Topic: [ANN] Sia - Decentralized Storage - page 362. (Read 1382191 times)

You can view some statistics about the other hosts on siapulse.

http://siapulse.com/page/network

what price my hosting contracts should have to be competitive and where can i see other peoples contracts?

I'm sorry to repeat but i have not found your post helpful, fact is :


First problem : the blocks are two days old. I've already mined a bunch of sia and confirmations take a few hours, + in this case, the transactions do show up in the wallet, only the actual funds do not.

Second problem : Can you please post a guide to how to update from 0.4.6 to 0.5.1 ? If i copy the wallet JSON without the consensus db, neither funds nor transactions appear in the unlocked wallet. Does this mean sia wallets cannot be moved without the consensus.db ? If i do copy the consensus db, the GUI won't start in spite of anything i do, or how long i wait, giving ECONNREFUSED 127.0.0.1:9980.

If it helps i can make a video showing this problem if there is anything unclear about it.

Great answer Taek!! Thanks for that

What about net neutrality issues, and possible adverse reactions from ISP's and governments (which aren't exclusive to sia, but *might* effect small business sia users)

I think it's just coincidence. Increasing your price should not increase the number of contracts that you are receiving. Right now, I think that uploads are happening in waves.


I'm not quite sure what problem you are describing. But, I think you just need to wait for more confirmations. You need to wait until the blockchain is synchronized before your wallet will recognize all of the incoming transactions. For blocks that you have mined, you will not see the coins from mining in your wallet until the block has 144 confirmations. The same is true for getting money from file contracts - the money will not show up in your wallet until the storage proof has 144 confirmations.

Normal transactions should show up in the wallet immediately as 'pending', and should show up in the wallet as confirmed after only 1 confirmation.

ECONNREFUSED means that the GUI is unable to find 'siad'. My guess is that you need to wait for siad to turn on, sometimes this can take several minutes. There should be a loading screen, but I think there is a bug related to the loading screen.


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Loading screen bug aside, we are ready to announce v0.5.1!

https://github.com/NebulousLabs/Sia-UI/releases/tag/v0.5.1-beta

upped the rate to 10SC/GB/Month and now I have 115 contracts and an amount of SC 'to be earned', kinda counter intuitive, but seems to work

Guys i have two wallets mining - the block i found lately show up as transactions but no funds have been added to wallets. One of the wallets was new so it shows 2 transactions of blocks of yesterday but 0 balance and 0 pending.

Please advise.


So 1 block for one wallet, shows transactions but funds have not shown not even as pending and on another pc another wallet with 2 blocks that show transaction mined but the same - no balance , no pending.


I know we're still in BETA but please advise a way to recover these. PM works best.


Edit :

3 different wallets on 3 PC's mining, two of them have each 1 transaction that shows for 270000 mined but no funds arrived nor pending, the third one has two transactions in the same state, unexistent. The transactions appear in the wallet both the GUI and the command line one but funds are simply missing.



Also, please advise i am desperately trying to upgrade from 0.46 to 0.51 but i seem to be unable , first,  if i simply copy the wallet folder, the password works and wallet unlocks but i see no funds or transactions. Then, if i also copy the consensus.db folder and file, the command line wallet works showing all the transactions and the funds ( with the same problem as 0.46, missing the funds for the last 2 transactions ) however the GUI won't start, showing a blue 1 in the middle of the GUI and the error :ECONNREFUSED 127.0.0.1:9980.


Thanks

You probably want to back up all of the folders and files in the Sia directory. Compatibility should mostly be preserved. One thing we're hoping to achieve with 1.0 is auto-updating, so that the upgrade from 0.5.x to 1.0 is the final upgrade you ever need to perform manually.


I'm not 100% certain, but I don't think that you need to upgrade from 044 to 048 before going to 051.

Also, 051 is approx. ready, should be done in under an hour. We thought it was done, but at the last minute we were seeing a weird UI bug. I'll make the announcement once we're happy that everything is reasonably smooth and ready to use.

darwin is the zip for Mac. You want to download the Sia-v0.4.8-beta-windows-amd64.zip file.

Currently running 0.4.4 and in the process of upgrading to 0.4.8, preparatory to the upgrade to v.0.5.0.

I've d/loaded Sia-v0.4.8-beta-darwin-amd64.zip (from https://github.com/NebulousLabs/Sia/releases/tag/v0.4.8-beta) but my Windows 7 OS claims the 'siac' and 'siad' files are unknown file types and ask me what program I want to use to open them with.

Any help much appreciated, as always

Thanks 

Primarily, yes. If you have many files uploaded through Sia, I would also back up the /renters directory occasionally since if you loose the .sia files you also loose access to your content on the cloud.

Which are the files that have to be archived for backup purposes? wallet.json and? Thank you for the help.

Hey so I have some contracts where I am playing the host, but no payments.  There is a 'to be earned' field too, but thats empty, I appear to be storing for free even though I set a rate of 1SC/GB/Month.
Is this an issue with the amount being stored is so small that it cant scale the payment calculation?

