Topic: Sia - Siafund Redemption Deadline: June 1st, 2015 - page 8. (Read 68779 times)
Good to see that Sianote has rebounded a bit on the NXT AE. Looking forward to seeing what you devs can do with Sia after all. Good luck.
Nice to hear that!
We've considered something like it. This post is more helpful: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/ultimate-blockchain-compression-w-trust-free-lite-nodes-88208
We've got something good coming soon. I think two weeks is the most we need for our next release, which will contain a whitepaper and perhaps a bonus announcement.
We've got something good coming soon. I think two weeks is the most we need for our next release, which will contain a whitepaper and perhaps a bonus announcement.
3. There is no 'sublinear consensus'. Sia is a single blockchain and will need to deal with blockchain bloat in all of the same ways that apply to other altcoins. This shouldn't be a problem until we have multiple millions of users.
Have you considered cryptonite's (XCN) mini blockchain protocol as a possible solution?
Not necessarily. I think they have more clever ways of doing things so that you get scalability without much added risk.
One of their ideas was to use a sidechain for less valuable transactions. So you'd have merge mining which mostly protects the smaller transactions, but since the total amount of money being thrown behind maintaining consensus on the sidechain is smaller, it's potentially vulnerable to Bitcoin miners being bribed to attack the smaller chain. But since it's only used for smaller transactions, there's not much benefit to attacking the smaller chain.
One of their ideas was to use a sidechain for less valuable transactions. So you'd have merge mining which mostly protects the smaller transactions, but since the total amount of money being thrown behind maintaining consensus on the sidechain is smaller, it's potentially vulnerable to Bitcoin miners being bribed to attack the smaller chain. But since it's only used for smaller transactions, there's not much benefit to attacking the smaller chain.
For those wondering: www.blockstream.com
Does this mean that with the side-chains BTC will solve the scalability issue but make 51% attack issue worse?
I feel like some sort of response to the sidechains thing is necessary. Sidechains aren't nearly far enough along for us to rationally consider using them. Being an altcoin still feels like the most sensible thing for us. The particular advantage that sidechains would offer to us (if the technology were ready, which I do not feel that it is) is that we could do proof of storage on Bitcoins directly. (we could still keep Sianotes). But there's a lot of complexity involved in doing that, and I don't trust myself to do it correctly at this point, especially since there's no existing reference sidechain.
Even further, I'm not sure that I want to use bitcoins directly, I think I'd rather have the siacoin be a separate asset, because there a different rules governing the siacoin economy (namely there's a sink for coins - when you create a contract, those coins are locked down for the duration of the contract, and can't be spent until either the host earns them or the host screws up and disappears). The siacoin really should have a greater stability than exists in Bitcoin once it's past the initial period of high growth. The situation where Bitcoin is improving dramatically but the price is falling for 6 months shouldn't be as possible in Sia. If the protocol usage is going up, the scarcity of the coin is also going up because people need to lock down the currency in order to make use of the storage contracts. We wouldn't want to dilute our stability by using bitcoins, as the price of bitcoin depends on a much greater number of factors (it's used in more places), and a fallout in one of those places would hurt Sia as well. I see economic isolation as a good thing in Sia's case.
For those wondering: www.blockstream.com
Even further, I'm not sure that I want to use bitcoins directly, I think I'd rather have the siacoin be a separate asset, because there a different rules governing the siacoin economy (namely there's a sink for coins - when you create a contract, those coins are locked down for the duration of the contract, and can't be spent until either the host earns them or the host screws up and disappears). The siacoin really should have a greater stability than exists in Bitcoin once it's past the initial period of high growth. The situation where Bitcoin is improving dramatically but the price is falling for 6 months shouldn't be as possible in Sia. If the protocol usage is going up, the scarcity of the coin is also going up because people need to lock down the currency in order to make use of the storage contracts. We wouldn't want to dilute our stability by using bitcoins, as the price of bitcoin depends on a much greater number of factors (it's used in more places), and a fallout in one of those places would hurt Sia as well. I see economic isolation as a good thing in Sia's case.
For those wondering: www.blockstream.com
Yes, pretty sure we are legally bound to that number.
Sianotes enforce a tax on the network. For every coin that is spent on renting storage, a percent will be taken and distributed among sianotes holders.
