You have been storing your files in the Dropbox cloud for years and you start to wonder more often if this is safe. After all, all your documents are at one server on the server. What if Dropbox is hacked or if you want to delete a file? Is this really removed from their database? All these concerns are removed when your files are stored in a decentralized manner. Siacoin brings the online storage of your files to the blockchain and in this article you will find a clear explanation of how they do this.

What is Siacoin?

Decentralized Data Storage

Sia is a decentralized platform on which you can store your documents, photos and videos. These files are then protected by the blockchain technology.

At the moment we store our files online in the cloud, such as on Dropbox or Google Drive. We trust that they handle our files carefully and that they protect our data against hackers. Sia wants us to no longer have to rely on large parties like these two and that we can take control of the management again.

To make this possible, Sia wants people (hosts) to join the Sia network and make their computer available for storing other people's data. Everyone has a part of his hard drive that remains unused and Sia sees the chance to use this part for his network. This gives you a network of computers throughout the world that all make part of their data capacity available.

If you want to save your Word document on the Sia network, each host will save a part of your file to his hard drive. None of these hosts can view the document themselves as they do not own the entire document. When you log in with your private key , you can regain access to your document. As long as nobody knows this private key, no one will be able to open the file.

Because a third party is no longer needed, the process is faster, cheaper and there is no room for censorship from the government.

Sia Is Cheaper

Amazon S3 is another example of a cloud for storing data that is widely used around the world. The costs are $ 23 per month with 1TB of data. Sia makes it possible to reduce this by 90%. This comes down to about $ 2 per month. These costs are paid with their own coin, the Siacoin. Cost reduction is very important in a world where Internet-of-Things and Big Data are becoming increasingly important. The increasing production of data has to be stored somewhere and as cheap as possible.

Sia Is Open Source

In addition to storing data, Sia wants to develop applications that will make the service extra valuable. Because Sia is open-source, every programmer in the world can contribute to this.
Sia's long-term goal is that all data that is produced is stored on Sia 's blockchain .

The following video explains Sia in 1 minute:

How do you get data on Sia?

Sia wants the platform to be so user-friendly that an explanation is unnecessary. Unfortunately, it is not yet so obvious at the moment and we explain how you can do this.

Step 1: Download and synchronize the Sia blockchain

The download of about 6GB takes a few hours with an SSD disk and can take a few days when your computer is equipped with a hard disk.

Step 2: Buy Siacoin

The network runs on Siacoins instead of dollars. When dollars are used it is necessary that every transaction is controlled by a person. This is a form of centralization and that is the opposite of what they are striving for.
By using the cryptocurrency Siacoin we can perform transactions decentralized. The smart contracts within the network ensure that the transactions are correctly executed.
Siacoin you buy on Bittrex and in case you do not have a crypto you can follow the purchase instructions at the bottom of this article.

Step 3: Create A Contract

This is a tricky part and Sia is working hard to simplify this.
Blockchains are not scalable. When the transaction resulting from the upload of documents is put on the blockchain, the upload would be slow and there will be long lines of transactions that still have to be processed. As a result, only a few thousand people could use Sia.

To prevent this, they use 'incremental contracts'. Normally you pay your host on the network for every action. Any change to the document and its upload would result in a new transaction and settlement with the host. With incremental contracts it is the case that a one-off transaction is made on the blockchain and that subsequent changes result in a new version of the document. This version only needs to be shown to the blockchain and is not processed as a separate transaction.

Compare it with a one-time check of your passport and then mentioning your name is sufficient.

You put some Siacoins in your contract so that you have a credit where you can pay the uploading and downloading of documents to your host. You pay in advance and all coins that you do not use will be refunded afterwards.
Creating a contract takes about one hour.

Step 4: Uploading files

You can upload both individual files and entire folders at once. The files will be distributed over 30 hosts from around the world. Ten of these are enough to request your file again.

Step 5: Maintaining your files

A contract is standard for three months. When these months are over, the host will delete the data as they will no longer be paid for it. Of course you do not want your files to be deleted and therefore a contract is automatically renewed. For this it is necessary that your Sia wallet is open so that this extension can be paid with Siacoins.

Sia mining

The first 100 blocks were mined by the Sia programmers before the mining code was made public. Furthermore, no pre-mining has been done.

At the first block, 300,000 Siacoins were released and for each subsequent block, one Siacoin will be spent less. At block 2 this was 299,999 and at block 3 it was 299,998 Siacoins. When only 30,000 Siacoins are released per mined block, this decrease will stop. At the end, each block will yield you 30,000 Siacoins.
On average, a block is mined every ten minutes.

Tokenized Securities Offerings (TSO)

Sia believes that token sale is the future of crowdfunding. However, they also see that the ICOs are having problems. Many projects spend their money on the marketing of their project instead of building a working product. Sia strongly believes in its opposite. But, how do you attract money for the development of your product and also for the long-term investors?
Sia did this herself by making two coins, Siacoin and Siafunds. Siacoin for the use of the working product and Siafund for the investors who share in the profits of the network. They would like to share this dichotomy with other crypto projects.
Such a token where investors share in the profits they call a Tokenized Security. This token can be sold to the public through a Tokenized Securities Offerings (TSO).

Competitors from Siacoin

Besides Sia, Storj , Internxt, MaidSafeCoin and Filecoin are also working on a possibility to store data in a decentralized manner. Siacoin is currently the only one with a working product that actually operates decentrally. The others have either no working product or the product is currently centrally controlled. That is why Siacoin does not have the biggest market capitalization at this moment for nothing.

I hope i covered almost everything about sia coin.

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