Renting Out Your Free Hard Drive, part II

Investing in cryptocurrencies reflects investors’ opinion that in the future, cryptocurrency will be a functional means of payment. It's that simple. How can the future of cryptocurrencies be predicted? Let's have a look at it.

Which one would you choose? Credit for the Picture belongs to my cousin Monika.

Last time I wrote about SiaCoin (SC) quite generally. Today, as I said last time, I’ll focus more on objective criticism of SC.

The most important thing is that hosts (storage providers) and clients (users who agree to store their data) must benefit from utilizing SC. Let's start from clients‘ side. There are some parameters that everybody takes into account when deciding which file storage to choose. One of the most important is the price of the service. Let's compare SC with well-known file storages (you can see all of them in the picture above 😊)

How does Sia work? Credit for the picture belongs to my cousin Monika, thank you very much!

From my point of view, I can rent via Google drive 1TB/month for 10USD – it’s integrated within Google services so it’s very easy to use. Buying external HDD for 60USD may be a better choice (but it’s not the best backup as your files will be near to your laptop, probably if your flat burn down, you’ll lose everything). Dropbox offers 1TB/month for 10USD as well. Amazon offers „low cost“ variant 23USD/1TB/month. SC offers, right now, 2USD/1TB/month, but it’s very volatile. For example, in January 2018, the price was over 10USD for most of the time. But usually, SC solution is less expensive. Good for Sia.

You can see the volatility of average storage price
Source: SiaStats.info.

The best advantage of SC is the decentralized solution unlike to traditional solutions like a Google drive Amazon’s AWS and so on. If Google or Amazon decides tomorrow to shut me off or delete all my stuff, I’ll lose all my files. This can’t happen using SIA.

As SC plans to enable files sharing it could be beneficial for people sharing illegal stuff as nobody can delete uploaded files and it should be anonymous. But you must buy SC to provide collateral, so you must be very careful when you buy SC - the police can trace your IP address as you probably buy it on an exchange where you must provide or personal information. So I wouldn't be so sure that this is a truly anonymous way to share illegal stuff.

Would be SC suitable for sharing illegal stuff?
Source: theverge.com

Let’s have a look at the other side – hosts (storage providers). To be honest, SC is not as much matured project so you could easily provide your free place on your HDD utilizing SC. You need to have a crypto exchange account because you must provide some collateral to start providing your storage. The certain amount of SC is locked up for the period you store files so you have the reason not to lose stored files. It makes a sense.

From my point of view it would be easier to make money by providing unused CPU cycles, for more: promisingcoins.com/airbnb-for-computers-golem/ or to mine Electroneum: http://promisingcoins.com/electroneum_part1/ and gain some referrals so then it’s quite profitable or sign up for Manna Universal Basic Income: https://www.mannabase.com/?ref=8106c4a7eb and gain some referrals so then it’s quite profitable.

A better choice? Probably not...
Source: dataflow.com.cy

From the hosts‘ point of view, right now, it’s more for crypto enthusiasts than for people trying to make money providing, for example, one or two terabytes as you can make 1-2USD/month/TB.

Best platform for trading cryptocurrencies is Binance:

Disclaimer:

Never invest more than what you can afford to lose. This post is my personal opinion, do your own research before making any investment decisions. If you make any trades after reading this post, it is completely in your responsibility. I am not responsible for any of your losses. By reading this post you acknowledge and accept that.