This is not a transaction fee, it's not a bandwidth fee, it's purely a storage fee. We use this fee instead of premining to fund our business and give value to the people who backed Sia. This money will go directly to funding developers, which means more than just me and Luke. We're planning on building something like Mozilla that's focused around cryptocurrency. Sia is our first major source of income.
The current model for cryptocurrency startups is premining, which I think is dirty and awful. Premined currencies means that someone (IE Satoshi, Ripple, etc) owns an extraordinary amount of coins, and this gives them a lot of power to crash the network, and creates a point of trust. In Bitcoin, we're basically all trusting that Satoshi doesn't do something retarded with his stash, because he could really wreck the ecosystem.
But it's also awful for the people who own the premined currency. As a business, how am I supposed to pay my employee? Cryptocurrencies are notoriously unstable. If I premine 1 million coins, and initially they are worth 10 cents each, how many do I sell vs. how many do I keep? As I continue to sell more coins, my company benefits less and less from the value we add to the network. And (as happened in Bitcoin recently), what if we add a ton of value to the network, and the price just falls? In the time that Bitcoin went from $800 to $300, Bitcoin as a currency was made a lot more useful to society. The price was pretty much unrelated b/c people don't need to hodl Bitcoins to get the value out.
So we're isolating ourselves from that problem, and we're isolating our currency holders from that problem. Storage is a real world asset with a stable value. If the price of the siacoin falls, the price of storage in siacoins will rise. By taking a fee on storage, we get our income directly from the value we add to the ecosystem, and we get that income regardless of what the price is. If we add value by adding both suppliers and consumers, our income will go up. Price shenanigans won't affect us.
And by us choosing not to own large volumes of the currency (and by keeping it permanently inflationary), we isolate you guys from whales. We want Siacoins to be a modest-at-best long term investment, because that will keep the whales from being interested. (The Sianote is a different story - very good long term investment, very subject to price instability, manipulation, whales, etc., but you don't pay for storage with the sianote so that's okay. People who want stability and predictability can use the siacoin at the cost of it not being a lucrative investment.)
This is not a transaction fee, it's not a bandwidth fee, it's purely a storage fee. We use this fee instead of premining to fund our business and give value to the people who backed Sia. This money will go directly to funding developers, which means more than just me and Luke. We're planning on building something like Mozilla that's focused around cryptocurrency. Sia is our first major source of income.
The current model for cryptocurrency startups is premining, which I think is dirty and awful. Premined currencies means that someone (IE Satoshi, Ripple, etc) owns an extraordinary amount of coins, and this gives them a lot of power to crash the network, and creates a point of trust. In Bitcoin, we're basically all trusting that Satoshi doesn't do something retarded with his stash, because he could really wreck the ecosystem.
But it's also awful for the people who own the premined currency. As a business, how am I supposed to pay my employee? Cryptocurrencies are notoriously unstable. If I premine 1 million coins, and initially they are worth 10 cents each, how many do I sell vs. how many do I keep? As I continue to sell more coins, my company benefits less and less from the value we add to the network. And (as happened in Bitcoin recently), what if we add a ton of value to the network, and the price just falls? In the time that Bitcoin went from $800 to $300, Bitcoin as a currency was made a lot more useful to society. The price was pretty much unrelated b/c people don't need to hodl Bitcoins to get the value out.
So we're isolating ourselves from that problem, and we're isolating our currency holders from that problem. Storage is a real world asset with a stable value. If the price of the siacoin falls, the price of storage in siacoins will rise. By taking a fee on storage, we get our income directly from the value we add to the ecosystem, and we get that income regardless of what the price is. If we add value by adding both suppliers and consumers, our income will go up. Price shenanigans won't affect us.
And by us choosing not to own large volumes of the currency (and by keeping it permanently inflationary), we isolate you guys from whales. We want Siacoins to be a modest-at-best long term investment, because that will keep the whales from being interested. (The Sianote is a different story - very good long term investment, very subject to price instability, manipulation, whales, etc., but you don't pay for storage with the sianote so that's okay. People who want stability and predictability can use the siacoin at the cost of it not being a lucrative investment.)
