Blockchain cloud storage promises much cheaper service than conventional approaches, so it's bound to succeed in the marketplace. My question is, which network will dominate, Sia or Storj?
As always, my first step in answering the question is reading and comparing the whitepapers.
The Sia whitepaper is 7 pages long with no hard mathematics. The Storj whitepaper is 35 pages long with some hard mathematics.
One thing that immediately grabs my attention is that Sia plans to peg the value of its token to Bitcoin. While this is good for liquidity, it would limit the growth potential for the token to the growth potential for Bitcoin. Storj does not indicate any plans to peg the value of its token, which means its value can grow with the size of the network.
Sia has a permanently increasing supply, meaning it is inflationary. Storj has a fixed supply.
Sia takes 3.9% of all contact funds, and distributes it to holders of siafunds (distinct from siacoins, like neo is distinct from gas). Moreover, 88% of all siafunds are held by Nebulous Corp. Storj has no such ownership scheme.
Sia uses Proof of Storage for audit. Storj uses Proof of Retrievability, which guarantees that successfully audited data can be extracted [1].
Storj shards data to distribute it for better retrievability and enhanced security of the data. Sia does not.