Taek42

The thing that bothers me the most about most cloud storage services is that it's a single corporation in control of all the data. For example, Dropbox can see all of your files, delete them, change them, and you'd likely never know. At the very least, if they are scanning your photos for evidence of criminal activity, you aren't likely to know.

And then you have 'invasion creep', where companies like Facebook will increasingly strip away your rights. At first the ToS says 'we will never look at your data!'. Then later the wording is changed to 'We will never share your data with others!'. 3 years and 300 million users later, the terms have somehow worked their way to saying 'We reserve the right to sell your images, own full copyright, and never give you any credit for them.' And yet they aren't losing marketshare.

And that makes me really uncomfortable. You also have these single, gigantic sources of failure. For example, in one strike, a single hack, someone was able to get access to the nude photos of a huge number of celebrities. It's a single point of failure, and it makes for some super juicy targets. Hackers love single giant databases with millions of personal photos, videos, etc.

With Sia, the only person with access to the data is the person who uploaded it. The encryption happens on the machine doing the uploading, and the keys are never shared with any sort of central server. None of the above problems exist with Sia.

It's also really competitively priced. For consumers this is maybe not such a big deal, but we're less than 10% the cost of Amazon S3, and for businesses with massive volumes of data we can be saving them tens of millions of dollars per year in infrastructure. And that's exciting even if you don't care about the privacy pieces.

Currently, you need access to the metadata. There's a small-ish (about 1/1,000,000 the size of the full data) metadata file that you need to fetch and decrypt everything. If you lose that file, you will not be able to get your files back from Sia.

We have a plan, though it's not implemented yet, to make it possible to recover all of your Sia data using just a master password. Basically, you store the metadata itself on the Sia network, and then you protect that with a master password. We use a few other tricks as well to make it fully possible, and expect to have that in a release within the next 6-9 months.

Once that's in place it should be possible to recover all your data from any device, using just the password.

I think that realistically in 3 years Sia will be used almost ubiquitously among privacy focused communities. I think we will also be seeing the first major names such as Netflix announcing that they will be migrating their content distribution to Sia.

Most people at this point will be comfortable with Bitcoin, and will understand that Sia is the data-version of this, even if they don't use it themselves.

The tech itself will be miles ahead of where it is today. We've only been in development for 2.5 years to date. Speeds will be universally regarded as unbeatable, scale will be billions of terabytes, and anyone using Sia will have access to their data from any machine by using just a master password.

Prices are set by the hosts, there's no control or mechanism through which we raise the prices.

We just write software and help the network grow :)

The downloader pays the cost of bandwidth. If someone uploads a file and unexpectedly gets 1 million downloads, it will not cost them because each downloader will be paying their own way.

For sites like YouTube, we can also set up a cookie-based payment. YouTube would give you a cookie that basically says 'Good for 300MB' or similar, and you would give that to the host to make the download. In this case, YouTube would have full control over the creation of cookies and would be able to stop any malicious behavior, the host can still get paid, and the user doesn't even need to know that they are actually doing a Sia download when they watch the video.