Their service is super simple; you don’t even need to register on their website. You just send them some Bitcoin and they send you back some Siacoin. Unfortunately Shapeshift charges really high fees, which is fine for something like a $5 purchase, since losing 7% to fees isn’t a big deal when it means losing 40 cents.

To do this, you will first need an SC address, so that Shapeshift can send the Siacoin back to you. You can open an account on Poloniex. Then go to Poloniex “Balances, Deposits & Withdrawals” from the “Account” button on the top right menu.

Then click “Deposit” from SC. Then you will see a string of characters will pop up and that’s your Siacoin Deposit Address. It looks like this. That is the address you’ll need for Shapeshift.

In case your trade has a problem, they will send the Bitcoin back to that address. Next, you’ll go to and set it up for Bitcoin-to-Siacoin trades by clicking on the two big currency logos, and then click “Continue”.

Now Shapeshift will ask you for your Siacoin and Bitcoin addresses. Paste both of these into the boxes (ignore Payment Id) and click “I agree to the Terms”. When everything is ready, click “Start Transaction”. STEP 3: Send Bitcoin to Shapeshift With Shapeshift awaiting a deposit, go back to Coinbase.

On the “Send Funds” page, paste the Shapeshift address into the “Recipient” box and type the amount of Bitcoin to send into the “Amount” box. Type the BTC amount into the box and click the blue “Send Funds” button. Click “Confirm” on the box that pops up, and your Bitcoin is officially sent to Shapeshift. Finally, go back to your Shapeshift trade.

Hopefully, everything went smoothly, and the white “Deposit Received” has turned green with a checkmark, meaning Shapeshift got your funds. Eventually both “Exchange Complete” and “All Done!” should receive checkmarks too, which means Shapeshift has exchanged your Bitcoin and sent Siacoin to your wallet. STEP 3 (Alternative): Send Bitcoin from Coinbase to Poloniex Exchange There are some weaknesses with the Shapeshift process outlined above, specifically that their exchange rate is pretty bad. Therefore, you can choose to send Bitcoin from Coinbase to Poloniex (one of the biggest exchange for Siacoin) directly. Go to Poloniex “Balances, Deposits & Withdrawals” from the “Account” button on the top right menu.

Then click “Deposit” from BTC to get your BTC address. Now paste the Bitcoin deposit address you got from Poloniex into the “Destination” box and type in the amount of Bitcoin you want to send. Just one click and your funds should be on their way to Poloniex. It will take a bit of time, perhaps 15 minutes or more, for your Bitcoin transfer to complete. Step 4: Trade Bitcoin for Siacoin on Poloniex Now that your Poloniex account is set up and you’ve transferred some Bitcoin over, it’s time to actually get some Siacoin! To do this, go to Poloniex’s SC/BTC exchange. Here you’ll be greeted with a historical graph of Siacoin’s changing price.

To trade your Bitcoin (BTC) for Siacoin (SC): • Click the underlined number next to “You have”. This will set your trade to include your entire Bitcoin balance. • Click the underlined number next to “Lowest ask”. This will set your trade price to the lowest current seller. • Click “Buy”. You just exchanged Bitcoin for Siacoin. Be aware that there often isn’t much Siacoin for sale at the very lowest price, so you may need to repeat steps 1-3 a few times until all your Bitcoin is exchanged.

Happy earning! Additional Reading/Sources.

Siacoin has been in the news recently with their announcement of Obelisk ASIC and what better time is there for a review?! So, I did some digging and some research and let it brew for a few days, and then did some more research. So let's dive in and explore what if found out. What is Siacoin? Siacoin is a cloud storage company.

Siacoin is a blockchain based, decentralized storage platform. The platform offers users to rent cloud storage space or rent out their unused hard drive storage space to earn money (Siacoin). In theory it’s an attractive idea and their marketing is very strategic down to name associations (like and the musician), colors, fonts, and images. Well planned. The media attention around this coin is really quite impressive!

Siacoin (SC) Basics. • 27,170,726,970 Siacoin in circulation • 27% Annual inflation • Mineable currency • $524,886,821 Total market capitalization • August 28, 2015 Official Market launch date Sia hit the market at the end of August, 2015. They currently are in beta testing and their road map is well documented.

At this time they have a working product (more or less) and there are around 500 hosts offering services at this time. However, of the 1. Arduino Monero XMR Miner. 9 petabytes (1945.6 terabytes, or 1.9 million gigabytes) of storage available, only (27.5 terabytes, or 28,160 gigabytes) of it is actually being used! Check it out for yourself. How much can I earn renting out my spare hard drive space? To make sure I had a full picture of what is going on with Siacoin, I downloaded their wallet and purchased a few thousand coins to test out the system.

Unfortunately, once I installed the wallet it had to update, which took several days running almost nonstop! The wallet does crash on occasion and if you make the mistake I did when I tried to close it and it was still updating, it may freeze up your computer for a few minutes and still refuse to close until you manually shut it down through the task manager.

Very frustrating! Once I finally got the damn thing updated (still don't understand why this took so long) I found what I was looking for. The current average rate to rent 1 terabyte of space is around 50 Siacoin per month.

Sounds great if you ask me because that only comes out to about $0.96 per month. So, that got me thinking of what the people renting space are earning. No surprise the average rate is identical at 50 Siacoin per month for renting out 1 TB of space according to the smart contracts currently listed. However, to rent out your hard drive space efficiently your computer must be on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week! Also, you must keep the wallet open and running the entire time. And on top of all that for you to make money, it all depends on a bidding system for the smart contracts.