At that point sianotes will be generating siacoins for everyone
On the distribution of Sianotes into the new protocol:
What I'm leaning towards right now is releasing Sia with sianotes built in, and then manually moving everyone's sianotes to the new protocol.
To have them moved over, you'll send the sianotes to an Nxt address that I provide (if it seems reasonable, it'll be an unusable address).
You'll send them with some message indicating what Sia address you want your sianotes sent to.
Once all the sianotes have been moved over, the Nxt sianotes will become completely worthless, as they've migrated. We'll probably have a deadline for moving Sianotes over, but it'll probably be 6 months to 1 year after we start moving them over. We'll be reasonable with regards to that.
At that point sianotes will be generating siacoins for everyone. They'll be transferable assets, meaning you can sell them on exchanges and stuff.
At that point we'll switch gears from being a small, moderately stealth cryptocurrency to being as public as possible. We'll probably fund one of those silly videos that startups and altcoins like releasing, because they seem to grab a lot of attention. And then we'll be a full startup. Follow our growth and whatnot.
Still no eta on the whitepaper, but it's looking a lot cleaner than the previous one. I'm liking it.
What I'm leaning towards right now is releasing Sia with sianotes built in, and then manually moving everyone's sianotes to the new protocol.
To have them moved over, you'll send the sianotes to an Nxt address that I provide (if it seems reasonable, it'll be an unusable address).
You'll send them with some message indicating what Sia address you want your sianotes sent to.
Once all the sianotes have been moved over, the Nxt sianotes will become completely worthless, as they've migrated. We'll probably have a deadline for moving Sianotes over, but it'll probably be 6 months to 1 year after we start moving them over. We'll be reasonable with regards to that.
At that point sianotes will be generating siacoins for everyone. They'll be transferable assets, meaning you can sell them on exchanges and stuff.
At that point we'll switch gears from being a small, moderately stealth cryptocurrency to being as public as possible. We'll probably fund one of those silly videos that startups and altcoins like releasing, because they seem to grab a lot of attention. And then we'll be a full startup. Follow our growth and whatnot.
Still no eta on the whitepaper, but it's looking a lot cleaner than the previous one. I'm liking it.
+1. Nice to see the progress! Thanks!
Btw, Ciyam's AT might be helpful for you to build a more complicated wallet in the future if it works - https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.9231765
Btw, Ciyam's AT might be helpful for you to build a more complicated wallet in the future if it works - https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.9231765
Thanks for the hard work 
I had a sort of zen minimalist moment yesterday. We have a new specification for Sia, and it's really really simple. Even simpler than Bitcoin, because we simplified the way the scripting system works.
It's pretty much the most minimal possible protocol that allows decentralized storage to happen. There are hosts that announce they have storage, and there are files that hosts agree to store, and the hosts submit proof-of-storage on the files to get paid. If they don't submit proof-of-storage, then the uploader gets refunded automatically.
And that's pretty much it, happening on a blockchain. It's so simple that we should have an alpha ready to go within a few weeks, maybe 4 to 6. I'm actually really excited about this new protocol, because it's simple enough to implement quickly and powerful enough to allow a full structure of decentralized storage.
We do sacrifice a few things:
1. There is no global network price. Hosts set their own price.
2. There is no automatic file repair. Clients will need to manage file repairs themselves. This means they need to be online to make the repairs, but that means running 'repair' every few months instead of needing to be online all the time.
3. There is no 'sublinear consensus'. Sia is a single blockchain and will need to deal with blockchain bloat in all of the same ways that apply to other altcoins. This shouldn't be a problem until we have multiple millions of users.
That's basically it. We slimmed things down to the very core requirements: decentralized storage that doesn't require you to be online all the time. Turns out you can do this with only a few simple changes to the Bitcoin protocol. We should still be completely compatible with enterprise customers, which I think is where the majority of our users will eventually come from. Without sublinear consensus, I'm having troubles imagining that we'll be useful for files below 10GB in size, but that's a problem for the future. Enterprise customers are unlikely to need files less than 1TB in size (replace file with 'cloud disk' --> 'file' is a misleading term). A 2.0 down the line will probably address this (requiring either a hardfork or a different cryptocurrency). We want to delay sublinear consensus because right now there are no good solutions to decentralized storage. We can change this without decentralized storage and we think it's more valuable to release something simple now than something complex and potentially insecure after we spend 3-6 more months planning it out.
