Its a myth that the whole chain is needed. Comes from BTC where you need the chain to recreate all transactions. It has zero practical use. If you would consider the current state of a blockchain to be "wrong" but everyone agreed to move forward anyway you may as well call it "correct" because by definition the majority decides what is right and what not in these systems. So you dont really need to validate the whole chain. All the splits and hard forks are well known and you can only agree or not use that particular chain. The accrual process of validating yourself is moot. Its not like you could find something new by running the exact same code thousands of other ran over that data before you.
Plenty newer DTLs have ditched the chain validation process completely and you can start at any point in time with the ledger state of that time and start going forward to the present. Whether that is years or seconds doesn't really matter. It all depend of whether you have an accentual use case for historical transaction data or not.
This is really important because second generation blockchains have way higher transaction throughput, integrated decentral exchanges (DEX) and other advanced feature that requires way more storage. Some already have reached uncompressed sizes of several TBs for the complete history.
My cofounder has been working on an upgrade for Sia that switches the core consensus engine to 'utreexo', which uses an accumulator rather than an entire blockchain history to verify new blocks and transactions. This brings down the effective size of the chain for users to just a couple of megabytes for the same history that currently takes 23 GB.
It would be cool if you can implement a light node (just enough to download files) in a browser extension, so people browse Skynet directly.
Otherwise, if people mostly use web portals, then it's not really free and decentralized, as people are essentially at mercy of portals they use. In fact, if application code itself is served through a portal, it is less secure than normal web.
Note: Taek is the same user that the SiaSetup website (the main source of documentation about the project) is criticizing as "unstable project management". Be warned about this man before sinking any significant amount of personal time or money into this project. Source: https://siasetup.info/concerns-about-sia-and-skynet#banned
I agree! Ethereum is already to big and too expensive to use. I hold a lot but worry about both BTC and Ethereum. Normal people can no longer use either chain for everyday transactions and at this rate Ethereum will never work as a global computer. To me only Bitcoin Cash and Monero really have their use cases and code sussed out. Sia (and filecoin) work great but both have issues with their insentives, in Sia's case they issue too many coins and it's not profitable to host content.
ETH has already solved scalability with Zero Knowledge Proofs and Optimistic Rollups. Some dapps are clocking 2000 transactions per second. Also, ETH 2's initial beacon chain has launched and when ETH2 fully rolls out, there will be 64x that available on the network.
You claim Sia issues too many coins. That is a myth. Inflation in 2021 will be no higher than 7%, declining every year after that. In case you are referring to the total supply, would it make you feel better to move the decimal to the left?
Hosts have been saving and serving content since the launch of the Sia network years ago. It is profitable if done at scale. For more information, https://siastats.info/storage_pricing
Disclosure: I mined Siacoin for years and have hundreds of thousands of tokens.
Sia is an amazing project with a team who is extremely talented and passionate, but Skynet is the future. They've built a fully decentralized CDN and it's incredible. Ten years from now, I can see it being the norm for startups and maybe even larger companies to use decentralized CDN's like this. I hope Coinbase adds Siacoin for trading soon, since they participated in integrating Rosetta.
No, they've made purpose-built silicon for sia mining and it is no longer viable to mine on general purpose compute. As far as storage mining - it may be. last check (november) filecoin was the most profitable to host your disk space for but required a rediculous amount of compute as well as disk space (latest gen GPUs, 128G ram, near-100% uptime).
We’ve been using Skynet for all our decentralized web projects at Namebase.io ever since they added Handshake naming support[1] — it’s been fantastic. It now takes us days to build things that previously took our intern a month to do. With censorship entering the zeitgeist nowadays I wouldn’t be surprised if the next big decentralized social network is build on Skynet.
Be warned of the large post mine coming to SiaCoin soon (the crypto-currency that powers Skynet). Massive inflation is coming to SiaCoin because of this to pay off Skynet Labs as they exit development on the Sia core protocol. David (aka Taek), the original creator, is leaving the Sia project to become a third party dev (working for the new Skynet Labs VC funded company) and will no longer be working on making the Sia core protocol actually work better. Lots of outstanding issues in the Sia core protocol still and with Sia losing their founding dev it raises concerns if the Sia protocol will ever be able to mature. Read more at https://SiaSetup.info (and more specifically https://siasetup.info/concerns-about-sia-and-skynet)
The "post mine" is something that has been discussed in the community for many months, and is not something we are hiding - in fact it's stickied at the top of /r/siacoin and has appeared in all of our announcment channels and official newsletters.
