I spotted Siacoin on poloniex as it is one of the highest volume coins at the moment with one of the lowest market caps.
How did Siacoin get to market so quickly? Any technical users on here willing to educate me on the difference between the two coins? It looks like both were striving towards decentralized storage and Siacoin already has a partnership with Crypti as it is already functioning.
How did Siacoin get to market so quickly? Any technical users on here willing to educate me on the difference between the two coins? It looks like both were striving towards decentralized storage and Siacoin already has a partnership with Crypti as it is already functioning.
Hi! I'm the project lead for Sia, and I think I have a few answers.
1. We've been working on Sia for a long time. We've been working mostly in stealth, because as developers we didn't feel comfortable creating a lot of buzz around a product that didn't exist yet. It sort of rubbed us the wrong way. Sia was conceived around August 2013 - roughly the same time that the Bitcoin price started its acceleration towards $1200. We did our first crowd fund in May 2014, which also predates Storj's first crowd fund.
2. The Sia team comes from what I feel is a much stronger technical background. I rejected a full time job offer from Google to pursue Sia. I have been studying Bitcoin since 2011. Many of the core ideas behind Sia got bounced off of people like Gregory Maxwell and Peter Todd, helping us to find the flaws in our early designs and iterate to something superior. (note: I don't think that either Maxwell or Todd would publicly endorse Sia. They helped see and get past some of the early obstacles, but never took any sort of formal role as mentors and never worked on the project directly).
We have been working on Sia at full steam for about 9 months. (We had a prior implementation that had to be thrown away). We have done our absolute best to use best practices, and are targeting enterprise customers. We are creating a platform that's designed to be maximally efficient, maximally powerful, and as low cost as possible. I think that, thus far, we have been very successful in laying the groundwork.
While Sia is a live currency, the platform itself is still in beta. We are still refining the API. We are still implementing the best host selection algorithms. We are still working on the startup time of the program and are still writing tests for the most important features.
Overall, I do believe that Sia is one of the strongest implementations of a cryptocurrency out there. Many parts of the code have 3x lines of tests code as actual code.
Over the next 1-3 months we are going to be rolling out significantly more powerful features for uploading and sharing files over the Sia network. We will be improving the API so that other applications can easily tap into the Sia network for their own use.
So far, since launching on June 7th, Sia has put out 4 releases. The 5th is right around the corner, and has substantial algorithmic and API improvements compared to the previous release.
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I will try to watch this thread so that I can answer any questions. You guys are also welcome to join us here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1060294.new#new
