Topic: Sia - Siafund Redemption Deadline: June 1st, 2015 - page 11. (Read 68743 times)

Just read your whitepaper.  I am impressed by the guts, but not by your solution.

Maybe some of these issues have been discussed in this long, long thread, but:

- Your quorum is not a quorum when put in a tree!
-  Assuming that attackers are randomly distributed is nonsense (sorry).  The sybil attack is as old as time.
- Thus your binomal distribution calculations are simply wrong, because the assumptions are wrong (sybil attack).
- The whitepaper does not describe what the consensus tree looks like.  Judging from the calculations in section 10, it seems like it could be a binary tree.
- A honest party cannot prove dishonesty with a properly programmed attacker using a simulated storage and controlling the (attacked) random generator (section 10).
- The number of messages required to keep consensus is very high. 
- Did I mention sybil attacks?  There is no protection!
- Section 6, what the cost of fetching a block from another participant needs to be is completely wrong in the whitepaper.   It is off by 5 orders of magnitude! (by 100.000x!).  This p0wns the consensus protocol, or this will indeed be an incredibly expensive storage platform.
- You allow changing the voter set in the consensus protocol without having consensus it seems.
- The proof of storage algorithm is way too naive when much, better algorithms exist.
- Nothing in the protocol requires a node from EVER SERVING DATA!
- Who is going to "fine" misbehaving nodes?  The only thing you will see are invalid quorums where data is held hostage.

This is like a swiss cheese!  Who reviewed this?

Right now the alpha is linux only. We're sort of expecting to keep it this way until the beta. Is this fine for everyone, or does anyone feel it's very important to release the alpha for Windows?

Keep in mind that the alpha isn't terribly functional. It's mostly for people who want to experiment, and isn't intended to be used as a file storage solution yet.

Great. I am really looking forward to that.

Another update.

File repair is finished, which means the groundwork for alpha v2 is complete. What's next is testing, followed by establishing a test network for the public.

I imagine that the internal testing and fixing will take a few days, but I'm getting excited.

Just so you know what we've got ready:

+ Ability to create wallets (with a small, introductory amount)
+ Ability to send money to other wallets
+ Transaction malleability protection (meaning you can only use each transaction once)
+ Ability to upload a file to your wallet (I don't know how big, but 1MB tops, probably closer to 256kb. This will of course get much larger in later versions)
+ Ability to download files from your wallet
+ Ability to save a wallet to a file, back it up, move it between computers, etc.
+ A consensus algorithm that does not get disrupted by dishonest machines
+ A network-joining process that can be disrupted by dishonest machines - this will be fixed in later versions, I don't see it being an issue right now.
+ Files that auto-repair and have high redundancy
+ A toy file-usage charging and compensation system. You lose money for having a wallet + files, and you gain money for being a participant. But it's not much money and the cost is constant, regardless of supply and demand. It's a very basic system.

We've also got an entire scripting system built, but our client doesn't allow you to interact with the scripting system. Maybe we can introduce support for that in an alpha v2.1. The biggest problem is figuring out an easy way to enable users to create their own wallets and their own script bodies and script inputs. Furthermore, documentation of the scripting system is minimal, containing only a full list of instructions along with some mildly commented example scripts. If there are multiple people who are interested in making their own scripts, we will make it a priority to enable playing around with the scripting system, but otherwise it's a low priority because I don't predict anyone wanting to play with it just yet.

Thanks for the update, looking forward to testing.

Another update because we're getting close. The code is nearly done. Uploads and downloads are finished and tested. Proof of storage is finished but untested.

So two things really remain before we can enter the final stage of preparing for the next release: proof of storage needs to be tested, and we need to add auto-repair to the quorum. Right now a file won't repair itself if nodes go offline, which consequently means that new nodes will not always be able to complete proof-of-storage, if they have to prove that they have a file which they were never able to repair. The other consequence of this is that right now, although we perform proof of storage, if someone fails a storage proof they are not kicked from the quorum, instead it's merely noted that they failed.

After that, things will be more or less complete, for the alpha stage anyway. We'll do some general testing, set up a test network, and then throw together all of the PR stuff (like updating the website, create a 'how to use' guide, etc.). At that point alpha v2 will be live, with a test network!

For the next release, we'll be working primarily on 2 things: getting time synchronization correct, so that nodes can remain synchronized in a way that is secure for the network (ntp is not secure, and if an attacker can convince your clock to drift by more than a few minutes you will be kicked from Sia - not good!), and getting sets of quorums to communicate with eachother, so that there's one big Sia network instead of tons of little fractured Sia quorums. I'd imagine that we'd call it alpha v3 because it still won't have implemented the pricing model for storage, nor have any way of introducing new coins into the economy (instead it'll be 100% premined), and it still won't have secure random number generation. You can probably expect alpha v3 by Halloween, but honestly I have no idea.

This is incorrect. Storj builds both.

Sia is the platform, the infrastructure. Storj is the application which can be built on the Sia platform.

Can someone explain the difference between this and Storj?

Alright. Thank you.

Yeah. We've got a longer annoucement planned for later this week but I'll give some brief info.

First, sorry that the alpha re-hash is taking so long. We've gotten quite far though, and the resulting code is stable and I'm very happy with it. The only thing left right now is file uploading and proof of storgae, which is mostly complete but not yet fully integrated. I'm sorry again that this is taking much longer than previously anticipated, but we're going to have our next release soon.

Second, we're on the verge of making an employement announcement. I don't want to say too much about it because we don't have all the details together, but the announcement will basically say that we're looking to hire someone, and then it'll list all of the traits we wish from this employee, as well as give a job description. We're looking to hire exactly 1 person, and they will be a software developer more than anything else.

I've become increasingly cautious about giving exact dates because I've learned that business never moves as fast as you would like, but things are certainly progressing.

Some news?

Sorry skrtel I wasn't quite sure what you meant by your question. I also was sure what you meant by storj being expensive.

Sianotes from our inital fund are available on the AE as Tobo said, be sure to read siacoin.com/sianotes so that you understand what you are buying, if you decide to invest. The price is set by the market, and not by anything that we control (unless we decide to raise more funds).

We're currently very happy with the amount of funding that we have and aren't looking to raise any more money until we've got a clear need for it (IE after launch when we're looking to grow, grow, grow).

You can buy Sianote at Nxt AE. Here is the current price - https://nxtblocks.info/#section/assets_exchange/market/11593659039925686857

That's all right, your confidents it not required.
They don't want your money.

There was a funding round months ago, and may or may not be another one, but not for a while for sure.
Also they were not selling coins but pieces of future profits, so price is not really comparable to storj.

Half a day and not a single response...doesn't make me confident

Is this going to be as expensive as storj?? Or something normal

Just to add my 2 cents, I don't consider Storj to be in competition. Their specific goals are different enough from ours that their extreme success would not be detrimental to the success of Sia at all.  And vice-versa. As Sia gets further along, we'll be looking to integrate with Storj more than we currently have.

Thanks for the links super3. I wasn't thinking.

It would be unfair to Sia to clutter their topic with an advertisement for Storj. Our website should address most questions: http://storj.io or http://storjtalk.org. We also have a few topics on Bitcointalk as well.