Siacoin: How to use it to store your files securely
Sia is a new approach to cloud storage platforms. Instead of all datacenters being owned and operated by a single company, Sia opens the floodgates and allows anyone to make money by renting out their hard drive. Data integrity is protected using redundancy and cryptography.
In this post, I'll go through the steps to using the Sia wallet to upload a file.
1. Download the Sia UI from http://sia.tech/apps/#ui
Synchronizing the UI will probably take a day or two.
2. Setup your wallet
This step is really important. The wallet generates a Seed and a Password. Keep it safe somewhere.
Setting up a wallet will also allow to recieve Siacoins.
3. Accquire Siacoin
The easiest way would be to buy BTC and exchange them for Siacoins on exchanges like Poloniex. Here I'm transferring some from my Poloniex.
4. Let's upload a file - Prepatory stage
Before we can upload anything, we'll need to create an allowance.
With 500 SC, I could allocate 2 Terabytes (TB) for storage.
The first attempt to create an allowance failed due to issues in the software. The UI crashed and as a result I lost about 15 Siacoins.
The second attempt was successful, but took around 45 minutes.
5. Let's upload a file - this time fo real
I uploaded an image file that I had on my hard drive.
The upload didn't get through because the network couldn't find nodes to upload to.
Conclusion
Sia's goal of being a competitor to Dropbox and Google Drive is highly ambitious. The UI is buggy and requires cumbersome steps before one can start uploading files. It's definitely not ready for primetime action.
That being said, It's impressive they've got a working product. I'm quite certain that the future releases will make things much smoother. Getting there!!
Thanks for reading !!
Follow @lexsapktoa for more crypto related stuff.
I love their project! They only need a "light client" to be ready for the big masses to use Sia! For now you need to download the blockchain before you could use it... And that's the problem, I need cloud data because I have not that much room on my SSD! Great post, Nice tutorial!
Thanks. Yes, the idea of securely storing data with Sia is really exciting. I'll keep an eye on their future releases.
Thank you so much! I am actually mining Siacoin :-) This was a really useful tutorial for me. I've got a film I want to store on siacoin which I finished last year. I'm hoping it can be a replacement for Amazon S3.
All of these technologies are so new and I'm excited to watch them develop. I'm going to repost this over on my social media channels. Cheers!!
Thanks !! I'm glad that you found it useful.
I haven't actually started exploring the file storage side yet... that is really cheap for 2 terabytes.
I hope they iron out the wrinkles because the wait umes described are unworkable. What I could not find in the documentation is how the price for storage is determined. If Siacoin price goes up 10x, will storage fees go up 10x as well?
Payment is in Siacoin. Whatever 1 SC price is doesn't matter. If Siacoin price goes higher -in BTC, for example- then you will get less storage space for the same amount of Siacoin, but you will still pay the same amount in Siacoin.
Storj makes it different: they charge the uploaders in USD and then pay -once every month, cough cough more or less in that period cough cough- to the people that host the files in SJCX -or since this week, in STORJ-. Again, if I have to buy USD because my bank only holds EUR, I will still to take into account the EUR/USD value.
I like the idea of Siacoin distributed storage tech it could easily rival the cloud storage giants and its so low right now, under 2 cents a coin it should surely have some movement. maybe... just wait and see.