Sia distributed storage

https://sia.tech/
Sia is a decentralized file storage system that incentivizes people to rent out their unused hard disk drive space to earn Siacoin, or SC.  

Sia splits up files into small pieces and stores the pieces across multiple hosts using Reed–Solomon encoding. This encoding enables Sia to achieve a 3x redundancy, ensuring that even if multiple hosts go offline, the renter will still have access to their files. Merkle trees allow the storage hosts to provide cryptographic zero-knowledge proof that it still stores the files. These proofs are tested continually by the storage network, with hosts failing to prove storage too many times losing their staked collateral. Hosts are expected to have 95 to 98 percent uptime, compared to 99.9% for conventional cloud storage providers. 

Pricing:

The Sia storage service can only be used with payment of Siacoin. Siacoin (SC) has been riding the crypto rollercoaster, see price for last year....current SC price is 2.1USc....1/12/2017 it was worth 0.5USc, then rollercoaster started:

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/siacoin/

Here are steps that I used to install SIa, I used the following tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IPPeVbvLro

1. Download Sia UI (current release is 1.3.1): https://sia.tech/get-started and unzip
2. Install Sia UI
3. Create new wallet. Take note of seed and password and put them somewhere safe
4. Sia will scan the blockchain and synchronize (took over 1.5 days!!...I have fast 100Mb fiber internet). The entire blockchain is over 9GB and is located in %APPDATA%\Sia-UI\sia\consensus\consensus.db on Windows.
5. Select 'Receive Sia Coin' to get wallet address 
6.  My Sia coin address:  1ac51addd11803e084836af868de60466c4db22837bbb9d66d9cac13a919a59e87626d28ecbe  
7.  This step is the most complex: a) Create account on crypto currency exchange b) Transfer money to crypto currency exchange c) Buy SC d) Transfer SC from exchange to Sia wallet
8. Created a storage allowance (I only used 100 SC)...this creates contracts between me and the storage renters (I think I need something like 50 contracts before I can use any storage): 
9. Wait until contracts appear can be very slow, I only had 6 contract after 2 hours:
10. I tried to upload files and got error “Not enough contracts to upload.", I googled and discovered that I must have bigger storage allowance to speedup the contracts process so I increased my allowance to 300 SC.
11. After 8 hours I had 43 contracts. This was sufficient to upload file...Please note I spent 76 SC on 43 contracts:
12. To upload: Files -> Upload Files. I selected 1 MB jpg file and 4GB MOV file. I expected 1MB file to uploads in a few seconds, unfortunately after 2 hours it was still uploading:
13.  After 12 hours it still had not finished boosting redundancy (Reed–Solomon coding to  achieve a 3x redundancy): 
14.  After additional 8 hours I notice that finally files have uploaded.

Downloads are slow:

The download of 1.02MB file took almost 3 minutes, when I tried uploading/downloading same file to S3 performance was much faster:

zorang@DESKTOP-7ET1P3I:~$ time aws s3 cp issy.jpg s3://zoranbackup

upload: ./issy.jpg to s3://zoranbackup/issy.jpg

real    0m2.158s

user    0m0.438s

sys     0m0.563s

zorang@DESKTOP-7ET1P3I:~$ time aws s3 cp s3://zoranbackup/issy.jpg copy.jpg

download: s3://zoranbackup/issy.jpg to ./copy.jpg

real    0m3.152s

user    0m0.391s

sys     0m0.609s

zorang@DESKTOP-7ET1P3I:~$

You can host storage to receive SC:

Hosting requirements:

https://siawiki.tech/host/using_the_ui_for_hosting

• Static IP address or DNS name that can be reached
• Open ports 9981 and 9982 on firewall 
• Frequent backups of the metadata stored on the Sia folders 
• Payments are not received until the end of each contract

Lots of useful stats:

https://siastats.info

 

Usage:

• Sia UI to upload download files
• CLI: simple commands for example siac renter download/upload filename
• S3 compatible object storage using minio. https://github.com/dvstate/minio. Yet this looks like an abandoned project

Potential issues with distributed storage:

On of the currently problems with sia storage is that the typical desktop/laptop home user does not even try to achieve high availability, they do not consider implications:

• shutting down, rebooting their machine or when machine crashes
• monitor if the sia application is running or has crashed
• does not consider implications on sia when they are say running a a intensive game that monopolises the system resources, there is no QOS for sia
• backups

Availability/security:

Sia is still unreliable, sometimes I would get error:

This occurs even though the file is has 3x redundancy....Unfortunately, this storage is great concept but simply not enterprise ready. From security perspective a well resourced attacker could spin up many Sia hosts and offer very low prices, then hijack or delete the victims data.    

