[Opinion] Altcoin Critique 15/09/17 - Siacoin, and Why Decentralized Storage Is Doomed
Been seeing a lot of pundits on Steemit the past few days hyping up Siacoin (SC) and thought I'd throw my hat into the ring with my thoughts and theories on Siacoin. Please not that this is an opinion piece - I'm not out to hurt anyone's feelings here, but if you do find yourself disagreeing with me on some things then by all means leave a comment and get a discussion going; I'm more than open to being proven wrong on this. That said, please remember to be respectful.
Deep breath inward
Siacoin is a great idea, a brilliant one even, but the fact is that decentralized cloud storage technology is beyond premature. In all likelihood it would be easier to put humans on Mars right now than it would be to get the slow, unstable Sia network up to scratch to the point where it could compete against the likes of Amazon Web Services. Aside from the aforementioned , there is simply nowhere near enough demand for their hosting services at the moment or in the foreseeable future, and there probably won't be for at least another 5 years even if they did manage to fix the numerous issues with the network.
The fact is that the average consumer simply does not need to store that much data, and they certainly don't want to pay for it, because for the most part they're already getting all they need for free from competitors like Dropbox. Besides, even if the consumer was willing to overlook the poor speeds and the fact that they've got to pay for the service, the user interface looks like this:
It's cheap looking, generally poorly designed and extremely hard to actually get anything done - this is not a $100,000,000 product. Sia is over-engineered and under-designed; there's no user experience to be had, no consumer-ready product for customers to rally behind, no reason for anyone other than crypto enthusiasts and cyber criminals to actually engage with the platform.
Then there's the business customers who are willing to pay big bucks for cloud hosting, who are 100% guaranteed to go for managed hosting - many of whom don't give a shit when it comes to paying out the ass for cloud storage; it's a drop in the bucket to them, and they're going to do it the easiest way possible
All in all, Sia is a classic case of a tech project biting off more than they could chew, and compared to competitors like Amazon Web Services, Google Drive and Dropbox, Sia is doomed to be the HD-DVD to their Blu-Ray. I might be wrong, and Sia might pump 500% over the next week, but certainly in the long-run I think Sia will prove to be a very poor investment.