SiaCoin - Renting Out Your Free Hard Drive Space

Investing in cryptocurrencies reflects investors’ opinion that in the future, cryptocurrency will be a functional means of payment. It's that simple. How can the future of cryptocurrencies be predicted? Let's have a look at it.

Which one would you choose? Credit for the picture belongs to my cousin Monika, thank you!

Today I have the honor of introducing the cryptocurrency with a market cap of around 600 million (18/04/18), making it #32 in the crypto world according to market cap.

According to whitepaper: "Sia is a variant on the Bitcoin protocol that enables decentralized file storage via cryptographic contracts. These contracts can be used to enforce storage agreements between clients and hosts. After agreeing to store a file, a host must regularly submit storage proofs to the network. The host will automatically be compensated for storing the file regardless of the behavior of the client." This is the core of the project SiaCoin.

How does Sia work? Credit for the picture belongs to my cousin Monika, thank you very much!

This is a quite similar project to another cryptocurrency project called Golem which is "Airbnb for computers". You can rent your unused CPU/GPU cycles and get paid in cryptocurrency. A decentralized network powering true cloud computing. For more read my previous article: http://promisingcoins.com/airbnb-for-computers-golem/ SiaCoin (ticker is SC) could be called "Airbnb for computers"as well. You rent your unused space on your hard drive instead of renting unused CPU/GPU cycles. Actually, you can do both of them.

Anybody who has a spare place on HDD can rent it via SC – the only cost is electricity cost. The most recent rate for renting HDD space is around 40-50SC/TB/month (around 0.9USD). You can check a recent rate: https://siahub.info

All right there are more similar, but centralized projects, like a Google Drive, One Drive, Dropbox, and Amazon Cloud. I will compare this services with SC from client's perspective next time. Using this services is possible only as a client, not as a host so you can't make any money.

Source: https://www.nichemarket.co.za/blog/sia-coin-sc/

Nebulous Inc., the company behind SC, has the perfect way how to monetize the whole project so they don’t need to rely on selling pre-mined SiaCoins. Nebulous Inc. has the second cryptocurrency called SiaFund (SF). There are 10 000 coins in total (all of them premined) and 3.9% of all successful storage contract payouts go to the holders of the Siafunds. According to https://siawiki.tech/wallet/siafund, "Nebulous Inc., holds 8835 of these Siafunds. The remaining Siafunds were sold in a crowdfund which helped finance Sia's early development. More people using Sia means more funding available to hire more developers.“

Very good idea how to monetize crypto project, isn’t it? I understand that these developers are not volunteers like early Bitcoin developers (they followed great visions and ideas rather than trying to make a fast buck).

Revenues from sharing your HDD space :-) Source: Pixabay.com

On the other side, it would make a sense to buy SF rather than SC as SF grants you access to a portion of the hosts' income - you can consider SF being dividend stock. As SF is not listed on any exchange you must buy it over the counter, you can ask directly somebody who owns SF. The risk is that this market is illiquid so nobody knows the real price of SF. If you buy SF you bet that people will use SC as clients much more than these days and you will earn in interests (3.9% of all successful storage contract payouts distributed to owners of 10 000 SF) more than you pay for SF.

All right, now you know what SC is (and SF). Next time I will focus on the objective criticism of this project, something like SWOT analysis.

To be continued…

Best platform for trading cryptocurrencies is Binance: https://www.binance.com/?ref=25352291

Disclaimer:

Never invest more than what you can afford to lose. This post is my personal opinion, do your own research before making any investment decisions. If you make any trades after reading this post, it is completely in your responsibility. I am not responsible for any of your losses. By reading this post you acknowledge and accept that.