Sia storage also has fees. Fees include: 

https://siawiki.tech/renter/using_the_ui_for_renting

• 3.9% of the allowance and 3.9% of the collateral locked by the hosts. Hosts setup their collateral usually higher than the storage pricing. As the renter pays the fees of the collateral if the host keeps the expected 97% uptime, the total deducted fees will be around a 10% of the allowance. These fees are paid to Siafunds holders. 
• Hosts establish a minimal contract size, usually 2-5SC. As contracts are formed with 50 hosts, about 100-250SC will be deducted from the allowance.

Sia is tiny with only 122TB usage:

They only have 122TB of storage used out of 3.8PB available. Assume the average user stores 100Gb. That would imply 1,220 renters. That's a tiny amount of people. Storj (see below) has over 30PB used!!! Also prices are very low right now because no one is using this service...122/3880 = 3.1%. If Sia was to become popular price would increase...currently lots of supply compared to demand hence prices are low, hard to make money as a storage host, people are making negative return! Hence long term it is not viable unless storage supplies can make money. People with spare resources have far better opportunity to make money mining sia coin (or other crypto) instead of offering storage hosting. 

At current prices offering storage hosting has negative return. How is this possible when they have underutilised storage?...Assume they are offering 1TB at 50 SC or $1.20/month to do this they would need to run their PC 24x7....so even if machine/storage/internet was free it would not pay for electricity to run machine 24x7. Here is an example, cost of electricity = 12c/KWhr x 10 addional power on hours x 0.2kW  for PC x 30 days = $7.20. Hence every month a user offers 1TB of sia storage they would lose $6.00. This just doesn't make any sense!!!

Reddit sia users are running at loss hosting Sia storage once electricity is considered, see more info on Reddit posts:

https://www.reddit.com/r/siacoin/comments/7bi9ry/how_much_do_i_earn_as_a_host/?st=jdgy8sky&sh=b59ba7ac

https://www.reddit.com/r/siacoin/comments/7o1954/how_much_do_i_earn_as_a_host_the_december_stats/?st=jdgw87or&sh=1034c9ec

Other blockchain cloud storage alternatives are:

https://storj.io/

The have 30

There are other competitors in the decentralised storage space including: Filecoin, Storj & MaidSafe

Sia is already being used in Sydney:

https://siahub.info/map

Sia Pricing:
Sia storage (which uses sia coin as payment) looks cheap compared to major cloud vendors:

*Please note that above slide is out of date as current storage is $2.83/TB/month plus ~$1/month in fees (assuming 3 month contracts) so total price is $3.83/TB/month....yet note peak was $14/TB/month + $3/month in fees = $17/TB/month which is consirably more expansive B2 cloud storage a $5/TB/month (which also far more reliable and has better performance).

Commodity storage is lower cost than Sia:

Commodity storage with much better performance and low latency.....less than half the price of Sia: http://blog.zorangagic.com/2018/02/low-cost-storage.html, please note that this does not even consider dedupe which will gives average of 6:1 savings!!!

Please note: I used Sydney AWS region (whereas Sia used US region...that is why their AWS S3 is cheaper)

To summarise:

• Decentralised storage like Sia has great potential....the idea makes sense
• Not easy to consume, need to buy sia coin first (Register on crypto exchange, transfer money into crypto exchange account, buy sia coin)....So not easy for average user. 
• User experience of sia installation is a fail. Too complex, too time consuming!
• Currently not robust for enterprise storage
• Currently performance is slow
• Currently people offering storage hosting are making negative return, hence no long term incentive to keep running sia on their machines.
• Currently has low prices because it has very few users, yet if demand increases sia storage prices will also increase
• Much cheaper than public cloud storage, yet not cheaper than commodity storage with Linux