How to use SIA-client ?
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Ah yeah, it's not advisable to create your allowance until you've finished synchronizing.
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Do you believe Siacoin is good for archival storage ?
For comparison, M-Discs are good for a thousand years. They should work long after I'm dead;
https://vimeo.com/126129387Basically I expect a similar (or better) level of redundancy and longevity from Sia. (as long as I pay).
I expect it to auto-heal my files. I.e. if a bunch of hard disks went down, replicate to new hard disks (and new users), automatically.For example, let's target my redundancy level to 400%-up-to-800%. So if the amount of rendundancy goes down below 400% , the network should auto-replicate my files back to 800%, originally targetted.
Is it possible with Sia ?
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There are a number of significant security tradeoffs that you make when you allow the network to automatically heal your file. So Sia does not support that, because we believe that any network with auto-healing insecure in a practically exploitable way.
Sia does support healing files, but the person in control of the encryption keys is the one who has to do the healing. Similarly, most hosts on the network do not support 1000 year file contracts. Most only support up to 25 weeks. That means that beyond that, someone with money has to be around to renew the file contracts.
Archival is a good use case for Sia, particularly because of the price. As of speaking, prices on Sia are in the ballpark of $2 / TB / Month, less than half the price of the next cheapest provider I am aware of. This buys you 6x redundancy.
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@Taek Vitalik Buterin says it could be possible to construct a self-healing storage blockchain, :
https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/08/16/secret-sharing-erasure-coding-guide-aspiring-dropbox-decentralizer/What do you think of it ?
I think the requirement that a human intervention occur every 25 weeks (or even every year) pretty much disqualifies Siacoin v1.0 for Archival storage role, but how serious are the trade-offs ?
Maybe they can be solved for version 2.0 ? (together with Vitalik Buterin)Thanks for your time,
-Alexey "Technologov"
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The third party service providers built on top of Sia ( like a dropbox alike built on Sia) can take care the very long term storage issue because they can do the renew for you.
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The tradeoffs are pretty serious - it means that anyone can pretend to be storing multiple redundant copies while they are actually only storing the original copy and deriving the redundant copy after-the-fact.
There are a number of ways to approach this problem if you are online and monitoring the network, but your whole idea is that you wouldn't want to be monitoring the network.
So then you need people to be monitoring the network for you, and you need some way to trust that those people are doing a good job. Once you're at that point, you've opened up completely separate cans of worms that are massive engineering challenges on their own, and many researchers believe that there is no secure way to approach the problem (I am one of those).
It basically boils down to either you need to trust someone who isn't yourself, or you need to be monitoring the network yourself.
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@tobo said in How to use SIA-client ?:
The third party service providers built on top of Sia ( like a dropbox alike built on Sia) can take care the very long term storage issue because they can do the renew for you.
Yep, this is the reason why regular renews are not a problem. The reality is that you are already doing this sort of regular intervention (or trusting someone else to do it for you). For example, you need to periodically check that your disks haven't failed. If you're archiving stuff on something like an "M-Disc," you need to haul them around with you when you move, or pay a storage company to store them. Basically, there are no storage solutions that require zero maintenance.
If you want to store something for 1000 years, you might think that writing it to an M-Disc and sticking it in a vault is a good idea, but I'm not so sure. It's just impossible to predict what will happen on that timescale. IMO the best way to store something for 1000 years is to make it culturally important. If something is culturally important, then people will make the necessary efforts to migrate it as new storage systems are invented, or at least preserve it. This is how the Pali Canon and the writings of Plato have survived for thousands of years. Even if your M-Disc is perfectly readable, it won't matter if someone paves over your vault to build a parking garage :P
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Hi everyone,
If I buy a MineBox (https://minebox.io/) would it be doing the automatic maintenance? Or do you still have to manually control the state of your backups?
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@cyjambo said in How to use SIA-client ?:
Hi everyone,
If I buy a MineBox (https://minebox.io/) would it be doing the automatic maintenance? Or do you still have to manually control the state of your backups?
I believe Minebox will take care it for you through its interface and communication with you. I think Mionebox will make everything user friendly and hide all its integration with Sia platform from the users (maybe except the Siacoins).
