Siacoin is a cryptocurrency project that challenges the cloud storage industry with the help of blockchain technology. It is owned by Champine & Vick, and Nebulous Inc created it. The idea of the original Sia came into existence in HackMIT in 2013. The main driving force for the birth of Sia was an idea – can the unused storage spaces of the hard drives around the world be united to form a kind of global cloud storage platform that is fully decentralized? The concept was an instant hit, and Champine and Vorick decided to pursue the project on a full-time basis.
The cloud storage industry is dominated by corporations like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. The fees are usually on the higher side, and people are skeptical about the security. Siacoin claims that the company has been able to solve all these drawbacks. Any person in the world can use the platform to rent online storage. Alternatively, one can earn Siacoins by hosting files through the contribution of their spare hard drive space. No single person controls the network, which means that the project is fully decentralized. The data transactions are verified by multiple nodes, which intends that the Siacon servers can never be hacked.
Sia uses two types of token system – Siacoin & Siafunds. Siacoin is the primary utility token. Unlike Bitcoin, there is no limit to the total supply of Siacoin, but they all must be mined. The mined first block gave a reward of 300,000 Siacoin, which will decrease until it reaches 30,000 Siacoins/block. The 2nd token is Siafunds, and there are 10,000 Siafunds in existence. All these coins have been pre-mined, and the majority of them have been used for the early development of Sia.
Siacoins have miners who use ASICs to mine the coins. In the middle of 2017, it was announced that Nebulous would launch Obelisk, a subsidiary, to make ASICs specially meant for Sia. The community members pre-ordered the miners and helped to contribute millions of dollars for funding the effort. The main aim of Siacoin mining is to provide a free marketplace network where people who are providing free store storage services will come together. They will be able to create their prices, make a bid in the marketplace, offer advertising space, and even provide compensation if a loss of client information occurs.