After the Sia team recovered from the holiday season, we wasted no time in getting back to work. We released new tools to interact with Sia in a powerful way, our friends at Goobox built something special that they shared with the community, and we made more progress on the next major Sia release.

There’s other info we can’t share quite yet — but it’s exciting. In the meantime, flick through this post to find some great reading, like David’s posts on 51% attacks or his talk on the ASIC industry and how devs can progress.

In this update

Let’s talk about 51% attacks Developer’s Corner Us David talks ASICs Goobox Alpha The Exchange Situation

Let’s talk about 51% attacks

Sia lead dev David Vorick published a post about the growing frequency and severity of 51% attacks in the cryptocurrency space. He details current theory behind them, what’s changed to allow more of them, and how dev teams can combat them in the future.

As the cryptocurrency space continues to develop, we are going to continue seeing sophisticated attacks. In the next 6–12 months, most of these attacks are likely to be focused around double spends of cryptocurrencies with poor proof-of-work security, but increasingly the vulnerable decisions of developers are going to be exploited.

Read the post here.

Updates from the…

Over the past month, 34 issues were closed, 25 were created, and 31 pieces of code were added to the core codebase. We have a snapshot of updates here, but tbenz’ and hakkane’s official updates can be found weekly in the #announcements channel in Discord.

Notable features

| Chris added a new API endpoint to query the most recent addresses generated by the wallet. This will help wallets with thousands or even millions of wallet addresses have a performant API experience.

| Chris also started the compatibility code that will enable current Sia users to transition to the 1.4.0 release in a few weeks.

| Chris added backwards compatibility code for renters with old data stored on Sia that upgrade to 1.4.0. The next Sia version will feature a complete redesign of the of the SiaFiles , and this MR ensures that upon the first startup of the new client, the old metadata files of the renters will upgrade to this new format. https://gitlab.com/NebulousLabs/Sia/merge_requests/3347

| Matt merged code focused on improving the file repair process. This first MR implemented a new routine that will check and update over time the health and repair status of uploaded files. The health of files and directories will be re-evaluated every hour. https://gitlab.com/NebulousLabs/Sia/merge_requests/3374

| Luke made additional progress on the RPC protocol upgrade (the communications channel between hosts and renters).

The team made a lot of progress on a public release of 1.4.0, and we expect a release candidate to be issued very soon.

A full list of updates can be found on GitLab. Just click on the version number to get the release notes for each update.

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.

Us

Nebulous co-founder Luke Champine released a personal Sia related project he’s been working on called us . us enables a developer to access lower level Sia functionality than what is available in the Sia API or other official Nebulous releases.

So for the past four years, our priority has been to grow the network and create an active, friendly community of renters and hosts. We’ve made great progress in that regard, and today, Sia has matured to the point that developers are eager to engage with the network at a deeper level.

You can read more about us on the Sia blog.

David talks ASICs

David gave a talk at the Stanford Blockchain Conference about designing cryptocurrency ASICs. He detailed the process, starting from the beginning and getting into the nitty gritty details, and talked about what it’s like to operate in the space today.

Learn about this incredibly intricate industry and the processes involved.

Goobox Alpha

The Goobox Alpha has launched! Goobox introducing their free file sharing solution that allows you to upload files using a slick web interface. Files can be easily shared and data is stored on the encrypted, distributed Sia network.

The Goobox team published a guest post on the Sia blog about the launch of the alpha, how Goobox works, and the philosophy behind what they want to accomplish.

Goobox Alpha will compete directly with [major] services, but with the additional selling point of being zero-knowledge, end-to-end encrypted and not being dependent on a fault-tolerant centralized storage system.

Try it out now.

The Exchange Situation

The List

Here’s the current list of exchanges that support Siacoin. I keep this up to date, but if you know of any additions or removals please let me know.

It’s time to…

Here’s to 2019, to you, and to us. I think you’ll be really happy with the direction of Sia in 2019, and the coming months should reveal some very exciting news.

But let’s not forget the great work that our team has already done. And be sure to think of the things you’ve already accomplished in your lives. Nothing happens overnight, and few great things are achieved alone. As always, reach out to me with any questions, any time.

Steve