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The Sia team has really impressed me with their approach. They're the type of devs that keep quiet and just get the work done. No hype, no grandiose promises,

The Sia team has really impressed me with their approach. They're the type of devs that keep quiet and just get the work done. No hype, no grandiose promises, just hard work and solving hard problems. I think that in the end they'll be the ones that come out ahead when it comes to decentralized storage.

api 9y ago
You're making me want to actually try Sia for real stuff.
- shepardrtc 9y ago
  I like them because they're really trying to solve the problems around decentralized storage. Storage will be a very valuable resource for a long time to come, so anyone who can make it cheap and make it work well will have solved a valuable problem. Take a look at the companies that have invested money in them (Google is one), and you'll see that they have strong interest in what the team is doing. And I'm not talking about millions, but more like normal investment money to fund hiring of people. Here's an article about them: https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2017/08/07/sia/sUZ0p3EEAsgVuL2aGCeqEJ/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2017/08/07/sia/sUZ0p3EE...
nemo1618 9y ago
Hey, Sia core dev here. From the beginning, we've prided ourselves writing code instead of pushing PR pieces and designing flashy websites. So I'm glad that you (and others) picked up on those values. By keeping our heads down, we've built the only truly distributed and decentralized marketplace for storage, and we did it with a team and a budget far smaller than our competitors. Thanks for your support -- posts like this motivate me more than almost anything else.
- synctext 9y ago
  Hi, Tribler dev here. awesome to see everybody here.. Do Sia and Filecoin take into account the "oversupply problem"? Filecoin devs nicely explain their sybil-attack strategy with growing your identity. However, how can you earn credits if nobody likes you and you happen to have a low-performance node? Is this a real problem or are we missing something? For details, see our journal article on a macroeconomic sharing model from 2012, https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/files/1517977/Meulpolder_et_al-2013-Concurrency_and_Computation__Practice_and_Experience.pdf https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/files/1517977/Meulpolder_...
  - iamnotnicola 9y ago
    Hey, great question! (i am filecoin/ipfs/etc employee) I am going to give some definitions (please chip in case of my misunderstanding) - “nobody likes you”: reputation is not central to Filecoin, so I guess you cannot be “not liked”. Whether you are trusted or not, the clients will pay you only if you have provided a proof of having offered a service. Note: Filecoin has pseudonyms, if for some reasons your address is not liked, you can create a new Filecoin address. So every “not liked” case eventually reduces to being a new user. TL;DR I will assume you mean “a new user”. - “low-performance node”: Filecoin does not require special hardware, but off-the-shelf CPUs, and whether you have 1 or 1000, it should not matter in practice (all the operations are sequential). I wouldn’t consider the amount of storage as “performance”, your node can always participate as a small miner. If by low performance you mean faulty hardware, then you are really not contributing to the network. So I am going to consider “low-performance” to mean slow network connection. Now, if you are a new node without much track record and with a bad internet connection, you could: - participate as a Storage Miner in the Storage Market (your job will be mainly storing the file and generate proofs offline that you have stored the file, you will need just enough internet connection to be updated with the head of the chain) and every now and then (even with a bad network connection), submit the proofs to the chain. In addition, if you are happy listening to new transactions and have enough storage (unless you consider yourself REALLY lucky), then you can participate to mining Filecoin and earn tokens from transaction fees and mining rewards. My strategy would be to start with lower prices than the rest of the network, if you are also mining, block reward could cover for your lower prices - participate as a Retrieval Miner, you might not be that successful in comparison to fast speed super connected nodes that have incredible amount of storage, BUT you could try to store and serve “rare” files or serve to nodes that are closer to you (since you could become their node of preference) I took advantage to explain my reasoning so that others could find this helpful too :) I will take a look at the paper, thanks for sharing, there is a lot the community can learn from the first wave of p2p file sharing.
    - synctext 9y ago
      Fascinating in-depth answer. thnx! > clients will pay you only if you have provided a proof of having offered a service. Sounds like a good approach. You need to make trade-offs in your design for storage providers I believe. You can bias clients to deal with and pay reliable plus fast providers. That means slow peers have less chance to earn coins. Or take a performance hit and use fairness as a guiding principle. Then slow or new users get selected with increased probability. True? > you could try to store and serve “rare” files Has your team done work on 'investment functions' to select which "rare" files to store? You want to be paid, so what is incentive compatible? For a few years our phd/master students have been struggling to get a high-performance algorithm: https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/issues/1842#issuecomment-339310825 https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/issues/1842#issuecomment-...
- wmf 9y ago
  Sooner or later (i.e. before Filecoin ships) you do need to turn on the marketing so that people will use what you built.