We're planning on releasing a whitepaper alongside a beta implementation. The beta implementation will be fully usable, but we're going to premine 99% of the coins on the beta, as sort of a "NOT FINISHED YET" red flag. After a few months of beta, we'll decide how much needs to change for a 1.0, and we'll release a 1.0 that has sianotes and no premining.
Luke and I are ecstatic. Wanted to share my enthusiasm. I know it's been a roller coaster, but that seems to be the expectation for startups and early stage investing.
It's pretty much the most minimal possible protocol that allows decentralized storage to happen. There are hosts that announce they have storage, and there are files that hosts agree to store, and the hosts submit proof-of-storage on the files to get paid. If they don't submit proof-of-storage, then the uploader gets refunded automatically.
And that's pretty much it, happening on a blockchain. It's so simple that we should have an alpha ready to go within a few weeks, maybe 4 to 6. I'm actually really excited about this new protocol, because it's simple enough to implement quickly and powerful enough to allow a full structure of decentralized storage.
We do sacrifice a few things:
1. There is no global network price. Hosts set their own price.
2. There is no automatic file repair. Clients will need to manage file repairs themselves. This means they need to be online to make the repairs, but that means running 'repair' every few months instead of needing to be online all the time.
3. There is no 'sublinear consensus'. Sia is a single blockchain and will need to deal with blockchain bloat in all of the same ways that apply to other altcoins. This shouldn't be a problem until we have multiple millions of users.
That's basically it. We slimmed things down to the very core requirements: decentralized storage that doesn't require you to be online all the time. Turns out you can do this with only a few simple changes to the Bitcoin protocol. We should still be completely compatible with enterprise customers, which I think is where the majority of our users will eventually come from. Without sublinear consensus, I'm having troubles imagining that we'll be useful for files below 10GB in size, but that's a problem for the future. Enterprise customers are unlikely to need files less than 1TB in size (replace file with 'cloud disk' --> 'file' is a misleading term). A 2.0 down the line will probably address this (requiring either a hardfork or a different cryptocurrency). We want to delay sublinear consensus because right now there are no good solutions to decentralized storage. We can change this without decentralized storage and we think it's more valuable to release something simple now than something complex and potentially insecure after we spend 3-6 more months planning it out.
We're planning on releasing a whitepaper alongside a beta implementation. The beta implementation will be fully usable, but we're going to premine 99% of the coins on the beta, as sort of a "NOT FINISHED YET" red flag. After a few months of beta, we'll decide how much needs to change for a 1.0, and we'll release a 1.0 that has sianotes and no premining.
Luke and I are ecstatic. Wanted to share my enthusiasm. I know it's been a roller coaster, but that seems to be the expectation for startups and early stage investing.
Good to hear, looking forward to updated whitepaper.
I had a sort of zen minimalist moment yesterday. We have a new specification for Sia, and it's really really simple. Even simpler than Bitcoin, because we simplified the way the scripting system works.
It's pretty much the most minimal possible protocol that allows decentralized storage to happen. There are hosts that announce they have storage, and there are files that hosts agree to store, and the hosts submit proof-of-storage on the files to get paid. If they don't submit proof-of-storage, then the uploader gets refunded automatically.
And that's pretty much it, happening on a blockchain. It's so simple that we should have an alpha ready to go within a few weeks, maybe 4 to 6. I'm actually really excited about this new protocol, because it's simple enough to implement quickly and powerful enough to allow a full structure of decentralized storage.
We do sacrifice a few things:
1. There is no global network price. Hosts set their own price.
2. There is no automatic file repair. Clients will need to manage file repairs themselves. This means they need to be online to make the repairs, but that means running 'repair' every few months instead of needing to be online all the time.
3. There is no 'sublinear consensus'. Sia is a single blockchain and will need to deal with blockchain bloat in all of the same ways that apply to other altcoins. This shouldn't be a problem until we have multiple millions of users.
