(I am the founder of Sia)
Sia's key distinguishing feature is that it's the only platform today which is fully/properly decentralized. If the MaidSafe devs today disappear, I believe all the servers running MaidSafe go with them. If the Storj team disappears, payments stop entirely and anyone using the Storj bridge (most of their users) will not be able to access files. If the Sia devs disappear, everything will continue to work as it currently does (though, bugfixes and feature adds will stop)
Sia distinguishes in two other major ways as well. First, we are the only platform that allows hosts to put up collateral - if a host loses your data, they don't just lose revenue they also lose collateral money that they put up as a promise to keep the data safe. Second, Sia is the only network that gives you full control over which machines your data ends up on. This is good if you want to run a CDN, need to comply with data laws, or have some other reason for favoring a particular region or set of hosts.
I encourage you to dive deep in the technical details, I think you'll find that Sia is pretty far ahead of everyone else.
The master branch client has a command 'siac renter prices' that will look at the network and estimate the costs. This feature hasn't been released yet because it's very recent.
My client is saying $0.50 to create a set of contracts (needs to be done once every six weeks), $0.60 per TB to download from the network, $1 / TB / Mo to store data on the network, and $0.30 per TB to upload to the network.
These prices include a redundancy of 3x in the upload and storage costs.
Long term I expect prices to not be more than about 2x what they are today, though it really depends on how the supply-demand mechanics play out. It's a fully open and competitive marketplace.
How are you even supposed to get started using Sia if there's no way to do it except to go and spend money. The point of being able to host files is that I'll offer up some storage on my NAS, earn coins, then be able to backup some of my own important documents on the network. Seems like if I have to dish out money to get started I doubt I'd ever be able to maintain the service without continuously spending money. So many other syncing technologies seem easier than this.
> You need to have at least 50,000 SC to begin hosting, and you can't earn SC until you start hosting.
This is one of the ways that we address churn on the network. It's actually really bad for the network for a host to get started, be around storing files for a day or two, and then leave. If you are going to be a host on the Sia network, it's important that you are committed.
> The point of being able to host files is that I'll offer up some storage on my NAS, earn coins, then be able to backup some of my own important documents on the network.
Sia is not designed as a tit-for-tat network. The economics are supposed to work much like Bitcoin + Bitcoin mining. That is, you have a dedicated set of specialists who work hard to provide a high quality service at a very good price. If you are hosting, the goal is to make money, not to be able to afford to back up your own data.
> So many other syncing technologies seem easier than this.
Yes but none of them are offering storage at $1 / TB / Mo. But also, Sia is still an early product and we're still iterating heavily on both the core algorithms and on the user experience.
Sia's core user market is people who are willing to pay for cloud storage. This would include businesses and enterprises. Sia's long term game is to offer a cloud storage platform that competes with the likes of Amazon S3 at less than 10% of the price, all while offering the security, privacy, decentralization, and open source codebase of a blockchain project.
Basics are data stored for each. Storj: ~1400 TB, Sia: ~100 TB, Filecoin: Not Functional, Maidsafe: Not Functional.
Prices on Sia:
- siapulse.com contains some information about pricing
- running `siac renter prices` on client on the master branch (yet unreleased) will give you a price estimate given the set of hosts you know about. This feature will be available in the next release.
- Storage cost: about $1 / TB / Mo (for 10-of-30 redundancy)
- Bandwidth cost: about $0.60 / TB
Prices on Storj:
- Not sure how the prices get set, but the prices are advertised on their website
- Storage cost: $15 / TB / Mo
- Bandwidth cost: $50 / TB
Prices on MaidSafe:
- No price given, but the claim is that it will adjust according to supply and demand. Should be within a small factor of Sia if that is the case (Sia's prices are also set by supply + demand).
Bitcoin is IPv4. There is lots of research into the next, better version.