First impressions, not good
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Even though this string has gone off topic a bit I would like to add my 2 cents to the user experience discussion.
I think Sia can have a very bright future based upon what I understand from reading and using it. I have been mining, hosting, and using Sia a lot during the last couple of weeks and find it extraordinarily difficult to use and understand. Without the help of friendly Sia folks on Slack the average user has no chance of success.
I understand that it is early days and most of the work has been focused on building a technically sound base for Sia growth but there must be an easier way to be a host storage provider and to use the system to backup files. Besides the slowness and lack of user friendliness there is no way for me or any other casual user to fully comprehend how to easily use this system. I just want to backup some files and make sure they are safe over the long run, I don't have all day to figure out how to do that, and in order to do that the process is extremely long and complicated and difficult to comprehend. It is tough to know what contracts really are, how they are assigned and managed automatically for me by Sia, how they are renewed, what happens when my contract fund(allowance) runs dry, how much SC it will take to backup everything I want to backup, how and when do I pay for network bandwidth, why the client takes multi-gigs of RAM to run, etc.
For the Sia developers it may not seem so complicated and difficult because they use it daily and get used to it but for the new user it is incomprehensible. It may be much lower in cost than other alternatives but it will not succeed in competing with other cloud storage providers for normal people until it becomes very easy to use and understand, including NOT using Sia coins directly to rent storage space.
I understand that if I was putting my heart and soul into developing this product I might be sensitive to criticism so please take this with a grain of salt from a new semi-technical literate user who wants to see you all succeed as I have also invested in your success.
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Amazon glacier is a massive success in cloudstorage. This service is way harder than sia to use in its bare form. Just saying there is no need to please joe mcmuffin to be a successful cloudstorage provider.
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@brisk That's true, I fully understand it doesn't have to be simple. But then again, ease of use is also a cost saving. Imagine if Sia competed with Amazon Glacier on both price AND ease-of-use. Trust me, if Sia doesn't do it, someone else will.
Also, just because Sia's main target is enterprise storage, it doesn't mean that Siacoin should never be a universal real world currency. It dosen't make sense to not do something when the market can decide.
The way I understand it, the Sia developers created Siacoin because bitcoin wasn’t granular enough (though why they didn’t create a NEM Mosaic is beyond me). It might be, for example, that Siacoin gets used in streaming media applications.. who knows, but why say no to a free market?
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@Fornax [Regarding funding]
As far as I know Sia is the only cryptocurrency with a built in ongoing funding model: https://siawiki.fornaxian.com/wallet/siafund
Dash also has a funding model, but the approach differs from Sia.
From: https://www.dash.org/governance/
"Dash uses 10% of the block reward to fund its own development."I think a good funding model is SUPER important for both projects. It makes the project sustainable, and offers monetary incentive for the developers to keep improving the project, maybe even hire more developers. Not that all developers are in it just for the money, I'm sure some just love their projects. But gotta have money to pay the bills!
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@SiaSia said:
It’s a joke right? You want to tell us how masternodes are majority owned and at the same time defend a company with 80% shares?Dash and Sia are quite different.
Dash is funded by 10% mining reward. Sia is funded by shares. I don't see the problem there.
Dash aims to be decentralized in it's government. Sia aims to be decentralized in it's storage layer, not government.
Dash is about transferring monetary value. Sia is about online storage.
@SiaSia said:
Actually, it’s quite easy to see the diversity of masternode operators because some of them are sporting a special badge on the dash forums.
...
Dash is sitting there with $600M market cap for a reason; it hasn’t been compromised, and I’m pretty sure that’s a big enough carrot to attack.No one is saying that masternodes don't serve a very useful purpose for Dash. They certainly do!
But, I agree with @Taek that Dash's masternodes are a potential vulnerability in Dash. A bad actor could purchase enough masternodes to influence voting, or even de-anonymize the Private Send (ie Russia, China, USA). Do I think this is happening or will happen anytime soon? No. But it's a technical possibility.
@SiaSia said:
Let’s compare that to your beloved bitcoin that has spent the past two plus years in civil war over it’s block size. Oh yeah, I know, you said it’s perfect for effective ecommerce.I see Bitcoin ideal for some eCommerce because it's still the most widely know and accepted digital currency compared to alt-coins. No one said it was perfect, haha.
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@ElvisRe Indeed, I couldn't agree more, and there's a growing list of alts realising this. People here want to talk about limited dev time / resources, well, good money attracts the best minds. And even if Sia had the best product out there, it would still need other functions, such as business development, because crypto is (and always will be) a highly competitive space. Relevance is the only game in town.
