What a way to end the year. 2017 has been quite a trip for Sia and our users. Twelve months ago, Siacoin had a market cap of $5 million USD, and a single coin was worth $.0002. You can read that out loud as two hundredths of a cent. Today those numbers are just shy of a billion (with a b) and about 3 cents, respectively.

I typically don’t discuss Siacoin’s valuation or price in this monthly post. This space is more importantly used for keeping the community updated on important info and sharing highlights from the past few weeks. But I feel like it’s important to note not only the amazing rise of our project, but the entire cryptocurrency/blockchain space. This year the mainstream media picked up our stories. This year made it clear that this is serious business.

In this update

Growing pains Sia releases v1.3.1 Developer’s corner Don’t get scammed By the numbers Me, in 2018

Growing pains

As with every project ever started in the history of mankind, Sia has had some growing pains. One especially recent and acute pain was as a result of the Sia network hardfork at block 135,000. In order to prep the network for the hash onslaught that ASIC mining will bring in mid-2018, the Difficulty Adjustment Algorithm was updated. A bug in the code caused a number of issues across our official app, Sia-UI, as well as the network. At the same time, our blockchain explorer was down. This meant that exchanges couldn’t reliably confirm whether or not transactions had been broadcast properly.

This meant issues for our users, like the inability to access funds, stuck transactions, and host downtime.

When you realize you have pain, you have that initial, instinctive reaction to cover or touch the affected area. This is what our amazing communities did. Across Discord, Reddit, and Facebook, there was an outpouring of help and instructions. Our more seasoned users were on top of their game as usual, assisting others and even creating their own guides. I saw new users returning to help people using solutions they had just learned themselves.

Of course, our developers were on top of addressing the issue as fast as they could. I created an official troubleshooting post so we could direct users to a single place for help with all issues. The core devs poured themselves into bugfixing and troubleshooting, leading into our next topic.

Sia releases v1.3.1, and other resolutions

This was always going to be a big update, filled with tons of fine-tunings and streamlined features. Then it also needed to pull double-duty and fix the aforementioned issues. No one will say it better than David —

I’m not sure where to start. We’ve changed a lot of things under the hood. One of the first big goals for this release was stable contracting. This version is better about monitoring the health of your contracts. When hosts disappear, they get replaced quickly. If a contract starts to run low on funds, it gets renewed automatically. Money is allocated more intelligently between contracts, which allows you to use your allowance a lot more efficiently. It also means that you pay less in contract fees. We overhauled uploading. The upload code is now much more able to use the full capabilities of your hosts, which means files will upload faster, and you’ll see much more steady full-capacity usage instead of spiky usage patterns. We overhauled the repair process. When files start to lose their redundancy, they will get repaired quickly and at full speed. File repair no longer greatly slows down your download or upload speeds. The components of uploading, downloading, and repair now work together cleanly and effectively instead of stepping on each others toes. This release has had an unprecedented number of community contributions. From bugfixes, to API extensions, to algorithmic help, we’ve been very excited to see the number of non-core-team pull requests grow. It’s a fantastic sign for the health of the network, and means that Sia continues to grow up and become independent from us. As a reminder, this release also contains a hardfork. The current difficulty adjustment algorithm for Sia has a bug that makes the block time 30 minutes instead of 10 minutes. This release fixes that (a one line of code change), but the fix is a hardfork that activates at block 139,000. This release comes from the bottom of our hearts, we hope it treats you well!

As you can see, 1.3.1 was a big deal. We’ve already seen it reduce the number of support tickets generated for Sia-UI launch issues to near zero.

An important note from all this: until the next hardfork at block 139,000, block times will be stuck at 30 minutes. This means extended confirmation times for transactions. If you’ve sent a Siacoin transaction lately and it has not completed yet, give it time. Many users will reach out for help only to have their transaction arrive at its destination later in the day.

Updates from the…

Over the past month, 57 new pieces of code were merged and 68 issues were closed. This was mostly in service of 1.3.1, and you can read the official release notes, but David’s message above contains all of the most important info.

As always, I highly recommend joining our Discord server to get these updates straight from user @tbenz9.

Becoming a contributor

If you’re interested in contributing to the Sia codebase, there are a number of issues waiting for community development. Please read the Guide to Contributing To Sia and comment on any issues you plan to work on.

Don’t get scammed

Scammers are as old as opportunity itself. During the American gold rush of the mid-1800s, a man named Fletcher created his famous “Gold-o-meter” that could find veins of gold ore in the ground. Eager miners paid him for his services as he scouted for veins with his device, but he would skip town after being paid. The Gold-o-meter was a stick with a ball stuck on the end.

There have already been multiple attempts to attack unaware Sia users. The latest comes in the form of siacoin-online.com, which appears to be stealing money from those who sign up. This website is not affiliated with Sia, even though they are using our branding and company info.

Always use best practices when dealing with financial transactions of any sort. Go through verified support channels and ask if a site is legitimate. Hop on the #help channel in Discord to get some advice. Be careful out there.

By the numbers

All of our channels have seen wild growth from last month. All crypto communities surged when Bitcoin neared $20,000, but this is really incredible regardless. Here’s the month over month breakdown:

Facebook: up 47%

Twitter: up 42%

Reddit: up 29%

Discord: up 67%

As we continue to grow, keep in mind that these are places to talk with and learn from your fellow users. Be respectful in these places, and we’ll build on the best community in crypto.

Me, in 2018

Good old Community Manager Steve will have an expanded role with Sia in the new year. For a project to succeed, a lot of things need to go right. You need the right team, the right product, and the right time.

At least, that’s the short version. You also need great resources, community development, proper support and a million other things. Doing any one of these right gives you a slightly better shot at making it. I’m going to do everything I can to help Sia succeed.

I’ll have a separate post detailing this soon, where I’ll wax poetic about the industry and all sorts of stuff. If you enjoy the idea of romance novels mixed with Michael Bay, you’ll love this.

It also might just be a nice little post about my new job.

The wrap up

As always, reach out with any questions. From Sia to you, we hope your holiday season was joyous. We have big plans for 2018, and couldn't be more excited to get to work. Have a happy New Year.

Steve