api 9y ago

You're making me want to actually try Sia for real stuff.

shepardrtc 9y ago
I like them because they're really trying to solve the problems around decentralized storage. Storage will be a very valuable resource for a long time to come, so anyone who can make it cheap and make it work well will have solved a valuable problem. Take a look at the companies that have invested money in them (Google is one), and you'll see that they have strong interest in what the team is doing. And I'm not talking about millions, but more like normal investment money to fund hiring of people. Here's an article about them: https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2017/08/07/sia/sUZ0p3EEAsgVuL2aGCeqEJ/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2017/08/07/sia/sUZ0p3EE...

nemo1618 9y ago

Hey, Sia core dev here. From the beginning, we've prided ourselves writing code instead of pushing PR pieces and designing flashy websites. So I'm glad that you (and others) picked up on those values. By keeping our heads down, we've built the only truly distributed and decentralized marketplace for storage, and we did it with a team and a budget far smaller than our competitors. Thanks for your support -- posts like this motivate me more than almost anything else.

synctext 9y ago
Hi, Tribler dev here. awesome to see everybody here.. Do Sia and Filecoin take into account the "oversupply problem"? Filecoin devs nicely explain their sybil-attack strategy with growing your identity. However, how can you earn credits if nobody likes you and you happen to have a low-performance node? Is this a real problem or are we missing something? For details, see our journal article on a macroeconomic sharing model from 2012, https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/files/1517977/Meulpolder_et_al-2013-Concurrency_and_Computation__Practice_and_Experience.pdf https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/files/1517977/Meulpolder_...
- iamnotnicola 9y ago
  Hey, great question! (i am filecoin/ipfs/etc employee) I am going to give some definitions (please chip in case of my misunderstanding) - “nobody likes you”: reputation is not central to Filecoin, so I guess you cannot be “not liked”. Whether you are trusted or not, the clients will pay you only if you have provided a proof of having offered a service. Note: Filecoin has pseudonyms, if for some reasons your address is not liked, you can create a new Filecoin address. So every “not liked” case eventually reduces to being a new user. TL;DR I will assume you mean “a new user”. - “low-performance node”: Filecoin does not require special hardware, but off-the-shelf CPUs, and whether you have 1 or 1000, it should not matter in practice (all the operations are sequential). I wouldn’t consider the amount of storage as “performance”, your node can always participate as a small miner. If by low performance you mean faulty hardware, then you are really not contributing to the network. So I am going to consider “low-performance” to mean slow network connection. Now, if you are a new node without much track record and with a bad internet connection, you could: - participate as a Storage Miner in the Storage Market (your job will be mainly storing the file and generate proofs offline that you have stored the file, you will need just enough internet connection to be updated with the head of the chain) and every now and then (even with a bad network connection), submit the proofs to the chain. In addition, if you are happy listening to new transactions and have enough storage (unless you consider yourself REALLY lucky), then you can participate to mining Filecoin and earn tokens from transaction fees and mining rewards. My strategy would be to start with lower prices than the rest of the network, if you are also mining, block reward could cover for your lower prices - participate as a Retrieval Miner, you might not be that successful in comparison to fast speed super connected nodes that have incredible amount of storage, BUT you could try to store and serve “rare” files or serve to nodes that are closer to you (since you could become their node of preference) I took advantage to explain my reasoning so that others could find this helpful too :) I will take a look at the paper, thanks for sharing, there is a lot the community can learn from the first wave of p2p file sharing.
  - synctext 9y ago
    Fascinating in-depth answer. thnx! > clients will pay you only if you have provided a proof of having offered a service. Sounds like a good approach. You need to make trade-offs in your design for storage providers I believe. You can bias clients to deal with and pay reliable plus fast providers. That means slow peers have less chance to earn coins. Or take a performance hit and use fairness as a guiding principle. Then slow or new users get selected with increased probability. True? > you could try to store and serve “rare” files Has your team done work on 'investment functions' to select which "rare" files to store? You want to be paid, so what is incentive compatible? For a few years our phd/master students have been struggling to get a high-performance algorithm: https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/issues/1842#issuecomment-339310825 https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/issues/1842#issuecomment-...
wmf 9y ago
Sooner or later (i.e. before Filecoin ships) you do need to turn on the marketing so that people will use what you built.