So you may not get a contract for a while and it may not even provide the average rate. I took my research a little further and discovered and used their tools and calculators to estimate what I would earn if I was going to rent out one of my spare 1 terabyte hard drive. Sadly the current estimate (based on 100% uptime) is 16.20 Siacoin per month. That’s $0.30! Unless you have free electricity from solar panels or something, you will have a solid electricity bill at the end of the month trying to do this.

And there are likely many hosts running at a loss at this time. Sia Security On February 7th, Siacoin released a blog entry talking about security concerns with their platform. Their global redundancy strategy is actually a pretty decent idea because they break up your files between 30 different hosts and the file is recoverable as long as at least 10 of them survive. And as long as the attack doesn’t happen on the whole network entirely that redundancy can be built back up after some hosts go down almost instantly. That does make the files seem secure, but then I read their official statement on user SecOps (Security Operations). Sia expects hosts to be performing their own SecOps in the standard case.

Certainly today we don’t have any certifications or checks that we put hosts through to make sure they are protecting themselves from attack. It’s something we’re looking into but would like to avoid, as it clearly hurts decentralization (getting a certification requires having a central entity that can choose to not certify you). So they expect their users to do a good job protecting themselves, but they are not actually going to bother to check if they even have an antivirus because they don't want there to be any central regulation unit to certify security levels (why can’t this be decentralized too?).

It's kind of ironic that they share an acronym with the Security Industry Association because no such association would endorse their policies and views on security operations. In my opinion, this approach will end up biting them in the ass if they don't do something about it.

You can’t just blindly trust the average user to know what the right amount of security is, let alone the industry standards. Did we all forget that the most common password in the world is still “123456”? Obelisk ASIC As many of you already know, Siacoin has recently announced that they will be releasing the Obelisk ASIC Siacoin miner.

According to the details released on the miner will cost $2499 and their target hash rate is 100 Gigahertz a second. If you want to know how some of the best ASIC's compare to the Obelisk, check out a recent article on. To put it in perspective, the slowest miner advertised on is the Antminer S5 with a hash rate of 1.16 Terahertz per second and it only costs $139.99. What is more interesting to me is that Siacoin is more focused on improving their coin mining operations instead of trying to build some sort of client base and improve their platform.

I mean 1% actual usage after two years? That's a joke! Their wallet is clunky and kind of primitive compared to modern wallets coming out these days. And yet they are developing overpriced mining equipment instead of advertisement or some sort of marketing campaign to bring in users. Final Verdict As a computer developer I have some insights into web development, database management, and network administration.

The reason so many corporations, small businesses, and even individuals are attracted to cloud services is because of the overall savings, simplicity, and security. Many companies used to maintain their own servers before they migrated, but those servers needed constant attention, periodic and extremely expensive hardware and software upgrades, and qualified personnel to maintain it all. Now, the cloud services like Microsoft Azure and Amazon S3 do it all for you and do it better than you ever could. Say what you will about 10-30 redundancy and decentralization, but you still can't beat an army of security experts at Microsoft, Amazon, and Google and they actually guarantee their services. My final verdict is that this is a mining coin with little future. Their product is built on hype with no customers despite generous media coverage and attention over the last couple of years.

What do they have to show for such a long development period (by cryptocurrency standards)? Their wallet product is difficult to use and set up and isn’t really like a cloud service at all because there is not quick access to your files (like Dropbox). There is no customer base at all and yet they have a $524 million market capitalization?! No self-respecting business would ever leave Amazon S3, Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure just so they can decentralize their data and maybe save a few bucks. And services like Azure are already starting to offer block chain services. I am sure Siacoin will gain more popularity and will be continually hyped for years as it has already enjoyed a lot of great media attention.

However, I will not be investing a dollar into Siacoin. If you like this article, please upvote and resteem.

I would love to hear what you guys have to say in the comments. This blog is written for informational and entertainment purposes only. As the author, I can honestly say that I am in no way associated with Siacoin or any other blockchain based company. I do not own any Siacoin at all (the few I purchased for this review I have sold the same day I was testing them). My opinions are my own and are offered freely.

My opinions and suggestions and are NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE! Please do your own research before considering any high risk investments. Image credits: Sia Logo: Sia promotional images 1-3: Sia Obelisk image: Crypt0.Critic Images. Brother, i´m an investor in Siacoin, and i must say that you did me a great service by exposing some of it´s flaws, limits and weaknesses. I wasn´t aware of such critical weak points, like the days needed to upload the wallet, and the security question, where each node is left alone to check by itself the security measures. What is most critical though, is that there´s people losing money with it right now, because of the low value, it´s a cash burner. Your views in this regard are shocking to me, to say the last, but they are very useful to make a good, mature analysis of what is this that i´m investing my money in.

Thank you so much for your great service. Rex Georges Segundo. Great article!

As a miner, I was excited with the ease of mining Sia coins. I was looking forward to the coin to get a better valuation but now I realise I won't ger rich overnight. You are painting a grim picture of the future but you are doing so using facts instead of speculation and I do appreciate that. What caught my attention the most is the 27% annual inflation.

It really makes you realise how much investment is needed just to keep moving forward(I'm talking about the coin, not the actual company). I hope the company proves us wrong but all of the sudden their ASIC miner pre-pay venture started making a lot of sense.