Siacoin has piqued my interest lately. At a market cap of roughly $380 million right now, they aren't the largest coin, but they definitely aren't the smallest. Their purpose is unique and definitely offers a competition against other cloud storage platforms such as AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Their pricing is just vastly lower than the competition.

Don't trust a central server

Like most of you, I use cloud storage for simple things like hosting school assignments, pictures, etc. The basic stuff I want on my devices. The issue with that is that you're giving your data to a central server. With Sia, their platform allows you to rent your personal hard drive space which is then encrypted on the decentralized network. You choose how much of your hard drive you want to share, get paid monthly based on the price you set, and get paid for however long you want to share your hard drive.

Mine Instead

If you're already low on storage space and don't have money for a spare hard drive, mining is a good alternative. The drawback to this is that it's only optimized for Linux. It'll work on Windows but the configurations won't net you nearly as much profit as if you were mining on Linux. If my desktop wasn't a Windows gaming setup, I'd be mining now. There aren't any pools set up yet but that's not a huge deal since Sia isn't as big as the other coins like Ethereum and Monero where the difficulty rate is really high.

Getting Started

All of their features work right now. Downloading the GUI is easy and just requires you to sync the blockchain.....and add 2,000 Siacoin. Fortunately, that equals only about $30 right now. Once you add that, you can use everything. I'm working on getting my Bittrex account back because I don't have access to my 2FA key anymore. But once that's back, I'll put some money into Sia.

Just Looking To Invest?

If you are just focused on the money, Siacoin is very low at roughly $0.014. This idea is still in the beginning stages and I can see this going far. It's cloud storage. It's not unheard of. Creating something that adds competition to some of the largest corporations is definitely a balsy move but we've seen crazier things happen. It may be a long term investment, but it looks promising and has room to grow.