It is also not correct to say I am "leaving" the Sia project, I will continue to work on Sia and Skynet as I always have, but administrative control over the codebase is being handed over to a non-profit foundation with a mandate of placing the community health and vision as its primary priority.
My own primary responsibility is to the bottom line of my company, and to the extent that Skynet Labs' bottom line is no longer perfectly aligned with the community's interests, we have created a foundation to ensure the community has a voice in how development progresses for the base layer.
I know that the 18,000 word letter you linked raises a lot of concerns about the project - from the history, to the speed of developemnt, to the core codebase, to the new Skynet initiative, to the economic model, to the team behind the project and the leadership behind the project, to the documentation, to the new initiative to hand over the project to the community, to the communtiy itself - but I don't believe the letter was written from a place of good faith, and I don't believe that most of the arguments hold up to scrutiny, especially if you compare the progress and decision making of the Sia project to competitors like Filecoin, Maidsafe, and Storj
If Trump has been kicked off Twitter, there's nothing stopping him from providing an email newsletter where people can sign-up and recieve his crazy ramblings.
Seriously wondering why people don't do this. Perhaps I shouldn't be giving Trump any ideas?
> Skynet's speeds rival centralized providers and surpass all decentralized offerings. A typical Skynet download starts in under 500 ms and can stream at rates as high as 1 Gbps!
I tried to download the PDF sample on the frontpage and the download never actually started. It kept waiting for the server to begin transmitting the file...
What's the difference between Sia and Skynet? This is the point that confuses me most.
I thought Sia is the low-level layer and Skynet is the high-level layer, but one of the comments says that Sia encrypts data and Skynet doesn't, so that makes no sense.
Too many names that aren't clearly explained in a very obvious place is a plague that many otherwise cool projects suffer from.
Yeah, there's actually organizational changes happening to help remedy this. At risk of over-simplifying:
- Sia is the blockchain project that lets renters and hosts create a market for storage space. (using SiaCoin as the cryptocurrency)
- Skynet uses this market to provide a data backend for a web ecosystem for developers and users. They access the ecosystem through "portals," which are actually just specialized hosts on the sia network.
Data on the Sia network is encrypted at a storage layer (as part of splitting it up to send it to hosts), but Skynet files are accessible to anyone who has its hash (portals, ISP, etc could see this info when you access the URL). The file contents are not encrypted by default because they're meant to be widely-accessible, but you can encrypt files on the client-side before sending the, to Skynet, which is what https://skysend.hns.siasky.net/ and some other projects do.
I had zero knowledge of what any of this was (Sia, Skynet, etc), tried looking it up on the page but the technical terms were too many and there was no glossary I could find. So I started searching, read the Readme on Sia's project on Gitlab, and then came upon this website [1] which harshly demonizes both Sia and Skynet due to maintainers banning a critic, and allegedly being generally toxic.
This is very much not a good look at all for the whole thing, and I suggest the developers should both solve this problem amicably ASAP, and also add very clear 'WHAT THIS IS AND HOW IT WORKS' links on every page related to the project, with many real world examples of how/why use this and with nearly no use of specific jargon that's not introduced clearly during explanations.
I'm asking in earnest but since I'm not very savvy when it comes to blockchain and decentralised internet, can this be used for piracy (movies mp3 etc)? What about really nefarious stuff like CP? Do we know who is responsible and is it possible to report and take down links? Also does running a node involve you in anything unknowingly?
Or does it have nothing to do with anonymity/bullet-proof links and is merely just a very cheap storage?
P.S. Sorry if this sounds like noob questions but i wasn't able to answer it by looking at their homepage.
Although this is a very fair question, I cannot help but notice that the first thing people associate with the word freedom today is with a negative angle. This is really troubling me, as it used to be a more cherished value.
True, unlimited freedom in this sense inevitably means the ethically very worst use cases, because this is the limit of freedom in any society: Material that is illegal and will have the authorities use all reasonable efforts to stop its spread. Whether that's political discussion or CP depends on the society.
