Sia, the distributed cloud storage on blockchain

Cloud storage has long been an integral part of modern life, the technologies of blockchain become more and more popular and are used in different areas. Therefore, the emergence of a distributed cloud network...

Cloud storage has long been an integral part of modern life, the technologies of blockchain become more and more popular and are used in different areas. Therefore, the emergence of a distributed cloud network Sia for storage of data based on blockage is hardly a surprise, but the project has great potential.

Sia network is focused on security, privacy and data integration. Network users can store their data in the network, on disks of other users, as well as provide with their disk capacity for data hosting. A user can combine these both roles, a renter and a host as they are called in Sia.

Before sending to the network files are first encrypted and broken into fragments. In this form data is distributed between 40 different hosts. Moreover, copying of the same data in the system is carried out in order to minimize the probability of their loss. Data remains accessible  if at least 10 of these hosts are accessible. With subsequent network growth, redundancy will be reduced.

Data is encrypted and only the one who has a secret key, a long randomly generated phrase can gain an access to it.

Siacoin cryptocurrency is an internal unit of account of the network. The blockchain is similar to the one of Bitcoin. The provision of disk space for storing other people's data is rewarded in Siacoin. And the uploading your data into the network is chargeable on the contrary. Users providing their capacities for external data storage make a deposit in the equivalent of the cryptocurrency and so they are interested in keeping it safe. In case of the lost of a part of the data the host will lose an equivalent part of the deposit.

Sia has a global goal to create a common level of data storage for the decentralized internet providing confidentiality and safety with assistance of the decentralization. The project has also a very ambitious goal to fully whip out existing providers of cloud solutions.

There is a calculator on the website http://sia.tech where you can calculate costs of data storage in the system and compare it to the costs of such services provided by Amazon S3, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Sia is more profitable than all three services in about 10 times. Monthly storage of 1 TB will cost you 2 dollars. For providing a space for the storage of 1TB  user will be rewarded with 1 dollar per month.

There are several products created on the base of Sia, including Siacoin Obelisk, a special equipment for mining and Minebox, an intellectual network data storage optimized for Sia network. Sia has also announced its first in the world integration as an application in the store Nextcloud.

But Sia has already competitors: for instance, Filecoin with its ICO in August which attracted peak 252 million dollars (including re-sale).