Did The Bitcoin Civil War Help Dash? What is SiaCoin? How Does Ethereum Gas Work?

Today’s Crypto Snippet

While the cryptoworld was focused on an existential battle between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, a less popular top ten crypto known as Dash increased in value by over 50%. Dash features instant payments which purportedly allows users to confirm payments in under 1 second. While the Bitcoin world quarreled about scalability, it’s clear that some savvy investors have at least temporarily put their muster behind Dash, which already possesses high transaction speeds. As Bitcoin continues its civil war, a number of cryptocurrencies including Dash, Litecoin, Ripple and Viacoin among others are improving their infrastructure at a respectable pace. After the weekend’s events Dash became the 5th most valuable cryptocurrency by market cap.

Today’s Coin

Sia Coin is a decentralized cloud storage marketplace that lets you rent excess storage on other individuals hard drives. In a world where we all have unused capacity on our hard disks why not sell that excess storage and put our extra space to profitable use? You can think about Sia as a crypto/blockchain version of DropBox. With DropBox, you pay DropBox a fee in order to store your files on their servers. Everyone’s files are sent to the same DropBox controlled servers with DropBox providing access to our stored files. With the Sia ecosystem, you pay other users directly for their excess hard disk storage using SiaCoin.

SiaCoin essentially transforms the cloudstorage relationship and puts it on the blockchain, theoretically creating a marketplace that is cheaper, more secure and arguably more environmentally friendly than current cloud storage models. By allowing customers and hosts to directly interact with each other and by forcing hosts to compete on pricing, Sia claims decentralized cloud storage can be as much as 10x less expensive than DropBox or Amazon. Additionally, Sia is arguably more secure, as it stores your files on dozens of computers across the globe and gives you the private keys to access your data. So, although someone else is storing your data, they don’t actually have access to it. On top of this, by using excess storage across the globe as opposed to running expensive server farms, Sia could prove a more energy efficient method of cloud storage.

Unlike many cryptocurrencies (and direct Sia competitors like Storj) who currently lack a working proof of concept, Sia already operates a beta platform where users can use SiaCoin to purchase storage from other hosts. At the time of writing, only uploads that are 500mb or less are supported, but this is set to increase over the next few years. There are roughly $31B SiaCoin in circulation today and no maximum supply. SiaCoin’s inflationary rate is designed to slowly decrease as the market matures, eventually achieving a roughly 2% inflation rate by 2036. The current inflation rate is roughly 4%.

SiaCoin is currently the 53rd most valuable cryptocurrency by Market Cap with a value of $125MM. It currently trades at roughly $.004 due to its large supply. Close to 100% of SiaCoin trading takes place on Bittrex and Poloenix. SiaCoin seems to be one of few coins on the market that meets a current market need, has a working proof of concept, and already offers utility with their coin.

Today’s Crypto Fact

You may have heard the term “gas” when crypto enthusiasts are discussing Ethereum. But what is this mysterious gas? Gas is Ether, but when deemed “gas”, it’s essentially the fuel that powers the Ethereum network. When an Ethereum user wants to issue a smart contract, conduct a transaction, create a token, or do anything that requires an item to be distributed across the network, the user needs to pay a commensurate amount of “Gas.” Users can also choose to pay more gas if they want their item distributed more quickly. Miners in turn receive gas (again, just ether) for the transactions they process. The fact that gas is such an integral and necessary part of paying miners to power the Ethereum ecosystem is a large factor in giving Ether actual value.