sia

README

Sia 0.1.0

This distribution is an early beta release. It is likely to have many bugs, some of which may be severe. Please use with caution.

This release comes with 2 binaries, siad and siac. siad is a background service, or "daemon", that runs the Sia protocol, and siac is a client that is used to interact with siad. siad also exposes a web interface, which can be viewed in your browser at http://localhost:9980 while siad is running. This is the preferred way of interacting with siad.

Usage

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 the sia folder and click File->Open command prompt. Then, start the siad service by entering siad and pressing Enter. The command prompt may appear to freeze; this means siad is waiting for requests. Windows users may see a warning from the Windows Firewall; be sure to check both boxes ("Private networks" and "Public networks") and click "Allow access." You can now run siac in a separate command prompt to interact with siad, or navigate your browser to http://localhost:9980 to use siad's web interface. From here, you can send money, mine blocks, upload and download files, and advertise yourself as a host.

A note on hosting: when you announce yourself as a host, you have to put up coins ("freeze" them) to show that you're serious. This helps to mitiage Sybil attacks. After 'freeze duration' blocks, you will get the coins back.

When someone makes a contract with you, you put up security coins. If you're a good host, you'll eventually get these coins back, but if you lose the file you'll lose the security too. So when people make contracts with you, your balance will initially go down. Rest assured, once you start submitting storage proofs, you'll start making money.

Troubleshooting

• siad prints Can't bootstrap: no peers responded to ping.

  There should be at least one peer online for you to connect to, so if you see this message you may be experiencing connection issues. Ensure that you are connected to the Internet. You may also need to forward your ports (see below). If you are confident that your connection is okay, contact us! Our server may be experiencing problems.

  You can also opt not to bootstrap at all by passing a "-n" flag to siad.

  Port forwarding: Port forwarding is how you let your router know that it's okay for other Sia peers to connect to you. If you are behind a firewall, you will most likely need to do this. By default, Sia traffic happens on port 9988. The specific instructions for forwarding a port varies by router. For more information, consult this guide.

  In future versions, we will add support for UPnP, which will allow you to skip this step.

If your issue is not addressed above, you can get in touch with us personally: email: david@nebulouslabs.com luke@nebulouslabs.com IRC: #siacoin on freenode

Version Information

• Please mine. Mining helps keep the network running smoothly. It can also cause changes to propagate if they seem to be taking a while.

• Uploading may take a long time, since the file contract needs to make it into a block. The default redundancy is also set very high, so uploading may be more expensive than expected.

Please tell us about any problems you run into, and any features you want! The advantage of being a beta user is that your feedback will have a large impact on what we do in the next few months. Thank you!

Version History

v0.2.0: Open beta release.

v0.1.0: Initial (closed) beta release.