If you wanted a more costless entry you could have new user's rewards go straight to burn or bond. That way there is no startup cost, but the attackers don't get rewarded until they can cover the damage they could cause. We will probably implement something like this on our system in the future, but with 2 PB on network, making it more costless would be bad for us.

Set your business up in the EU we have net neutrality

We have plans to support algorithmic adjustments to the host price, depending on a variety of configurable inputs. We expect that, in the long term, hosts will have a large number of tools to help them set the price. More flexibility will be provided as the product continues to mature. For the time being, other features are taking priority.


He makes a few valid points about the potential pitfalls of building systems like Sia. Sia has either already addresses most of these problems, or has plans to address them in the near future. I don't want to do as much as point-by-point, but I'll address the big things that stood out to me. If there's something else in his post you would like addressed, let me know and I'll go into more depth.

1. Sybil Attack

This is probably the biggest thing we haven't fully addressed. While we do some IP address gating to help minimize the Sybil attack, we're not doing as much as we could be. Storj requires everyone to have 10,000 Storjx coins, which is not a bad defense mechanism. You can also use web-of-trust style barriers-to-entry, or use trusted whitelists to fill out a large portion of your hosts.

We have not worried about it too much up to this point because it's both annoying to execute and the payoff is very tiny, at least while the network is small. We will have stronger defenses in v1.0. We are planning on introducing a 'burn' that hosts can participate in to be put on a priority list, from which renters will be drawing a large number of their hosts.

Ultimately, the way you fight a Sybil attack is by making identity expensive. In Bitcoin, a Sybil attack is fought using POW. To submit a new block, you need a massive amount of hashing power. Sia takes a similar approach. To make an identity, you must demonstrate expense. Expense can come in many forms. The simplest is burning some volume of coins, which I think we're going to call 'cryptographic advertising' or something similar. Another form of expense is owning an IPv4 address. While it's not that expensive, most people already have 1, which means you can costlessly give power to legitimate users while adding expense to Sybil users. Unfortunately, there are not many costless things that we can leverage to prevent Sybil attacks, which is why we are probably going to resort to cryptographic advertising (also called proof-of-burn).

2. Deduplication Attack

An attack was mentioned where you can't be certain about the redundancy of your file. Maybe all of the redundant copies are lies? This is an actual attack, and I usually call it a deduplication attack. If you upload a bunch of redundant pieces such that anyone on the network can repair them, then one person can gather a single copy and pretend to store at maximum redundancy, receiving pay for lots of storage that they actually aren't participating in. Sia prevents this by encrypting each piece separately, using a random key. This completely stops the deduplication attack, but has a tradeoff: only the uploader can repair the file if pieces start to go offline.

Sia's reliability is very good, however. Even if you are only logging in every few weeks, there should be no issues with uptime. And eventually, we might be able to implement a pass-the-hat type of protocol that allows for files to be refreshed for as long as there is money. (though, that would require a soft-fork).

3. ISP issues & legality

We've gone over this a few times, and there are some threads dedicated to it at https://forum.sia.tech, but the quick version is that it's legal for hosts to accept random files from strangers, even if they are illegal files. If the host is caught with an illegal file, they are required to remove it within a certain period of time (usually 24 hours). Sia v0.5.0 (recently completed, though we haven't finished updating all the links yet) has support already for complying with these types of requests, though no host has ever been asked to remove a file thus far.

TPTB is a known conspiracy theorist, but I'm still not convinced he isn't raising an important issue here, not just for Sia, but for all P2P decentralised economic activity that *might* take place over the internet in the new knowledge age economy. His points about the differentiated treatment of upload vs download capacity, and net neutrality, and how they both effect the economics of ISP's, and therefore the governments ability to 'tax' the middle man in the knowledge economy sort of makes sense to me, but I can't grasp the full picture in my mind yet.

I like Sia coz it offers the chance to run a small independent business without any intermediaries in between, but if a large chunk of the knowledge economy follows this pattern, then people can avoid taxes easily, and ISP's will want a cut of the profits (similar to how some ISP's argue for a cut of Netflix $$), so wont there be a 'reaction' from both (ISP's & gov)? I can see they would both want to differentiate between commercial & non-commercial internet traffic eventually.

I would hang on for a couple of days until the official 0.5.0 version is released. The available version is a Release Candidate that is rather buggy.

Is there a particular process for me to upgrade?

No, he doesn't have a point, because he made no point.

I am not a Sia dev but it is hard to take his comments seriously. He makes some hand-waving claims that Sia is prone to Sybil attacks, without proper analysis of how. He then concludes that Sia is therefore a provable scam, which demonstrates that he is incapable of logical deduction. For me, taking anything else in his post serious is therefore an impossibility.

In order to make these claims, you need some demonstrable proof of your assertions. I am not saying a Sybil attack can't be done, but I disagree with simply taking it for granted.

He moves on to some legal justifications for why Sia will be limited to ISP user clients which are simply not true. There is no reason why a commercial entity could not provide storage on the Sia network, even if they host illegal content, as long as they take steps to remove illegal content and block nefarious users. Dropbox does it. Google does it. Why can't Sia storage providers? Just because there is no central authority, that does not mean there can't be policing and enforcement of the rule of law.