Sia is a cryptocurrency set to dramatically change the way we look at enterprise cloud storage, and the technology is no doubt set to transform data storage in the future. It has its eyes set firmly on a market currently dominated by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Dropbox.
Traditional cloud storage services such as DropBox upload customer’s data to a central ecosystem. The data is controlled here and thus exposed to all sorts of shady shenanigans such as personal data misuse, accidental loss, and database breaches.
With Sia your uploaded files are encrypted, broken up into tiny pieces and then spread across multiple hosts. This means superior redundancy (multiple copies of your data are securely stored across multiple hosts) ensuring data loss and snooping is no longer a problem.
What makes Sia so great is that anyone can participate and get paid for leasing their spare storage space. This is something many of us have with the price of hard drives being so low. When a host and an uploader connect a contract is formed. This contract is called a ‘smart contract’. It allows the renter to receive payments in exchange for their storage space being used.