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Sia is a new decentralized cloud storage platform that radically alters thelandscape of cloud storage. By leveraging smart contracts, client-sideencryption, and sophisticated redundancy (via Reed-Solomon codes), Sia allowsusers to safely store their data with hosts that they do not know or trust.The result is a cloud storage marketplace where hosts compete to offer thebest service at the lowest price. And since there is no barrier to entry forhosts, anyone with spare storage capacity can join the network and startmaking money.

Traditional cloud storage has a number of shortcomings. Users are limited to afew big-name offerings: Google, Microsoft, Amazon. These companies have littleincentive to encrypt your data or make it easy to switch services later. Theircode is closed-source, and they can lock you out of your account at any time.

We believe that users should own their data. Sia achieves this by replacingthe traditional monolithic cloud storage provider with a blockchain and aswarm of hosts, each of which stores an encrypted fragment of your data. Sincethe fragments are redundant, no single host can hold your data hostage: ifthey jack up their price or go offline, you can simply download from adifferent host. In other words, trust is removed from the equation, andswitching to a different host is painless. Stripped of these unfairadvantages, hosts must compete solely on the quality and price of the storagethey provide.

Sia can serve as a replacement for personal backups, bulk archiving, contentdistribution, and more. For developers, Sia is a low-cost alternative toAmazon S3. Storage on Sia is a full order of magnitude cheaper than on S3,with comparable bandwidth, latency, and durability. Sia works best for staticcontent, especially media like videos, music, and photos.

Distributing data across many hosts automatically confers several advantages.The most obvious is that, just like BitTorrent, uploads and downloads arehighly parallel. Given enough hosts, Sia can saturate your bandwidth. Anotheradvantage is that your data is spread across a wide geographic area, reducinglatency and safeguarding your data against a range of attacks.

It is important to note that users have full control over which hosts theyuse. You can tailor your host set for minimum latency, lowest price, widestgeographic coverage, or even a strict whitelist of IP addresses or publickeys.

At the core of Sia is a blockchain that closely resembles Bitcoin.Transactions are conducted in Siacoin, a cryptocurrency. The blockchain iswhat allows Sia to enforce its smart contracts without relying on centralizedauthority. To acquire siacoins, use an exchange such asBittrex,Yunbi, orBisq.

To get started with Sia, check out the guides below:

• How to Store Data on Sia
• How to Become a Sia Host
• Using the Sia API

Sia is ready for use with small sums of money and non-critical files, butuntil the network has a more proven track record, we advise against using itas a sole means of storing important data.

This release comes with 2 binaries, siad and siac. siad is a backgroundservice, or "daemon," that runs the Sia protocol and exposes an HTTP API onport 9980. siac is a command-line client that can be used to interact withsiad in a user-friendly way. There is also a graphical client,Sia-UI, whichis the preferred way of using Sia for most users. For interested developers,the siad API is documentedhere.

siad and siac are run via command prompt. On Windows, you can just double-click siad.exe if you don't need to specify any command-line arguments.Otherwise, navigate to its containing folder and click File->Open commandprompt. Then, start the siad service by enteringsiad and pressing Enter.The command prompt may appear to freeze; this means siad is waiting forrequests. Windows users may see a warning from the Windows Firewall; be sureto check both boxes ("Private networks" and "Public networks") and click"Allow access." You can now runsiac (in a separate command prompt) or Sia-UI to interact with siad. From here, you can send money, upload and downloadfiles, and advertise yourself as a host.

To build from source,Go 1.9 must be installedon the system. Make sure your$GOPATH is set, and then simply usego get:

go get -u github.com/NebulousLabs/Sia/...

This will download the Sia repo to your$GOPATH/src folder and install thesiad andsiac binaries in your$GOPATH/bin folder.

To stay up-to-date, run the previousgo get command again. Alternatively, youcan use the Makefile provided in this repo. Rungit pull origin master topull the latest changes, andmake release-std to build the new binaries. Youcan also runmake test andmake test-long to run the short and full testsuites, respectively. Finally,make cover will generate code coverage reportsfor each package; they are stored in thecover folder and can be viewed inyour browser.