README
¶
Sia is a decentralized cloud storage platform that radically alters the landscape of cloud storage. By leveraging smart contracts, client-side encryption, and sophisticated redundancy (via Reed-Solomon codes), Sia allows users to safely store their data with hosts that they do not know or trust. The result is a cloud storage marketplace where hosts compete to offer the best service at the lowest price. And since there is no barrier to entry for hosts, anyone with spare storage capacity can join the network and start making money.
Traditional cloud storage has a number of shortcomings. Users are limited to a few big-name offerings: Google, Microsoft, Amazon. These companies have little incentive to encrypt your data or make it easy to switch services later. Their code is closed-source, and they can lock you out of your account at any time.
We believe that users should own their data. Sia achieves this by replacing the traditional monolithic cloud storage provider with a blockchain and a swarm of hosts, each of which stores an encrypted fragment of your data. Since the fragments are redundant, no single host can hold your data hostage: if they jack up their price or go offline, you can simply download from a different host. In other words, trust is removed from the equation, and switching to a different host is painless. Stripped of these unfair advantages, hosts must compete solely on the quality and price of the storage they provide.
Sia can serve as a replacement for personal backups, bulk archiving, content distribution, and more. For developers, Sia is a low-cost alternative to Amazon S3. Storage on Sia is a full order of magnitude cheaper than on S3, with comparable bandwidth, latency, and durability. Sia works best for static content, especially media like videos, music, and photos.
Distributing data across many hosts automatically confers several advantages. The most obvious is that, just like BitTorrent, uploads and downloads are highly parallel. Given enough hosts, Sia can saturate your bandwidth. Another advantage is that your data is spread across a wide geographic area, reducing latency and safeguarding your data against a range of attacks.
It is important to note that users have full control over which hosts they use. You can tailor your host set for minimum latency, lowest price, widest geographic coverage, or even a strict whitelist of IP addresses or public keys.
At the core of Sia is a blockchain that closely resembles Bitcoin. Transactions are conducted in Siacoin, a cryptocurrency. The blockchain is what allows Sia to enforce its smart contracts without relying on centralized authority. To acquire siacoins, use an exchange such as Binance, Bittrex, Shapeshift, or Poloniex.
To get started with Sia, check out the guides below:
Usage
Sia is ready for use with small sums of money and non-critical files, but until the network has a more proven track record, we advise against using it as a sole means of storing important data.
This release comes with 2 binaries, siad and siac. siad is a background service, or "daemon," that runs the Sia protocol and exposes an HTTP API on port 9980. siac is a command-line client that can be used to interact with siad in a user-friendly way. There is also a graphical client, Sia-UI, which is the preferred way of using Sia for most users. For interested developers, the siad API is documented at sia.tech/docs.
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 its containing 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) or Sia-
UI to interact with siad. From here, you can send money, upload and download
files, and advertise yourself as a host.
Building From Source
To build from source, Go 1.13 or above must be installed
on the system. Clone the repo and run make:
git clone https://gitlab.com/NebulousLabs/Sia
cd Sia && make dependencies && make
This will install the siad and siac binaries in your $GOPATH/bin folder.
(By default, this is $HOME/go/bin.)
You can also run make test and make test-long to run the short and full test
suites, respectively. Finally, make cover will generate code coverage reports
for each package; they are stored in the cover folder and can be viewed in
your browser.
Running Sia on a Raspberry Pi
Official binaries are not provided for the Raspberry Pi, but you can easily
compile them yourself by installing the Go toolchain on your Raspberry Pi.
Alternatively, you can cross-compile by running GOOS=linux GOARCH=arm64 make.
Raspberry Pi compatible binaries will then be installed in
$GOPATH/bin/linux_arm64/.
Directories
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| Path | Synopsis |
|---|---|
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cmd
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Package compatibility contains a bunch of tests to make sure that compatibility has been preserved with previous versions.
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Package compatibility contains a bunch of tests to make sure that compatibility has been preserved with previous versions. |
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Package modules contains definitions for all of the major modules of Sia, as well as some helper functions for performing actions that are common to multiple modules.
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Package modules contains definitions for all of the major modules of Sia, as well as some helper functions for performing actions that are common to multiple modules. |
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explorer
Package explorer provides a glimpse into what the Sia network currently looks like.
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Package explorer provides a glimpse into what the Sia network currently looks like. |
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gateway
Package gateway connects a Sia node to the Sia flood network.
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Package gateway connects a Sia node to the Sia flood network. |
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host
Package host is an implementation of the host module, and is responsible for participating in the storage ecosystem, turning available disk space an internet bandwidth into profit for the user.
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Package host is an implementation of the host module, and is responsible for participating in the storage ecosystem, turning available disk space an internet bandwidth into profit for the user. |
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miner
Package miner is responsible for creating and submitting siacoin blocks
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Package miner is responsible for creating and submitting siacoin blocks |
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renter
Package renter is responsible for uploading and downloading files on the sia network.
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Package renter is responsible for uploading and downloading files on the sia network. |
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renter/hostdb
Package hostdb provides a HostDB object that implements the renter.hostDB interface.
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Package hostdb provides a HostDB object that implements the renter.hostDB interface. |
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Package node provides tooling for creating a Sia node.
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Package node provides tooling for creating a Sia node. |
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api/server
Package server provides a server that can wrap a node and serve an http api for interacting with the node.
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Package server provides a server that can wrap a node and serve an http api for interacting with the node. |
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daemon
Package daemon contains tests related to the /daemon endpoints.
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Package daemon contains tests related to the /daemon endpoints. |