Siacoin (SC) is the native token of Sia, a blockchain-based distributed, decentralized cloud storage platform. The main goal of the project is to become the "backbone storage layer of the internet."
It is currently ranked 81st on CoinMarketCap with a a total market cap of around $411 million
I generally prefer to invest in coins which have some kind of obvious utility and that is certainly the case with Siacoin, it's linked to the online storage of data.
NB - it's recently rebranded as the rather unfortunately named 'Skynet'.
What can you do with Sia/ Siacoin? (Siatech)
There are two main functions:
- You can use SC to rent storage space, for around $2 a TB per month, which makes it around 10 times cheaper than AWS.
- You can also be a data storage host, in which case you can set your own price on the market, and you get paid in SC.
A renter's perspective
To get started with Sia, all you need to do is download the Sia UI, store you seed phrase securely and you're good to go.
The basic interface is pretty intuitive and allows you to receive and send SC or use it to rent storage space.
Just as with Hive, there are a number of different front ends which use Sia on the back-end, so you have a choice of which one you use:
A hoster's perspective
As a host you need a system with at least 8GB of RAM and ideally 4 TB of storage space, and once you're set up you need to set a price for storage.
You control various price points such as:
- storage cost per TB
- download and upload fees
- contract fees (to cover transaction costs)
- collateral - which should be 3 times what you're capable of earning for storing data.
Hosts are scored according to several metrics such as uptime, costs, staked collateral and fees modified according to score.
Security
To simplify how storage works, it is broken up into about 30 different bits and distributed across different hosts - even if 10 of them go down you can still access all of your data.
Hosters are incentivised through a reputation system which effects their returns and to make sure they don't have too much downtime.
Tokeneomics
There is no upper limit to the amount of SC which can be printed, to allow the network to keep up with the ever increasing amount of data.
There are currently around 45 bn coins in circulation, with inflation being around 4% a year, reducing to 2% a year over 20 years, so printing approximately an additional 1.5 bn coins a year.
Hosts are encouraged to burn 4% of what they earn, as a commitment to the network.
SC - worth investing in?
While I do like the idea of Siacoin and decentralised storage I'm put off by the following three factors
- The unlimited supply of the coin
- The increasing number of competitors in this space, such as Filecoin.
- The fact that I couldn't get the Sia UI to sync to the network, even after waiting for several hours. This may be because I'm on a 4G connection.
I do hold a few thousand SC - I'll be looking to get out shortly I think, I can't see that this particular coin is worth holding onto!
Find out more...
The best source available is this: https://sia.tech/