Not really anymore. It's hard to walk away because I have so much fun experimenting with Sia, but I don't think I can really make a living doing anything with Sia. My Sia blog had a dedicated, enthusiastic following, but the niche is so small that the following was like 50 people.
>What are your thoughts on Filecoin or other alternatives?
I haven't looked too deeply into Filecoin. I read their whitepaper, but I feel like it's hard to really grasp before I have software I can actually run. They still haven't published any code, just some whitepapers.
Filecoin has so much money and so many employees that it's plausible that they're working on something in secret that's going to blow everyone else away once it's released. But it's also possible that they've got nothing and they're going to release a $250M dud.
I think Storj is a trainwreck with almost zero chance of coming out of the decentralized storage game on top. They're not even really a decentralized storage project. They're an open source project that tells people they're decentralized to cash in on the trend towards decentralization.
>You're one of the few people with any understanding of this, what are the barriers preventing adoption and even lower prices?
The biggest barrier right now is how difficult it is for customers to store data on Sia.
I can sign up for AWS/GCP/Azure and have data in their clouds in ~15 minutes. With Sia, there are SO many steps just to start uploading data and the process is not documented well. Not only that, there are huge waits between steps. So it's like start Sia, wait 36 hours for the blockchain to sync, create a wallet, wait an hour for the wallet to initialize, unlock the wallet, wait 10 mins for wallet to unlock, and on and on.
Even after Sia is totally initialized and ready for use, it's still much harder than anything else to use. They don't yet support backup and recovery, so you're stuck uploading an additional copy of all your data to another cloud provider anyway. And then even in the remaining scenarios, there are no client libraries for using Sia, so you have to write a ton of boilerplate code to wrap HTTP calls to their API.
>Have you read or contributed to the source code?
I've read a lot of Sia's source code. I'm the #9 top contributor to their core codebase. Relative to other cryptocurrency projects, their code is good, but that's kind of a low bar. I think their code has been degrading over time. Their functions are getting much longer, more complicated, and depend on increasingly complex lock synchronization behavior. Their builds are broken about 50% of the time just due to flaky tests.
>Have you still been working with Sia?
Not really anymore. It's hard to walk away because I have so much fun experimenting with Sia, but I don't think I can really make a living doing anything with Sia. My Sia blog had a dedicated, enthusiastic following, but the niche is so small that the following was like 50 people.
>What are your thoughts on Filecoin or other alternatives?
I haven't looked too deeply into Filecoin. I read their whitepaper, but I feel like it's hard to really grasp before I have software I can actually run. They still haven't published any code, just some whitepapers.
Filecoin has so much money and so many employees that it's plausible that they're working on something in secret that's going to blow everyone else away once it's released. But it's also possible that they've got nothing and they're going to release a $250M dud.
I think Storj is a trainwreck with almost zero chance of coming out of the decentralized storage game on top. They're not even really a decentralized storage project. They're an open source project that tells people they're decentralized to cash in on the trend towards decentralization.
>You're one of the few people with any understanding of this, what are the barriers preventing adoption and even lower prices?
The biggest barrier right now is how difficult it is for customers to store data on Sia.
I can sign up for AWS/GCP/Azure and have data in their clouds in ~15 minutes. With Sia, there are SO many steps just to start uploading data and the process is not documented well. Not only that, there are huge waits between steps. So it's like start Sia, wait 36 hours for the blockchain to sync, create a wallet, wait an hour for the wallet to initialize, unlock the wallet, wait 10 mins for wallet to unlock, and on and on.
Even after Sia is totally initialized and ready for use, it's still much harder than anything else to use. They don't yet support backup and recovery, so you're stuck uploading an additional copy of all your data to another cloud provider anyway. And then even in the remaining scenarios, there are no client libraries for using Sia, so you have to write a ton of boilerplate code to wrap HTTP calls to their API.
>Have you read or contributed to the source code?
I've read a lot of Sia's source code. I'm the #9 top contributor to their core codebase. Relative to other cryptocurrency projects, their code is good, but that's kind of a low bar. I think their code has been degrading over time. Their functions are getting much longer, more complicated, and depend on increasingly complex lock synchronization behavior. Their builds are broken about 50% of the time just due to flaky tests.
>Was that too many questions?
I'm ready for more!