Siacoin Review Is It Worth Investing?

I have been learning about cryptocurrencies for more than half a year now. I wrote about my first investments in cloud mining right here: All You Need To Know About Bitcoin. I invested in Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum and Dash mining and I'm also planning to add Monero and Zcash mining contracts to my portfolio.

Even though all these big cryptocurrencies are rising and are really great investments, currently it is summer and not a lot of moves are happening so, I started doing a bit of research on the up and coming cryptocurrencies. Mostly about the ones that are around rank 10 to 30 and in this post I want to summarize my findings about a cryptocurrency that caught my attention, which is Siacoin.

What Is Siacoin?

Siacoin brings the blockchain technology into the cloud storage space. Instead of building massive servers that cost a lot of money to maintain, they are actually building a network of people that anyone can join and lend out their free space to others and make some money.

It sounds quite genius if you ask me. We all have free space on our computers that we could lend and the blockchain technology allows to store the data securely, but let's dig a little bit deeper.

The Competition

The cloud storage space is very competitive. We all know Dropbox, Google Drive, One Drive(Microsoft) and these are only the big players as there are a bunch smaller ones and there are even companies like Storj using the same blockchain technology. Some say it's now a better investment because the price hasn't gone up significantly.

So, the competition is fierce and gaining users won't be easy though from what I read Sia targets big companies instead of regular users and it makes perfect sense having in mind that it's still inconvenient to use regular blockchain technologies.

The Inner Workings

So, if you wanted to make a little bit of money renting out your storage space to Sia, what would you need to do?

Firstly, you would need to buy 2000 Siacoins minimum, at the current price it would be around $40. This is the major factor that makes the price of the coin go up because you have to hold the coins if you want to rent out your space. Now, the amount of coins you need to hold I think depends on the amount of space you want to rent out.

Also, it's not that easy to set everything up. You can't just click a button or two and rent out space from your laptop, there's some decent configuration involved and you also need to ensure near 100% uptime. I won't get into exact details here because if you are interested in that you will still need to find a more in-depth guide.

All I want to say is that the system is complicated and it's far from mainstream adoption. Also, the necessity to hold coins even though is good for the token price is still a barrier for wider adoption.

Potential

Nonetheless, there are currently more than 1.1 petabytes of storage available on the Sia network from which only 2% is currently being used. So, there are a lot of people renting space, but not that many renting it out and the opportunity for the average folk isn't that great right now.

Though on the broader perspective, if Sia would manage to get at least a single big company on board that available space would quickly disappear, which would mean a higher demand for space, then the price of the Siacoin would skyrocket, because more people would be buying coins to be able to rent out their space.

When and will that happen? Who knows. You can only guess, but in my opinion, it's likely to happen because Sia is able to offer 10 times cheaper storage.

To put things in perspective, Dropbox is estimated to be worth around $3.5 billion. Where Sia currently has a market cap of a little more than $500 million. So, it's already quite big in comparison and I would even say it's rather inflated having in mind that the adoption rate and from a different perspective there's also a lot of room for growth if Sia would grow as big as Dropbox.

Wrapping It Up

So, in my opinion, the price of the Siacoin is a bit inflated for its current usability rate, but I do believe in this idea of decentralized cloud storage, it's safer for the users and 10 times cheaper, which is the ultimate selling point.

My plan is to buy at least 2000 Siacoins that I could use in the future to try out renting out my storage space.

What do you think about Sia? Have you bought Siacoins? Let me know in the comments below.