Hello World: Here comes my knowledge of the SiaCoin

I will start my very first post on steemit with my newly obtained empirical knowledge of the SiaCoin. 

Brief Introduction about myself

Before I start talking about SiaCoin I give a quick introduction to my "Blockchain" history: My interest for Blockchain technologies started in December 2015. There was no particular reason why I got interested. Probably it was due to the fact, that I worked with a computer science/ mathematics background as a consultant in the finance industry and needed a intellectual/ scientific challenge.  I started reading white papers and became an active observer of blockchain developments. In the beginning my interest was based purely on scientific motiviations. All the different blockchains and their specific application domains fascinated me. It reminded me of the concept of qualified money (an introduction can be found here), which I find highly interesting and about which I will (maybe) write in a later post.

But it took me up to September 2016, before I also saw the opportunity to trade the different "currencies". I started with ether at a price per unit of 10$ (so cheap when viewed in retrospect). Since then the value of many coins exploded and more and more people joined the blockchain market. There is such a rich ecosystem of different blockchains, that one quickly can get lost in it.
I hope to lift some confusion/ fear regarding this technology with my posts. 

But I plan not to restrict myself to blockchain technologies as I am rather interested in broader topics like decentralized systems, politics, history and philosophy.

Buying SiaCoin

My aim with this post is to share my empirical knowledge of the SiaCoin, which I obtained during the last week.
The first time I heard about SiaCoin was when a friend mentioned it to me in our discussion-wire group. I checked it out and was fascinated from the beginning: A decentralized, encrypted and blockchain based storage system sounds like everything I dreamt of. Moreover the value of SiaCoin (like most others coins) started to increase again, so without thinking much I wanted to join the sia-train.

But here I encountered my first problem: Where to buy it? The website sates:

• shapeshift.io - nice concept/ intuitive - no SiaCoin trading 
• poloniex.com - biggest trading platform/ shady (in my opinion) - temporarily disabled!
• yunbi.com - chinese platform/ never heard of it before - no experience

Shapeshift is as of now not trading any SiaCoin. I read somewhere that they are using Poloniex to trade SiaCoins, which is mentioned second on the sia website. But as of now it is only possible to buy/ sell SiaCoin on Poloniex, but not to withdrawal them! I noticed, that two days ago it was temporarily disabled, then yesterday enabled only to be disabled today again. It seems that Poloniex is facing a (serious?) problem. But there is hope, as Poloniex is working together with sia developers to solve the issue. 

I used Poloniex to buy SiaCoin, which are currently "taken hostage" by the site. In general I advise people not to use Poloniex (this could be a own post). 

I did not test yunbi, so I cannot say much about it, but currently I would advise everyone to use Bittrex (they recently started trading with it).

Storing SiaCoin offline

Simultanously to joining the sia-train I downloaded the Sia-Ui (version 1.2.1) for linux and transfered a test send from Poloniex (when it was still working) to my offline wallet. It took me almost 5 days to synchronize my wallet with the blockchain (hence no proof that the transfer worked), only to find out that my Sia-Ui version has a bug: The transaction is shown in my wallet under Recent transactions but the value is not displayed as "Confirmed Balance" nor "Unconfirmed Delta". I found out that through reinstalling the Sia-Ui one should be able to solve this issue. Moreover I found out, that there is an update to the UI, which probably solves the issue. I did not test the last two mentioned steps. I will post an update during the coming days.

SiaCoin as an investment - buy 

So what is my view on SiaCoin? 

I believe that save, decentralized storage systems are the future and that there is definitely a market for it, hence to this regard I think that the value of the SiaCoin will go up. Considering all the drawbacks (as described before) potential investors and user face:

• Investors: obtaining and trading SiaCoins
• Users of the storage system: High friction to use/ be part of the decentralized storage network (as one needs a working and synchronized wallet)

it is astonishing to see, that SiaCoin is still performing well. One could say that this is because of a bubble in the coin market/ resp. due to the fact that everyday new traders are joinging it. I think this is partly true and that it explains the general upward trend on the whole currency market.

But factoring in that SiaCoin could not be traded on 2/3 exchanges which are listened on the sia.tech website, one of them beeing the biggest cryptocurrency exchange (where it could have been sold, but not withdrawn), it is astonishing, that SiaCoin did not lose much more in value.

Hence there is a good possibility that as soon as the developers solve the mentioned issues (wallte synchronization & balance display - hence usage of the storage system!, + trading ) SiaCoin will follow the other high performing coins. 

Considering the small price for a coin I would not hesitate to buy some.

What do you think? 

Leave a comment :)