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@ElvisRe A bad actor could not possibly buy up enough masternodes as the cost increases exponentially in the process. And even then, if they did, they would have waaaay too much skin in the game to make poor decisions. It's just not going to happen.
EVERY crypto needs governance of some kind, you only got to look at bitcoin and ethereum to see how things fail when there is no governance.
You say Sia is about online storage but I totally disagree. For as long as Siacoin is allowed to sit on exchanges, the value is not confined by “storage”. You want to talk about bad actors, then fine, let’s talk about traders, price volatility and shorting. Or are you going to tell me that deep pockets are only possible with dash masternodes and not on exchanges??
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I’m so glad I came to this forum. It’s made me realise how closed minded the devs are. Until there’s a shift in thinking here, Sia deserves to be shafted on the exchanges. Honestly, you can’t continue living in this bubble, there’s a much bigger picture and you’re simply not going to survive working in isolation.
As a Digital Asset Investor (and masternode owner), I feel I can talk with some authority about dash. But people here are going to tell me they know otherwise. Shooting their mouth off, half-cocked, like they know enough about Instant Send or Private Send and saying it could be compromised. How dumb is that, talking about stuff you don’t know? But you see, I’m not claiming to know the details of Sia. For example, I didn’t know about Siafunds and I’m certainly not telling anyone that Sia is technically broken. But I am saying, so long as there’s someone talking of time-limited-devs and working in isolation, that Sia will be nothing more than a side project and eventually eaten up by someone else.
Or is that the plan? - the fickle hope that Amazon, Google or Microsoft will buy up the 80%+ shares at a good markup? What will happen to Sia and it’s users then huh?
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It’s a joke right? You want to tell us how masternodes are majority owned and at the same time defend a company with 80% shares?
Siafunds are a completely separate asset from siacoin. You don't need them to use the network, they don't have any fundamental utility outside of their SC revenue, they aren't even divisible (which means they make poor trading assets), and they have no ability to influence governance. It's a completely unique situation.
Actually, it’s quite easy to see the diversity of masternode operators because some of them are sporting a special badge on the dash forums. Those badges can only be attained through a cryptographic masternode signature. Perhaps you’d like to counter that by saying the conversations on the forum are fake?
You can have a forum of 1000 legitimate active masternode users and still have an invisible party that owns 2000+ masternodes. I wasn't suggesting that all masternodes were fake, just that it's likely that a significant number of them are owned by a single party. The two are not mutually exclusive.
I understand that it is early days and most of the work has been focused on building a technically sound base for Sia growth but there must be an easier way to be a host storage provider and to use the system to backup files. Besides the slowness and lack of user friendliness there is no way for me or any other casual user to fully comprehend how to easily use this system. I just want to backup some files and make sure they are safe over the long run, I don't have all day to figure out how to do that, and in order to do that the process is extremely long and complicated and difficult to comprehend. It is tough to know what contracts really are, how they are assigned and managed automatically for me by Sia, how they are renewed, what happens when my contract fund(allowance) runs dry, how much SC it will take to backup everything I want to backup, how and when do I pay for network bandwidth, why the client takes multi-gigs of RAM to run, etc.
This is really good feedback, thank you. We are working on simplifying it.
For the Sia developers it may not seem so complicated and difficult because they use it daily and get used to it but for the new user it is incomprehensible. It may be much lower in cost than other alternatives but it will not succeed in competing with other cloud storage providers for normal people until it becomes very easy to use and understand, including NOT using Sia coins directly to rent storage space.
The parts with the spending and renewals and budget cycles all get me confused too. We know it's an issue and we're working on fixing it.
Unfortunately, siacoins are the only way to operate the decentralized network. If you are using something like a credit card, you are introducing trust via the credit card company. And, because of chargebacks, we can't even make the system secure using things like credit cards. Any sort of fiat money (USD, Euro, etc.) has similar problems, where the government really is the ultimate authority instead of the blockchain. To get security and decentralization, we need the blockchain to be the authority.
We are working on making it easier to acquire siacoins though.
I understand that if I was putting my heart and soul into developing this product I might be sensitive to criticism so please take this with a grain of salt from a new semi-technical literate user who wants to see you all succeed as I have also invested in your success.
We always welcome polite criticism, it's one of the best ways to improve.
