Siacoin is one of the earliest contenders in the decentralised cloud storage space. Siacoin is the coin that is required to transact on the sia network. Sia Network is nothing but a decentralised storage space. In this blog, we shall discuss about siacoin in detail. So, get ready to have an exclusive Siacoin review and know about Siacoin wallet, a bit of siacoin mining and how to buy siacoin on various exchanges across the world.
I hope to make this blog as a first in the series of blogs where we analyse a coin on a certain factors that we feel are crucial to the success of a particular coin. Please note that this is my personal opinion only. Kindly do your own research before making an investment in a particular altcoin.
Siacoin Review : Key Factors to analyse
1. The Team : Just like any startup, Team is the most crucial part of any altcoin. I personally like the teams who have both great developers and sales/marketers to liaison partnerships in the market. Activity on their reddit, slack or other public channels also tells a lot about the transparency in the organisation.
2. USP/Problem Statement : What’s the USP of the coin and what is the problem that they are trying to solve. Just another bitcoin/ethereum use case won’t make any dent at all. I am sure you would agree.
3. Community : What’s the community that the coin has harnessed and what does the community think about them. A good community can bring a lot of virality, unfair advantage and organic growth to the coin.
4. Coin Progression : How has the coin fared on the market after its launch. Their basic stats like their market cap, coins in circulation, links to the important channels etc.
Now, let us checkout Siacoin and analyse it based on the above said important factors. I hope this will help you arrive at a decision on whether you should participate in siacoin or not(in the form of investment, mining or whatever you would like to).
1. The Siacoin Team :
The Team Members :
The Siacoin team consists of:
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David Vorick: Cofounder, CEO, Core Developer
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Luke Champine: Cofounder, President, Core Developer
Both the co-founders are still involved and working full time on the product. This is one really good indication in the team. With that said, team is still looking for a good sales/marketing guy. This is kinda put off for me personally. A good product needs an equal good marketing/sales. With that said though, the Sia team is seriously onto finding the right guy for the job.
The Codebase :
Just like other altcoins, siacoin is open source. The codebase of sia is stored at the nebulous labs(parent company) github at https://github.com/NebulousLabs.
The codebase is fairly active and you can see a lot of activity in all the times.
Fund Raising :
The company has raised around 750K USD of funds from Pyrocon ventures and raptor group. Fund Raising can be considered as good and bad depending upon who you ask.
2. USP/Problem Statement :
Sia has a cut out use case of delivering a distributed blockchain based storage where you have control over your own data at a fraction of price. This is quite a mission to achieve since this competes with who’s who of technology industry including but not limited to Microsoft, Google, Amazon etc. The total addressable size is 20BN USD expected to grow up to 200 BN USD by the end of 2020. Quoting David Vorick(CEO):
” Sia is going to change the face of cloud storage. That’s a $20 billion market, and it’s projected to become a $200 billion market. Sia is not some niche either, it’s a full upgrade to how cloud storage works. We aren’t aiming at 1%, we are aiming at 70-90% market share, because the core technology is that good.
Today, most Internet infrastructure is owned by a small number of companies. When you put your data in the cloud, you give up control. They can choose to delete your data, they can choose to hold your data hostage, they can change their terms of service on you. These are not uncommon situations either. Here’s a story about photobucket requesting ransom prices from Ebay and Amazon. About a month ago, atlassian.com announced massive price increases for their platform, which left many people out to dry. Several months ago, Amazon pulled the unlimited tier from their Amazon Cloud Drive, giving users 180 days to download the data and find a new home.
When you put your data in the cloud, you give it to someone else. The traditional cloud is controlled by humans. There can be downtime, terms changes, price changes, companies can go under (like Soundcloud). We have built a fragile internet that puts the power in the hands of a few.
Sia changes that equation. Sia allows people to use the cloud without giving up control. This is a feature that resonates deeply with IT admins. The majority of IT admins will agree that they don’t like using the Cloud, and that they would rather use another option if they could, except that the cloud offers so many advantages that they are willing to accept the loss of control of their data. Sia changes this equation. IT admins can have all the benefits of the cloud, without giving up control. It’s a big step forward, and it’s the core reason for blockchains existing in the first place.”
Another interesting use case that we see in their roadmap is video streaming. This can be quite exciting and increase the addressable market size. Automatic host pricing is also in the roadmap making whole of the process of setting up a host storage automatic.
3. The Siacoin Community :
Siacoin has garnered quite a community support on reddit, twitter and bitcointalk alike. The developers are quite active on reddit and reply consistently to the queries and doubts posted by the members and reddit users.
They are quite upfront on their roadmap and transparently share their roadmap on the trello. Overall, sia commands a good community and the developers are quite upfront and transparent.
If you have a real interest for crypto currency, you may also like : Best Bitcoin Wallet : Review of Online, mobile, desktop wallets
Siacoin Wallet :
Siacoin has provided a wallet at their own site. The wallet can be downloaded from siacoin website in all the operating system(https://sia.tech/apps/). The official wallet is the only wallet available as of now to store your siacoins.
Once you download the wallet, you need to sync it with the blockchain and after that it will generate an address for you to store the coins. The Siacoin wallet program is quite self explanatory to operate.
How to Buy Siacoin ?
It is not possible to buy Siacoin from fiat currencies as of now. So, you will need some base currency to change it to siacoins and then head over to the platforms which offer Siacoins.
Steps involved in buying a Siacoin :
- Buy a crypto currency like Bitcoin or Ethereum. You can buy it using credit/debit card. If you want to know how to buy using credit/debit card, you may head over to Buy Bitcoin using Debit/credit instantly.
- As of this writing, following platforms support changing BTC/Ethereum and other base currencies to siacoin :
- Shapeshift
- Poloniex
- Bittrex
- Shapeshift is the easiest to convert from the above options. Once you have the BTC, just send it to a shapeshift designated account and it will send the siacoins to the address you want.
- Thats it !!
Siacoin Statistics (as of writing this post) :
- Created: June 2015
- Market Cap: 135M USD
- Circulating Coin Supply: 30BN as of date
Important Links :
This was all about Siacoin and Siacoin Wallet that we wished to share with you.Hope, this post had sufficient information and resources for you to make a decision on Siacoin. Once again this is not an investment advice, we suggest you to use the information in the blog to carry out your research further.I will be back next week with a review of some other different use case altcoin. Till then, feel free to drop your comments on what you feel about Siacoin.
