Why do we need to mine?
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Sorry I'm a noob. Just wondering. I know its for the distribution on new coins but...I guess the real question is, is there plans to switch to another algorithm in the future?
What's the cap on total coins?
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There is no plan to switch to another algorithm. The primary reason that we do POW mining is that it's the only really secure way we currently know of to secure consensus. Though there is a lot of energy in the altcoin space around Proof of Stake and ripple-style consensus algorithms, they are not accepted by the general research community as a way to achieve consensus securely.
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Thanks. What's the cap on coin?
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There's no cap.
from https://sia.tech/faq
The number of siacoins created each block is (300,000 - height). The genesis block has a height of 0. After height 270,000, all blocks will have a reward of 30,000 siacoins. The current number of siacoins can be found at explore.siacoin.com
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I think perhaps the lack of a cap might stop making Siacoin deflationary, which in my mind could be a good thing for this coin specifically, because it might encourage people to quicly spend their coins back in more Sia cloud storage, instead of hoarding them, and since Siacoin is mainly a means to exchange storage space, rather than a "general currency", that seems desired.
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Indeed, that was a large portion of the original idea behind making siacoin inflationary. We want people to use siacoin for storage, not for hoarding or speculating. And, speculating can even destabilize the currency (as we're seeing on Poloniex today). It's not really good for the network to have the price flailing around a lot.
Price flailing is unavoidable while we're in the early phases of growth, but the permanently inflationary aspect of Sia should help eliminate some of the speculation and should encourage using the coin for it's primary purpose - buying storage.