@brisk That's true, I fully understand it doesn't have to be simple. But then again, ease of use is also a cost saving. Imagine if Sia competed with Amazon Glacier on both price AND ease-of-use. Trust me, if Sia doesn't do it, someone else will.
We intend to complete on both. Just needs more love + polish, which takes time + developers.
Dash aims to be decentralized in it's government. Sia aims to be decentralized in it's storage layer, not government.
I forgive you for getting that wrong, but Sia definitely aims to be decentralized in government. That's why we chose a PoW blockchain. Realistically, today, the Nebulous team has full control over Sia's future. But that's because the Sia network does not work very well yet, and any network without our ongoing development effort is going to fall apart. Once Sia is standing on its own two lets more solidly (it's getting closer every release), then the community will have a real ability to reject hardforks or protocol changes that we try to push onto the network.
Conversely, the Dash masternodes can push whatever changes they want onto the network, and a network participant who does not like the changes really cannot resist them. They subscribed to accepting those changes when they accepted the consensus rules of Dash.
It's far more decentralized to have a system where users are able to resist change even when the majority or supermajority is pushing for change. When change is the difficult thing, a supermajority has to enforce change by leaving the network. That means anyone who is not actively a part of the supermajority gets left behind. Which in turn means that usually when the supermajority moves, a big minority get left behind together. Which means that a minority is actually able to resist change and continue using the system. You get a split, but it's a split where the supermajority gets what they want, and the minority also gets what they want.
And that, to me, is really amazing. It's in my opinion one Bitcoin's best features.
@ElvisRe A bad actor could not possibly buy up enough masternodes as the cost increases exponentially in the process. And even then, if they did, they would have waaaay too much skin in the game to make poor decisions. It's just not going to happen.
This is the type of handwaving that gets most altcoins in trouble. Dash masternodes require 95% uptime or whatever, and Dash masternodes have a reward system. If I were to attack Dash, that's one of the places I would start from. Buy some masternodes, then engage in some DoS attacks focusing down the weaker or more exposed Dash nodes to deprive them of their rewards. If there's any type of collateral or penalty or whatever for missing the uptime goals, that benefits me a lot. And, as long as my expected return on the reward schedule is higher than that of the other masternodes, I'm going to be able to get network share faster than anyone else. Then it's just a waiting game.
This is just one example of the types of things you can do with these sorts of systems.
Shooting their mouth off, half-cocked, like they know enough about Instant Send or Private Send and saying it could be compromised.
You are correct, I don't know how the instant send works, or how the private send works. But I know that Dash devs are eager to deploy things that don't have sufficient review, and I also know that gaining anonymity on a network is very difficult. Even the heavy hitters Monero and Zcash have big issues with them. I would expect any meaningful breakthrough in ledger privacy to be accompanied by a lot of cryptographic review and praise.
But I am saying, so long as there’s someone talking of time-limited-devs and working in isolation, that Sia will be nothing more than a side project and eventually eaten up by someone else.
If they can pull of the required engineering where we've been unable to, then my hat goes off to them. They will have earned it. But right now Sia is the only system that comes reasonably close to being able to call itself 'decentralized', and even then we're missing features which most people would consider obvious and fundamental.
The UX will come, and we've been working on it. But UX is no good if you never build anything actually meaningful.
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@SiaSia:
A bad actor could not possibly buy up enough masternodes as the cost increases exponentially in the processAs the cost of masternodes go up, you're right this would be more difficult. And that's a good thing! We are going to have to agree to disagree on this point though. Maybe I'm just paranoid, lol.
@SiaSia:
I’m so glad I came to this forum. It’s made me realise how closed minded the devs are.By the way, I'm not a Dev of Sia, so I hope you're not thinking I'm speaking for the team. Just my take on it.
I have to disagree with you about the developers here being closed minded. I have not had that impression at all.
@Taek:
I forgive you for getting that wrong, but Sia definitely aims to be decentralized in government. That's why we chose a PoW blockchain. Realistically, today, the Nebulous team has full control over Sia's future. But that's because the Sia network does not work very well yet, and any network without our ongoing development effort is going to fall apart. Once Sia is standing on its own two lets more solidly (it's getting closer every release), then the community will have a real ability to reject hardforks or protocol changes that we try to push onto the network.Oops, my mistake! You're right, I was talking about how Sia appears now, and as you said, "today, the Nebulous team has full control over Sia's future." And I don't have a problem with that, I understand that's how things need to be while the network is being created. Good to know the goal is decentralized government.
