Here’s Why Siacoin Is Flying High Today

After the excitement of last week, which saw XRP up almost 100% at one stage, the markets are starting to settle down and normal service has resumed. What we saw last week was the result of a community based excitement, off the back of the announcement of a pending xRapid release from Ripple. With the markets now back to normal, a number of altcoins are standing out, Siacoin is one such cryptocurrency that looks to be making great progression today. What is Siacoin? Siacoin is the native cryptocurrency to the Sia project, a decentralised storage platform that uses blockchain technology. The premise of Sia is that it encourages the sharing of the worlds unused hard drive storage, in order to allow for a blockchain based marketplace on which people can buy and sell digital storage space at a far lower cost than is currently provided by traditional cloud storage solutions. As it stands, there are 4.0 petabytes available through Sia. A petabyte (PB) is equivalent to 1,000 terabytes, or 1,000,000 gigabytes, therefore the true scale of the space available via Sia is frankly huge. These 4PBs are available across 590 storage providers with just 224TB current in use. What are the advantages to Sia? The advantages of this platform are pretty clear overall, it’s a cheaper and easy to use data storage solution that benefits both the user and the provider. Through the use of blockchain technology, Sia is totally private, all data stored is fully encrypted and distributed across the blockchain, only the user (who’s data is being stored) has access to the private keys needed to access the data, therefore, unlike with many cloud storage solutions, no third parties can access the files or data. According to Sia, pricing is around 90% cheaper than traditional cloud storage providers. 1TB of storage on Sia costs (on average) $2.00 per month, compared to the same amount of space via Amazon Cloud (Amazon S3)  which could set the user back $23.00 for the same period. Because Sia distributes the data across nodes around the world, there are no single points of failure meaning the integrity of the data is always secured, moreover, this ensures that the data is distributed fast and effectively. Finally, the marketplace format makes uploading data to the blockchain quick and easy, it makes buying storage space easy and gives people the opportunity to earn and spend Siacoin, the native token to the entire Sia project. Siacoin Now we come to Siacoin, the token native to the project and the token that seems to be making great progression today. According to Sia:

“Both renters and hosts use Siacoin, a unique cryptocurrency built on the Sia blockchain. Renters use Siacoin to buy storage capacity from hosts, while hosts deposit Siacoin into each file contract as collateral. Micropayments flow between renters and hosts using a technology called payment channels, which is similar to Bitcoin's Lightning Network. Payments between renters and hosts occur off-chain, greatly increasing network efficiency and scalability.”

In essence, Siacoin is used to incentivise both those who are offering the storage space and those who have data to store. Moreover, Siacoin is a truly decentralised token:

“Sia is a network which requires you to download the full blockchain to get started. It means you need to acquire cryptocurrency before you can offer or consume storage. It means that in general that setup is a lot harder than on other networks. But the payoff is real: Sia is a decentralized application, and its decentralized in ways that most altcoin users don’t even realize is possible.”

Siacoin, is offering a new level of decentralisation and is changing the way the data storage industry operates, but why is Siacoin flying today?   As it stands, there seems to be no sole reason for the rise in the value of Siacoin at the moment, there are no updates from the Sia development team and therefore, we can only guess that the sudden rise in the value of Siacoin is as a result of the recent market positivity. If this is true, correction will take over soon enough and the value of Siacoin will balance back out over the next few days. Since Sia is such an exciting project though, this is only just the beginning for Siacoin as a token. As more people start to buy into this storage economy, more people will look towards projects like Sia, which in turn will encourage the flow of Siacoin. Since Sia uses Siacoin as an actual currency and is used to monetize the Sia system, the value of Siacoin will only rise with the increase in the popularity of Sia as a data storage solution. References Putting Data on the Sia Network Sia Website