If I had asked this question, it would be to gauge how far along the freedom spectrum this service has been designed to operate. There are distribution systems that are capable of even evading the most capable authorities, but their user experience is absolutely horrible.
Any system like this will strike a balance, maybe also designing provisions for removing "material that is really bad". Either out of an ethical obligation, or in order to not risk being shut down wholesale.
A system that was truly free and unlimited, would be the tool of an anarchist. Few people wish the implication of such a technology.
I think it’s because people end up asking “what can I functionally do on this platform that I can’t functionally do on another platform”, and it’s easier to think of these ‘negative’ examples.
I think this maps reasonably well to a rise of both technological abuse and accountability when producing things for the internet now, compared to what it used to be.
Public facing portals and hosts serving unencrypted data are of course responsible for the content they serve.
People can upload content in two ways: either by using a public facing portal such as siasky.net or by spinning up their own portal client (Sia node) and communicating with hosts directly via the distributed network.
It is possible for individual portals and hosts to take down links and stop serving that content, for example after accepting copyright infringement requests.
It it also possible for anyone to spin up their own portal and keep content pinned as long as any host on the network will accept it. For example, skyportal.xyz is another public portal. Same goes for hosts.
The Skynet (Sia) model aims for thousands and thousands of hosts spread geographically. It becomes extremely difficult to delete any piece of data from the network entirely as long as someone wants to make sure it stays up.
Erasure coding redundancy ensures very high resilience from any single host going offline.
> It is possible for individual portals and hosts to take down links and stop serving that content, for example after accepting copyright infringement requests.
I think this needs to be solved at the protocol level. What if the portal is hosted in a DGAF jurisdiction, but I'm running my node in a different jurisdiction? What forces the portal to keep my interest in mind?
That is incorrect. Only files on the basic Sia client are all stored encrypted. Skynet stores all files by default in cleartext. It is up to Skynet users or app developers to ensure files that are uploaded are encrypted client side.
On a side note, child pornography is not the intended or primary use case for Skynet and is condemned by the dev team and the community at large. There is no evidence to suggest anyone is using Sia or Skynet for this type of content, and portal operators aggressively censor such content and report it to authorities.
Skynet is intended for privacy and data ownership while also offering users unprecedented features in terms of portability and composability.
Can somebody explain what the difference between this and IPFS is? I see block chain mentioned so I assume you pay for storage but that page just allows you to upload anything right away without payment. Is this actually an alternative to FileCoin?
Readit News
I really hope these blockchain based projects can solve the sharding problem. These blockchains are getting so big.
[1] https://siastats.info/blockchain_size
Plenty newer DTLs have ditched the chain validation process completely and you can start at any point in time with the ledger state of that time and start going forward to the present. Whether that is years or seconds doesn't really matter. It all depend of whether you have an accentual use case for historical transaction data or not.
This is really important because second generation blockchains have way higher transaction throughput, integrated decentral exchanges (DEX) and other advanced feature that requires way more storage. Some already have reached uncompressed sizes of several TBs for the complete history.
See technical documentation for the XRPL https://xrpl.org/ledger-history.html
Curious: beyond XRPL, what are examples of such blockchains?
Otherwise, if people mostly use web portals, then it's not really free and decentralized, as people are essentially at mercy of portals they use. In fact, if application code itself is served through a portal, it is less secure than normal web.
So with Skynet, you can either do "easy" or "decentralized", but not "easy and decentralized", right?
Wouldn't it need to very each individual shard?
Sia is an amazing project with a team who is extremely talented and passionate, but Skynet is the future. They've built a fully decentralized CDN and it's incredible. Ten years from now, I can see it being the norm for startups and maybe even larger companies to use decentralized CDN's like this. I hope Coinbase adds Siacoin for trading soon, since they participated in integrating Rosetta.
Deleted Comment
[1] https://siasky.net/docs/#handshake
https://www.reddit.com/r/siacoin/comments/iox6ly/proposal_th...
It is also not correct to say I am "leaving" the Sia project, I will continue to work on Sia and Skynet as I always have, but administrative control over the codebase is being handed over to a non-profit foundation with a mandate of placing the community health and vision as its primary priority.