That's basically it. We slimmed things down to the very core requirements: decentralized storage that doesn't require you to be online all the time. Turns out you can do this with only a few simple changes to the Bitcoin protocol. We should still be completely compatible with enterprise customers, which I think is where the majority of our users will eventually come from. Without sublinear consensus, I'm having troubles imagining that we'll be useful for files below 10GB in size, but that's a problem for the future. Enterprise customers are unlikely to need files less than 1TB in size (replace file with 'cloud disk' --> 'file' is a misleading term). A 2.0 down the line will probably address this (requiring either a hardfork or a different cryptocurrency). We want to delay sublinear consensus because right now there are no good solutions to decentralized storage. We can change this without decentralized storage and we think it's more valuable to release something simple now than something complex and potentially insecure after we spend 3-6 more months planning it out.
We're planning on releasing a whitepaper alongside a beta implementation. The beta implementation will be fully usable, but we're going to premine 99% of the coins on the beta, as sort of a "NOT FINISHED YET" red flag. After a few months of beta, we'll decide how much needs to change for a 1.0, and we'll release a 1.0 that has sianotes and no premining.
Luke and I are ecstatic. Wanted to share my enthusiasm. I know it's been a roller coaster, but that seems to be the expectation for startups and early stage investing.
It's pretty much the most minimal possible protocol that allows decentralized storage to happen. There are hosts that announce they have storage, and there are files that hosts agree to store, and the hosts submit proof-of-storage on the files to get paid. If they don't submit proof-of-storage, then the uploader gets refunded automatically.
And that's pretty much it, happening on a blockchain. It's so simple that we should have an alpha ready to go within a few weeks, maybe 4 to 6. I'm actually really excited about this new protocol, because it's simple enough to implement quickly and powerful enough to allow a full structure of decentralized storage.
We do sacrifice a few things:
1. There is no global network price. Hosts set their own price.
2. There is no automatic file repair. Clients will need to manage file repairs themselves. This means they need to be online to make the repairs, but that means running 'repair' every few months instead of needing to be online all the time.
3. There is no 'sublinear consensus'. Sia is a single blockchain and will need to deal with blockchain bloat in all of the same ways that apply to other altcoins. This shouldn't be a problem until we have multiple millions of users.
That's basically it. We slimmed things down to the very core requirements: decentralized storage that doesn't require you to be online all the time. Turns out you can do this with only a few simple changes to the Bitcoin protocol. We should still be completely compatible with enterprise customers, which I think is where the majority of our users will eventually come from. Without sublinear consensus, I'm having troubles imagining that we'll be useful for files below 10GB in size, but that's a problem for the future. Enterprise customers are unlikely to need files less than 1TB in size (replace file with 'cloud disk' --> 'file' is a misleading term). A 2.0 down the line will probably address this (requiring either a hardfork or a different cryptocurrency). We want to delay sublinear consensus because right now there are no good solutions to decentralized storage. We can change this without decentralized storage and we think it's more valuable to release something simple now than something complex and potentially insecure after we spend 3-6 more months planning it out.
We're planning on releasing a whitepaper alongside a beta implementation. The beta implementation will be fully usable, but we're going to premine 99% of the coins on the beta, as sort of a "NOT FINISHED YET" red flag. After a few months of beta, we'll decide how much needs to change for a 1.0, and we'll release a 1.0 that has sianotes and no premining.
Luke and I are ecstatic. Wanted to share my enthusiasm. I know it's been a roller coaster, but that seems to be the expectation for startups and early stage investing.
I'm kind of liking this. It shows you are committed to this for the long term which I think was the concern for some recently. As long as you guys are still trying to make Sia a huge revenue making machine for Nebulous then Sianote holders will mutually benefit obviously.
Got enough ideas down to put together a new whitepaper. We've opted for a dumb protocol that has smart clients. Our v1 is going to look a lot like Bitcoin, except that it's also going to have a list of hosts and a list of files. You upload files to one host at a time, and the host must agree to store the file, you can't just upload arbitrarily. This allows the hosts to protect themselves against illegal files.
Clients will contact a bunch of hosts at a a time, and store things redundantly. The blockchain will force hosts to perform proofs of storage. Clients and hosts will have a bunch of tools that allow them to negotiate price, but I don't think that the price will be able to change throughout the lifetime of the file. Hosts can agree to pay penalties if they lose the file or fail to perform storage proofs.
