SiaCoin (SC)

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Revision as of 10:36, 24 August 2019 by w:c:dyor-crypto>Zeb.dyor

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Basics

"Sia is a platform for decentralized cloud data storage, getting built by a team at Boston-based Nebulous Inc., founded in 2014. The aim is to provide a platform that allows for peer-hosted storage of files, without the need for a single centralized entity. Sia itself would store only the storage contracts formed between the parties."

  • Is focused on bringing full decentralized disaster recovery to market. Knowing nothing more than a wallet seed, a user should be able to recover their most precious data.

Token

  • Each Siacoin is composed of 10^24 indivisible units (hastings).
  • Utility token: “The most important features of Sia can only be accessed by using Siacoins. All storage contracts and all Sia payment channels require owning Siacoins. This requirement means that as Sia grows in usage, so too will demand for Siacoins. As demand grows, the price will increase. If Sia is being used for billions of dollars of storage, billions of dollars of Siacoins will be required. The value of the Siacoin is inextricably tied to the amount of storage in use on the Sia network.”
  • From Messari:

"In the platform, files of individual users will be broken up and spread across a number of storage providers, known as hosts. These hosts will need to provide proof of file storage on a regular basis in order to receive payment and not be penalized. Payment is in the form of Siacoin and penalties involve the host losing Siacoin collateral that was put up. The proofs provided by hosts are available on the Sia blockchain for verification by miners, who also receive payment in the form of Siacoin for their verification work."

SiaFund

  • Sia has a second cryptocurrency called the Siafund (SF). 3.9% of all successful storage contract payouts go to the holders of the Siafunds.
  • From Messari:

"Instead of pre-mining a certain amount of Siacoin, Nebulous intends to generate revenue from a fees on all contracts. This is done through the existence of so-called siafunds. When a contract is created, 3.9% of the contract fund is removed and distributed to the holders of siafunds. Nebulous Inc started off holding 88%, with the remainder held by early crowd-fund backers of Sia.. Siafunds can be transferred to other addresses but not used as payments on the platform."

Technology

  • The developers mined the first 100 blocks or so before releasing the code and miner to the public. Other than these first blocks, there was no premine for Siacoins.
  • The initial block reward was 300,000 siacoins. Each block reward after that is one siacoin smaller than the previous block reward (299,999, then 299,998, and so on). When the block reward reaches 30,000, all remaining blocks will give a 30,000 siacoin reward. The block time is 10 minutes.
  • From Messari:

"Sia is being built as a derivative of Bitcoin, with the additional required support for the creation and enforcement of contracts. These contracts contain a number of items of information including a hash, duration of the contract, frequency of challenges and payment parameters including the reward for a valid proof and for an invalid or missing proof. If a valid proof is provided during the required window an automatic payment goes to the host. If the proof is missing or invalid the coins are sent to a “missed proof” address, likely an unspendable address.

Hosts will be able to advertise themselves in different ways, e.g. as highly reliable, requiring a higher price and with higher penalties for losing files, or as less reliable, with lower prices but with lower penalties for losing files. The intention is for this to result in an optimized, efficient market place."

Mining

"David Vorick, founder and CEO of Nebulous told CoinDesk that Sia will soon move to enact a software change meant to block certain types of specialized mining hardware from the platform, allowing hardware manufactured by Nebulous subsidiary Obelisk to remain one of the only ways to collect the blockchain’s lucrative cryptocurrency rewards.

“Sia’s decided to fork to obsolete or brick the Innosilicon and Bitmain hardware,” Vorick said, referring to Obelisk’s rival manufacturers of application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) mining equipment for Siacoin.

Still, Vorick portrayed the code change as a near-unanimous decision taken by the community, and this Reddit thread – the closest thing to an official vote that was held in the community – appears to show broad support for the decision. The sentiments expressed represent a change from January, when another proposal to similarly fork Siacoin failed.

During those months of back-and-forth, some community members appeared just as concerned about Nebulous’ consolidation of power as they were about Bitmain or Innosilicon (the latter, Vorick made clear, is the “monopoly” he has in mind).

Meanwhile, some in the community saw a fork as amounting to a bailout of Obelisk by Nebulous – a way to turn back the clock on production delays, political rifts and threats of legal action. Obelisk missed its June 30 target for shipping the first batch of ASICs by weeks, leading to threats of legal action from at least two parties, as CoinDesk reported in August. The Reddit post containing the proposal argues, however, that it “seeks to protect the community members who invested in Obelisk ASIC units,” not the company itself.

Vorick said that Innosilicon controls 37.5 percent of the network’s total mining power through its own mining operation. The company also sells ASICs to other miners. Since they “have the only rig capable of competing,” Vorick wrote, Innosilicon is able to charge an estimated 100 percent markup on this hardware.

Speaking to CoinDesk, he described the method behind the so-called Sia kill switch, or the software change to disable hardware which the fork will activate: “Basically blake2b [Sia’s hash algorithm] is a circuit, and we added just a tiny extension in a clever place that you wouldn’t just naively think to add that extension. So basically we made our circuit just very slightly more complex in a very sort of random way, and this is something that we do not expect anyone else to have anticipated.”

As a result, as soon as the network’s nodes adopt the upgrade, chips designed to run the unaltered blake2b algorithm will be useless for mining Siacoin."

Team, partnerships, investors, etc.

Team

  • David Vorick; founder & CEO of Nebulous, lead dev
  • Luke Champine; co-founder, core dev
  • Chris Schinnerl; core dev
  • Zach Herbert; COO (also works for Obelisk)

Partnerships

Investors