The people at sia.tech have not only built an exciting blockchain technology to leverage a decentralized storage platform. Their approach is exciting and their road map is strong. And their coin serves a functional purpose.

What Is the Platform?

At its core, the Sia decentralized storage platform gives a person (or renter) an affordable, secure place to store data. When user uploads a file to the platform, the files are divided into segments prior to upload on the client. Each file segment is then encrypted. The segments are sent across the platform to different hosts to store. Only you have the key to put the file back together. And for this your pay a little SC coin for the space you use.

Renters

Users of the Sia platform are referred to as renters. You use SiaCoins (SC) to purchase space on the platform through a smart contract. Once you have your purchase, you can push files you want to keep safe, and secure on the platform. A point worth mentioning here is the Sia platform is cheaper to use than conventional cloud storage. 1 TB of storage is approximately $2.00/mth.

Hosts

If you have space on your personal network and want to be part of the platform. Sia UI makes it easy. You can allocate any of your local storage to the network and get paid in SC coins for your space. On average you will earn about 50 SC coins per TB per month.

Why Is This Different — Security and Privacy!

Simply put, the Sia platform offers security and privacy that other platforms do not. If we look at Azure for table storage as an example; Azure replicates your data. If a data center goes down, you flip to one of of your other 2 full copies. But they are full copies, if someone hacked into your storage, they would get all your data (theoretically). With Sia your data is sliced, encrypted and distributed. No one could ever get the full file. Which is huge!

How To Use It

You simply downloads the SIA UI client, configure your wallet , deposits SIA Coins (mine or buy them from Bittrix) and then you can then purchase your first smart data storage contract. Simple right?

SIA UI

But…

There is always a but! Sia UI is where Sia needs to grow before I feel it can really be adopted. The current version of Sia UI works and does everything it says it will do, but the typical end-user or enterprise needs more ease. Once Sia can give us the same freedom of use DropBox or OneDrive offers, I feel Sia will really take hold.

Ultimatley I truly beleive the folks at Sia.Tech have put together a solid use for blockchain technology. Their platform coupled with their coin make an attractive alternative to non-local data storage (notice I didn’t say cloud?) But until their end user experence is improved there will be a niche market.