My own primary responsibility is to the bottom line of my company, and to the extent that Skynet Labs' bottom line is no longer perfectly aligned with the community's interests, we have created a foundation to ensure the community has a voice in how development progresses for the base layer.
I know that the 18,000 word letter you linked raises a lot of concerns about the project - from the history, to the speed of developemnt, to the core codebase, to the new Skynet initiative, to the economic model, to the team behind the project and the leadership behind the project, to the documentation, to the new initiative to hand over the project to the community, to the communtiy itself - but I don't believe the letter was written from a place of good faith, and I don't believe that most of the arguments hold up to scrutiny, especially if you compare the progress and decision making of the Sia project to competitors like Filecoin, Maidsafe, and Storj
AKA email.
If Trump has been kicked off Twitter, there's nothing stopping him from providing an email newsletter where people can sign-up and recieve his crazy ramblings.
Seriously wondering why people don't do this. Perhaps I shouldn't be giving Trump any ideas?
[0] https://disrn.com/news/email-provider-suspends-trump-campaig...
I tried to download the PDF sample on the frontpage and the download never actually started. It kept waiting for the server to begin transmitting the file...
I thought Sia is the low-level layer and Skynet is the high-level layer, but one of the comments says that Sia encrypts data and Skynet doesn't, so that makes no sense.
Too many names that aren't clearly explained in a very obvious place is a plague that many otherwise cool projects suffer from.
Data on the Sia network is encrypted at a storage layer (as part of splitting it up to send it to hosts), but Skynet files are accessible to anyone who has its hash (portals, ISP, etc could see this info when you access the URL). The file contents are not encrypted by default because they're meant to be widely-accessible, but you can encrypt files on the client-side before sending the, to Skynet, which is what https://skysend.hns.siasky.net/ and some other projects do.
This is very much not a good look at all for the whole thing, and I suggest the developers should both solve this problem amicably ASAP, and also add very clear 'WHAT THIS IS AND HOW IT WORKS' links on every page related to the project, with many real world examples of how/why use this and with nearly no use of specific jargon that's not introduced clearly during explanations.
[1] https://siasetup.info/guides/using-skynet
Or does it have nothing to do with anonymity/bullet-proof links and is merely just a very cheap storage?
P.S. Sorry if this sounds like noob questions but i wasn't able to answer it by looking at their homepage.
If I had asked this question, it would be to gauge how far along the freedom spectrum this service has been designed to operate. There are distribution systems that are capable of even evading the most capable authorities, but their user experience is absolutely horrible.
Any system like this will strike a balance, maybe also designing provisions for removing "material that is really bad". Either out of an ethical obligation, or in order to not risk being shut down wholesale.
A system that was truly free and unlimited, would be the tool of an anarchist. Few people wish the implication of such a technology.
Public facing portals and hosts serving unencrypted data are of course responsible for the content they serve.
People can upload content in two ways: either by using a public facing portal such as siasky.net or by spinning up their own portal client (Sia node) and communicating with hosts directly via the distributed network.
It is possible for individual portals and hosts to take down links and stop serving that content, for example after accepting copyright infringement requests.
It it also possible for anyone to spin up their own portal and keep content pinned as long as any host on the network will accept it. For example, skyportal.xyz is another public portal. Same goes for hosts.
The Skynet (Sia) model aims for thousands and thousands of hosts spread geographically. It becomes extremely difficult to delete any piece of data from the network entirely as long as someone wants to make sure it stays up.
Erasure coding redundancy ensures very high resilience from any single host going offline.
I think this needs to be solved at the protocol level. What if the portal is hosted in a DGAF jurisdiction, but I'm running my node in a different jurisdiction? What forces the portal to keep my interest in mind?
Edit: Above is about Sia. Apparently Skynet is different.
On a side note, child pornography is not the intended or primary use case for Skynet and is condemned by the dev team and the community at large. There is no evidence to suggest anyone is using Sia or Skynet for this type of content, and portal operators aggressively censor such content and report it to authorities.
Skynet is intended for privacy and data ownership while also offering users unprecedented features in terms of portability and composability.
Dead Comment
https://ipfs.io
https://filecoin.io