What Sia Might Become

For those who are new, Sia is an attempt at a decentralized cloud storage platform. By using encryption, cryptographic contracts, and redundancy, Sia enables a collection of untrusted and unknown machines to be combined into a single logical cloud storage host that is faster, cheaper, and more reliable than traditional cloud storage platforms. And because the untrusted nodes are located all over the world, Sia can become an effective content distribution network at no additional cost. The uploader is at liberty to select the nodes they use, which means they can avoid nodes inside of certain legal jurisdictions, or exclusively use nodes that have public reputation. The decentralization portion comes from splitting the file into many erasure coded pieces and giving each piece to a different host. Out of the hosts holding the file, only a small percentage actually need to be trustworthy for the file to be both safe and accessible.

Files on the Sia network are represented as ‘.sia’ objects, small objects which contain a list of encryption keys and hosts. A ‘.sia’ object is essentially a pointer to a larger file on the network. The current ‘.sia’ objects are between 2kb and 20kb, but there is room for substantial improvement. There are two tricks that can be played to reduce the size of a ‘.sia’ object. The first is that you can create a smaller ‘.sia’ object which points to a larger (or even multiple larger) ‘.sia’ object(s). You essentially end up storing large ‘.sia’ objects on the Sia network, and then do a two-stage lookup when fetching files. The second trick involves formalizing a protocol for deterministically generating the smaller ‘.sia’ files when starting from a random seed. By doing this, we can actually reduce the size of an initial ‘.sia’ object to that of a single hash, and then that hash could potentially point to any object or collection of objects. It becomes the ultimate way to store objects on the Internet. Sharing a file with a friend is as simple as uploading the file to Sia, and then giving your friend the 32-byte (or even a minified version at 16 or even 8 bytes) ‘.sia’ object that will allow your friend to locate the object on the Sia network. In a more interesting example, you could store something like a VM image. You could provide the tiny ‘.sia’ input to the VM host and it could use that to load an entire operating system snapshot from the Sia network.

One of the greatest advancements of Sia is the introduction of a free market for cloud storage. Today, being a cloud storage provider means establishing a brand, establishing trust, having customer service and support, and often requires establishing an entire ecosystem. Sia eliminates all of that overhead for storage and bandwidth providers. If you have a hard drive and an internet connection, you just plug your computer in and you can start accepting storage contracts. People don’t need to know who you are or trust you, and you don’t have to deal with any PR or customer services issues. Similar to Bitcoin mining, you simply plug in your machine and it starts generating income. People with access to cheap resources can turn large profits by providing those cheap resources to the rest of the world. There is no vendor lock-in on Sia, no privacy policies (privacy is complete and automatic), just a pure market for storage and bandwidth. We at Nebulous believe that this will cause the price of each resource to plummet. This is already visible on the beta network, where storage is virtually free. (The current price, even at the standard 8x redundancy, is about 3% of the cost of equivalent traditional cloud storage services).

Content distribution services (think Netflix, Spotify, or even YouTube) could benefit by using Sia as a content distribution network. Today’s content distribution networks are expensive and heavily redundant, and are run on many servers that all need to be controlled by a single central party. Sia is able to outsource nodes by paying untrusted entities and then using cryptographic contracts to enforce storage and distribution agreements. When using Sia, the content distribution network is actually built in. This can also provide a layer of protection to controversial services. For a while, Comcast was throttling Netflix traffic. All Sia traffic would look the same, and Comcast would have great difficulties singling out a service for throttling. Sia’s free market model also means that distribution costs are likely to decrease substantially for services that are bandwidth intensive, as cheaper nodes will be heavily prioritized when streaming, meaning more expensive nodes may not get any traffic at all (thus applying downwards price pressure).

