We’re winding down the year, but not the activity. While Thanksgiving had us home with family, the rest of the month saw new integrations, meetups with users, and dedicated progress toward the core Sia platform.

We also began alpha testing our latest product — SiaStream. The perfect home for your media, it lets you enjoy super-cheap storage for your media files, completely under your control on the Sia network.

And now we accelerate toward the end of the year with incredible progress made in 2019. We’ll focus more on that next month, but for now let’s get to the happenings in November.

In this update

The SiaStream alpha A month of code Community Spotlight The exchange situation Scams targeting Sia users Dev updates

The SiaStream alpha

In November, we launched the alpha for SiaStream. SiaStream allows you to upload your movies and tv shows to Sia, mount Sia as a FUSE drive, and then stream your files back from any media app. We built this app with Plex in mind, but it works with any media app you prefer.

We put together a really beautiful dashboard and on-boarding process, and will be looking to release an more open beta in the coming weeks. Stay tuned for more info!

A month of code

Just like last year, Sia co-founder Luke Champine is hosting his private leaderboard for Advent of Code. Sign up at https://adventofcode.com/ and use this leaderboard code: 30280-93df612d

Advent of Code is a programming challenge where you compete to solve a new puzzle each day in the month of December. It's a fun way to learn new algorithms, data structures, and programming languages. The faster you solve the problems, the more points you'll earn. We'll also be giving out swag to participants -- more details on that later.

Community Spotlight

David, Chris, and PJ hosted a meetup in Zurich. It was a great event and wonderful to get some face time in with the community.

You can learn about future gatherings by joining our Meetup group.

We recently integrated with Abra (more on that later), and they hosted a talk with David Vorick about decentralized digital ownership.

The exchange situation

Siacoin is now available on Abra. You can deposit, withdraw, buy, sell, and exchange SC using the Abra iOS and Android app.

Also, a reminder: Poloniex is ceasing operations for US residents. Trading has already ended, and you have until at least December 15th to remove your funds.

The full list

Scams targeting Sia users

When online, it’s becoming better practice to assume that any unsolicited messages are some form of spam or scam.

A bot impersonating Sia has been DMing users and telling them to download a mandatory update to Sia-UI, calling it 1.4.2.0. It directed users to a Github profile designed to look like the official NebulousLabs repo. This update is not from us, and will likely infect your computer with malware. Fortunately, our diligent community reported the Discord profile and Github repo, and it seems that it has been removed.

That being said, this likely won’t be the last time something like this is attempted, and it’s important to remember that Nebulous will never personally solicit you to download a new version of Sia. We will only ever let you know a new version has been released via Discord, Twitter, Reddit, and Blockfolio, and inform you what might happen to your Sia experience if you don’t download it.

Updates from the…

1.4.2 Release Candidate

On November 11th, we released RC1 for our latest version of Sia to the #contributors channel of our Discord server. The most notable changes include better file contract management and reduced file contract churn. There should also be some performance improvements, and a more stable repair processes.

We’re targeting the full 1.4.2 release this year, which will provide a number of great updates. Find the full list here.

Other updates

Chris finished a deep change on the Sia filesystem that improves the performance and reliability of operations such as moving and renaming files and directories.

Matt created a new tool, connmonitor , that will provide more granular information about the bandwidth usage by each Sia module.

Community member DaWe35 added the --force flag to the siac host folder remove command. This is a feature often requested by hosts that need to remove a Sia folder when it is not available anymore.

Marcin added a watchdog subsystem to the renter module to improve its reliability. This watchdog monitors the blockchain for information about the renter’s contracts (like contracts that failed to be included on the blockchain or proofs of storage submitted by hosts) and takes necessary actions, like re-broadcasting a stalled contract or informing about a host that failed its obligations.

Matt improved the API documentation: the format has been cleaned, the difference between available and recoverable files has been clarified and typos were corrected.

A number of new code analysis tools were implemented in the Sia repos, including a static analysis tool to look for unused code, and dependency caching in the Gitlab CI/CD jobs.

Several merge requests were added for documentation improvements, better examples, and to fix typos.

Marcin added a churn limiter which reduces the amount of contract churn from a renter. This will be a primary change in Sia version 1.4.2 when it’s released.

PJ extends the alerts system to the host module.

Chris has worked to ensure that the changes on the Sia filesystem are backwards compatible. He also added extensive documentation about how the Sia filesystem works.

Chris has also made it possible to serve downloads from the local disk instead of from Sia, if available, to improve performance. This can be overridden with a flag on the download API.

The development team has recently been pushing for new code analysis tools. After their deployment, various issues have been found and fixed. These fixes may not be user facing, but demonstrate a commitment to writing good, secure Go code.

It’s time to…

We look behind at all the work that’s been accomplished in 2019, and ahead to all the great things 2020 will bring. We’ll have some news coming up — we always do, don’t we?

And some great things have already happened in December that will be great to recap in another few weeks! Stay warm, stay healthy, and if you celebrate the holidays in December, have a wonderful time.

Steve