History

Sia initially started as an idea by David Vorick in 2013 that he was discussing over email with Luke Champine, calling it “the Nimbus network”. After writing the first draft of the whitepaper in September (called “Bytecoin”), David shared it with college friends who together with Luke began programming a prototype. The project was then renamed once more to “Sia” (the Egyptian god of perception, pronounced [sigh-uh]).

It met with positive response on BitcoinTalk, and so David decided to work on Sia full-time as a startup. Together with Luke they applied for Y Combinator, a startup accelerator, and got through the initial screen but were ultimately rejected as the project would take much longer to build than anticipated.

They didn’t have to wait for their chance much longer. After one BitcoinTalk user abused David’s hand-drawn diagrams in order to fraudulently raise money, it was clear that there is enough interest to raise money via crowdfunding.

Not only was the crowdfunding successful, it also helped them with raising contacts and getting introduced to Jim Pallota and their first traditional investment funding. They formally incorporated Nebulous, Inc., and soon after sold Sianotes, later convertible to Siafunds (a supplementary token of the Sia network that will be explained later in the series).

But Sia was a very different project back then. It used Proof of Storage consensus instead of the current Proof of Work (will be explained later in the article), hosts were grouped into “quorum” that were responsible for storing users’ files, and the wallet was also fully scriptable.

Ultimately, David discovered issues in the Proof of Storage algorithm that forced them to start over, but thanks to David’s participation in the Bitcoin core developer community around that time, he became able to understand the unique challenges of cryptocurrencies and use this knowledge to lay a path towards the efficient and well-designed Sia platform as we know it today.

The re-created Sia was heavily inspired by Bitcoin, but improving some of its known deficiencies and using a transaction type that enables storage contracts (digital contracts between those providing storage and paying for storage). It became formalized in the second whitepaper titled “Sia: Simple Decentralized Storage” in November 2014 and the beta version was publicly released six months later with the genesis (first) block being created on June 6th, 2015 at 10:13 EST.

If you are interested in more details and all the progress made through the betas and early releases, definitely check out the Sia Wiki. It contains the complete history up to the end of 2017 and it was used as a source for this article.

At time of writing, the latest major version is 1.4.0 with codename “Draco” (though 1.4.1 is almost ready for release) and as I already mentioned in previous section, it was probably the biggest release since 2015. Everyone can notice the complete visual redesign of Sia-UI, but even more happened under the hood, making Sia faster, more robust and ready for the features we’ve been waiting so long for. Community member and contributor Thomas Bennett (tbenz9) wrote excellent article about 1.4.0 here.