For the short lifetime of the World Wide Web, corporate giants (Facebook, Google, etc.) have controlled a majority of the data and made a very handsome profit off our data.
We are going to create more data in 2018, than every year previous in human history. Data is everything now, whether it’s your smartphone counting the number of steps you took today or your car’s computer checking the engine or brake pads and analyzing data to suggest when maintenance is needed. A self-driving car can generate up to 1-gigabyte/second, which after about three minutes is more data than the largest storage option on the iPhone currently, 256 GBs.
Currently, AWS, known as S3 (Simple Storage Service) is the main front runner in the cloud, with Dropbox, Google Drive, IBM, and Microsoft’s Azure behind them competing for their share of the market, which continues to grow.
These companies all charge a premium for storage in comparison to what the decentralized cloud options offer.
There are four decentralized cloud platforms: Filecoin, MaidSafe, Siacoin, and Storj. The idea behind these four is to rent out unused harddrive space around the world, which there is a lot of. Think about the desktop you have at home, you could turn it into a revenue-generating asset.
Sharing economy is the future. Market participants will drive market price via supply and demand for storage instead of arbitrary prices set by centralized cloud providers like S3, IBM, etc.
There are four decentralized cloud platforms: Filecoin, MaidSafe, Siacoin, and Storj. The idea behind these four is to rent out unused harddrive space around the world, which there is a lot of. Think about the desktop you have at home, you could turn it into a revenue-generating asset.
Sharing economy is the future. Market participants will drive market price via supply and demand for storage instead of arbitrary prices set by centralized cloud providers like S3, IBM, etc.
The advantage these provide is the redundancy across multiple nodes. Redundancy in data is simply extra copies of it stored or pieces of the copy stored in case of error in storing or transmission of data, as to prevent loss or partial loss of files.
Security and privacy of your files are better on decentralized network. Your files are broken apart and spread across multiple nodes. So even if a node wants to look at your file, it’s encrypted with a private key that only the file owner has. Along with the fact that it is only a partial file, meaning that it doesn’t matter if the host even gets into your file, it’s a fraction of its original self.
Another advantage decentralized storage offers is close proximity to the server, which means your data will be accessible quickly whether it is the website that is stored on it or simply files you are trying to recover.
Centralized storage units have to set up new facilities which are costly and take time and staff to maintain them. On top of that, you’ll never get the proximity to servers that a decentralized storage can offer as anyone who has a harddrive with free space can offer storage.
Recently human error caused US-East 1 of Amazon S3 to go down, leading to websites and services like Business Insider, Medium, Giphy, and others impacted. Simply due to an incorrect piece of code typed in, thus a larger set of servers were removed; the servers were down for around 4 and half hours.
These coins are similar for the most part, but there are key differences. We won't get into all of them though, just sia.
Siacoin has one goal, to be the backbone storage layer of the internet. Sia was conceived at HackMIT in 2013, with the idea of liberating unused storage space of the world and unite it into worldwide free market for data. Nebulous Labs is the parent company to Siacoin and is Venture Capital funded startup located in Boston, Massachusetts.
Sia offers complete privacy, by breaking up files into pieces, encrypting them, and distributing them across nodes. Since you hold your key, you own your data. No outside company or party can access or control your files, unlike traditional cloud storage providers. Siacoin has very high redundancy, as it stores your files across multiple nodes around the globe. And to recover a file you only need four of the forty pieces that are spread across the nodes.
The Sia team has been very transparent with its community throughout the whole process. A great example was when Sia announced they were building ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) Miners for mining Siacoin to help secure the network. The reasoning behind this was to protect the network from a 51% attack, which is where a miner or pool of miners take control of the hash rate and can control what transactions are put through or denied. Also, they could reverse transactions, allowing them to double-spend coins.
This announcement caused many angry Reddit members to come out against Sia, but that wasn’t for long as David Vorick (Sia CEO) wrote an in depth Reddit post explaining why they went ahead with the ASIC miner. I highly suggest you read that Reddit post, it really shows their commitment to the longevity of the project.
The ASIC miner is called Obelisk, which is being worked on by a team separate of the Sia team, as to let them focus on the Sia platform. Currently there have been 1,960 ASIC miners sold at a price of $2,400 per unit. Obelisk has 100x the power of a GPU, allowing owners of them to secure the Sia network.
Sia crushes centralized storage providers when it comes to storage costs and download bandwidth costs. It’s not even in the same ballpark, Sia reduces costs by over 90%.
Siacoin has a caveat, which is for the better, it requires the use of the token to store data; thus giving the token utility. This is so the smart contract can be completed, and it ensures that the host followed through with the contract so the customer can access the data they store on it. If a host doesn’t follow through with the contract they are not paid, and the payment is not received until the contract is complete.
People tend to complain that Siacoin has too high of a supply of tokens, so it’s price is hard to move. That’s why many in the cryptocurrency avoid it as investment, but if you see what they are trying to accomplish, being the backbone layer of the internet, you can see the light at the end of tunnel. As I stated earlier we are storing more data in 2018, than every year previous in human history combined.
Open your mind up, and see the future of data storage. It’s a sharing economy, where data is controlled by the original owners, not the corporations or service providers. This is one of the most promising segments of blockchain to come out.
The change in storage will likely not happen overnight, but in 5 years you will see it being used by everyone. Filecoin, Maidsafe, Storj, and Siacoin are very promising projects and have the ability to all coexist with each other in the future. With the way data storage is heading, the market will be so big, it’s conceivable to see more than one of these providing decentralized cloud storage down the line.