I'm trying to understand value propositions for exactly what Sia is, at this point.
Does anyone have any ideas of what we have here?
What makes this have value?
Sia is valuable because it offers a decentralized way to do storage. On the current network, that value is rather low b/c you can only upload one file at a time and there is a 500mb limit to what can be uploaded. The next client will be much more powerful, the file size limit will be removed (or at least bumped to multiple GB) and there's a good chance that you can choose to upload entire folders instead of just one file at a time.
We do believe that in the long run, storage on Sia will be substantially cheaper than the current cloud storage platforms (Amazon, etc.), which is very attractive to enterprise customers. Enterprise customers will need siacoins to rent storage, this will create a baseline demand for the coin.
What I am not real clear on is when storage is used by a customer, is that persons data stored entirely on just the one PC in which you have a contract on? or is it dispersed around the network in bits and pieces across many storage units. I would think some form of the latter?
Ya I know, I need to read up and do more homework lol, but a quick answer is always nice
On the current network, the full file is uploaded to 8 different hosts. The hosts are selected randomly, but cheaper hosts are more likely to be chosen. I forget the exact algorithm, but someone who is 1/2 the price is ~8x as likely to be chosen. If you are a host and you are more expensive than everyone else by a significant amount, you will never be chosen for storage. If you are significantly cheaper than everyone else, you will be chosen pretty much every time, and your storage will fill up much faster.
The optimal price is the price where your storage fills up at the same rate as contracts expire. You make it cheap enough that you are pretty much always nearly sold out, but expensive enough that you are making money on every contract.
Right now, there's not enough upload demand to fill pretty much anybody's hard drive. It's difficult to upload more than a few files, people don't want to spend their siacoins, the filesize cap isn't that high, and the network doesn't have any sort of a proven track record. We hope to address a handful of these in the next major version (v0.4.0) in the next 6-8 weeks.