That's about all of the details I have right now but I'm optimistic. Our long term plan is as follows:
1. Create new whitepaper
2. Have experienced people look at it, such as the core devs
3. Launch an alpha and test things.
4. Launch a _beta_ product that is fully functioning, and has sianotes. We hope this is done in Q2 2015.
5. Grow and support the _beta_ product.
6. Create new whitepaper, incorporating more dramatic changes. There are a lot of things that I think could be improved, but they are all ambitious, and I think it would be foolish to try and complete any of them in the next year. This whitepaper will probably not be done until 2016.
7. Have it reviewed, hype it.
8. Create alpha, test
9. Create 1.0 for Sia. This step probably won't be complete until mid 2017.
====
So the idea is to do something easy and very similar to Bitcoin for our first product, but being transparent about the idea that it's not the final iteration. We want to get something out because we believe it will take a long time to have something more sophisticated that is also properly secure. I think we will be able to return to quorum-style scalability, which will once again enable many many small files.
Having a file storage beta that's making us money will give us experience, we'll know the types of features that are missing that are most useful after we have a cryptocurrency. We'll know where the most severe bugs are.
There is a possibility that we simply upgrade the beta to the 1.0 after a few years. This is hugely dependent on the miners being in agreement though. Altcoins like Nxt have had some success doing regular hard forks. If it looks like we can safely hardfork our beta product, we'll probably prefer that approach.
I'm very much into the idea of smaller iterations where we try new things each iteration. A cryptocurrency that does that is essentially centralized around the developers however. We'll start with this first whitepaper, have a big launch and start supporting actual decentralized storage apps. And then we'll figure out where to go from there based on what people like and don't like, and what they want or don't want.
Thanks for sticking with us. Working on a new whitepaper, no eta.
Clients will contact a bunch of hosts at a a time, and store things redundantly. The blockchain will force hosts to perform proofs of storage. Clients and hosts will have a bunch of tools that allow them to negotiate price, but I don't think that the price will be able to change throughout the lifetime of the file. Hosts can agree to pay penalties if they lose the file or fail to perform storage proofs.
That's about all of the details I have right now but I'm optimistic. Our long term plan is as follows:
1. Create new whitepaper
2. Have experienced people look at it, such as the core devs
3. Launch an alpha and test things.
4. Launch a _beta_ product that is fully functioning, and has sianotes. We hope this is done in Q2 2015.
5. Grow and support the _beta_ product.
6. Create new whitepaper, incorporating more dramatic changes. There are a lot of things that I think could be improved, but they are all ambitious, and I think it would be foolish to try and complete any of them in the next year. This whitepaper will probably not be done until 2016.
7. Have it reviewed, hype it.
8. Create alpha, test
9. Create 1.0 for Sia. This step probably won't be complete until mid 2017.
====
So the idea is to do something easy and very similar to Bitcoin for our first product, but being transparent about the idea that it's not the final iteration. We want to get something out because we believe it will take a long time to have something more sophisticated that is also properly secure. I think we will be able to return to quorum-style scalability, which will once again enable many many small files.
Having a file storage beta that's making us money will give us experience, we'll know the types of features that are missing that are most useful after we have a cryptocurrency. We'll know where the most severe bugs are.
There is a possibility that we simply upgrade the beta to the 1.0 after a few years. This is hugely dependent on the miners being in agreement though. Altcoins like Nxt have had some success doing regular hard forks. If it looks like we can safely hardfork our beta product, we'll probably prefer that approach.
I'm very much into the idea of smaller iterations where we try new things each iteration. A cryptocurrency that does that is essentially centralized around the developers however. We'll start with this first whitepaper, have a big launch and start supporting actual decentralized storage apps. And then we'll figure out where to go from there based on what people like and don't like, and what they want or don't want.
Thanks for sticking with us. Working on a new whitepaper, no eta.
I believed Sia was a good investment because of the potential "enterprise friendly" goals. So I am for that. $1,000-$5,000 as the potential best case scenario upside isn't really a lot considering the risk and how much we paid. But hopefully, Sia will be bigger than even that estimate. Well, my unofficial vote is to continue the project. I bought mostly at post ipo prices which is a lot of $ but I believe as long as you guys still live and breathe Sia its a good investment. Thanks guys.
Sounds good. Thanks!
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