The promise of gigabit internet adds some interesting possibilities. A gigabit internet connection is as fast as an SSD. With Google Fiber or some equivalent service, your computer could be just as fast without a hard drive (but downloading everything from the Internet) as it would be with a hard drive. You could potentially store your entire computer on Sia and nowhere else at all, without seeing an impact to performance. This means that you could boot your personal OS and settings from any computer in the world, and you wouldn’t even need a USB stick, CD, or anything more than a simple Internet connection. This is not likely to work on a traditional operating system because of extreme latencies, but if you set up a ramdisk OS (the whole OS stays in ram) that occasionally synchronizes to a cloud storage service, speeds would not suffer without a hard drive.

One of the potential promises of Bitcoin is the elimination of advertising from the Internet, replacing everything instead with content paywalls. Bitcoin enables paywall infrastructure that is simpler and smoother than any previously existing paywall infrastrucutre, enabling people to visit arbitrary websites and pay tenths of a cent for their time there, then never visiting the website again. Using Bitcoin, this can be done in a decentralized way such that neither the website nor the visitor need to be a part of the same payment service — they just each need to be part of the same decentralized payment service network. The setup time is potentially very minimal. A huge problem here though is transitioning from something that used to be free to something that now costs money. Though you have gotten rid of ads, it means shelling out actual dollars, and this causes a huge psychological barrier even if the payments only amount to a few cents per month. Human psychology does not like making lots of small payments.

The Sia ecosystem is actually forced into this model from the getgo. There is no free storage on the decentralized network, and no ‘trial download’ you can make that will give you 5GB for free, regardless of how financially inexpensive it may be. Small pockets of free storage are simply incompatible with the protocol. Storage on Sia is a metered resource. However, there are great examples of successful metered resources in our society today. The first major example is a use-now pay-later model. This is the model followed by your utility company. Every time you turn on the lights, every time you shower, every time you run the dishwasher, your utility companies are charging you small amounts of money. Over the course of a month, this adds up to a significant sum of money but you are used to it, and in general you know when the bill is going to be expensive. You happily pay your utility bills at the end of the month. The second example is pay-now use-later. Filling up a car with gasoline is a great example of this. Every time you get in the car, you know that you are going to be using some gasoline and that you’ll eventually need a refill, and that the refill is going to be a large sum of money. But you happily drive around anyway, because you know that the expense of spending money on gasoline is worth driving around.

The key in each of these scenarios is that you aren’t actually paying except every once in a while. You are aware that its costing you money each time it happens, but you only have to pay at the end of the month. When resources are tight, you can limit your expenses and avoid surprise heavy bills. These models of paying for things work well with human psychology. Sia has chosen to follow the gasoline model of resource consumption. When you start using Sia, you’re going to ‘fill up’ your account with some resources, and you’ll be given an estimation of how far these resources are going to stretch. When you start to run out of resources, you’ll get a ‘low fuel’ warning indicating you need to fill up again. Because of the payment channel network that will be set up on Sia, downloading from unknown servers and parties does not require any setup time. As long as both the uploader and the host are a part of the same global payment channel network (composed of many mutually distrusting parties), they can do instant and fully secure monetary transactions with eachother. This facilitates both uploading and downloading.

It’s entirely possible that this could also facilitate web browsing as a greater experience. Sia’s payment channel network is not limited to decentralized storage, and content downloads don’t need to come directly from Sia’s decentralized network. Using Sia, you could visit and manage paywalls on centralized websites, eliminate the need for ads and giving web hosts a more wholesome source of income.

Today, Sia’s core focus is decentralized storage, and more specifically a decentralized object store. We are focused on turning Sia into a simple, efficient, and secure platform where you can place and fetch data of any kind, and store a lookup value that’s nothing more than a hash. Uploading should be simple, keeping files safe should be simple, and moving files to other computers (either your own, or sharing with friends) should be simple. Finding files that you need should be simple, and most importantly, there should never be any question whether a file you put onto the Sia network still exists. The platform is still in beta, but is making great strides forward. We’re excited for the future, and we hope that you are too.

Sia, by Nebulous Inc., is a blockchain-based decentralized cloud storage platform.