Why is Sia Important?

We're seeing a pattern that we've seen before. Sia hits some high point in the price, then people start to sell off and the price begins to fall. People get frustrated at their falling investment and start pointing at all of Sia's deficiencies and saying why it can't succeed, why it won't succeed, why the dev team is insufficient and incompetent.

Last year Sia pumped from about 3 satoshis to about 180 satoshis. Then it fell to 28. The whole way down, people were upset, and missing the bigger picture. They would talk about the user experience. They would talk about how you could only upload like 5 GB to the platform. They would talk about the giants and how nobody would ever be interested in using Sia when you could only store 5 GB on it. They would complain that Sia doesn't do any marketing. They would complain that Sia didn't have any money. They would accuse the devs of price manipulation.

I had many people private message me below the price of 40 satoshis in late 2016 and early 2017 saying they just didn't believe that the fundamentals made sense. They said they really like the project but don't see how it could be successful, so they were selling what little they had remaining and leaving. These people sold millions of coins for under a thousand dollars.

Everyone today is missing the point. Everyone is focused on trivial things like a 30% inflation rate. Like a competitor that just raised $230 million despite having no working code and a whitepaper that is incomplete and that betrays a poor understanding of blockchain technology.

Sia is going to change the face of cloud storage. That's a $20 billion market, and it's projected to become a $200 billion market. Sia is not some niche either, it's a full upgrade to how cloud storage works. We aren't aiming at 1%, we are aiming at 70-90% market share, because the core technology is that good.

Today, most Internet infrastructure is owned by a small number of companies. When you put your data in the cloud, you give up control. They can choose to delete your data, they can choose to hold your data hostage, they can change their terms of service on you. These are not uncommon situations either. Here's a story about photobucket requesting ransom prices from Ebay and Amazon. About a month ago, atlassian.com announced massive price increases for their platform, which left many people out to dry. Several months ago, Amazon pulled the unlimited tier from their Amazon Cloud Drive, giving users 180 days to download the data and find a new home.

When you put your data in the cloud, you give it to someone else. The traditional cloud is controlled by humans. There can be downtime, terms changes, price changes, companies can go under (like Soundcloud). We have built a fragile internet that puts the power in the hands of a few.

Sia changes that equation. Sia allows people to use the cloud without giving up control. This is a feature that resonates deeply with IT admins. The majority of IT admins will agree that they don't like using the Cloud, and that they would rather use another option if they could, except that the cloud offers so many advantages that they are willing to accept the loss of control of their data. Sia changes this equation. IT admins can have all the benefits of the cloud, without giving up control. It's a big step forward, and it's the core reason for blockchains existing in the first place.

The advantages don't stop there. Sia is cheaper, faster, more reliable, more secure, and has better uptime than the traditional cloud. The software today is not fully able to realize these benefits, but that's no fault of the protocol. The protocol itself is the foundation for a superior cloud platform, even if you don't care about trust. Sia is a full fledged CDN, with storage points in over 50 countries and on all 6 continents. Amazon can't claim numbers like those. Sia has hosts within 50 milliseconds of every major city in the world. Amazon can't claim that either. If you want low-latency storage to every city in the world (useful if you are YouTube, Netflix, Imgur, etc.), Sia is the best technology to use. The world's leading CDN (Akamai) charges >$50/TB. Sia charges $0.50, and that's a sustainable price.

The community has fallen into a mental trap that we see every time the price is declining. We see it with Bitcoin too. As the price goes down, people only ask themselves "what are the ways this project can fail?". I can promise you, Sia has a much better chance of success than 90% of the cryptocurrencies with a higher market cap. The projects technological fundamentals are exceptional, and an outlier in the space. Not only that, we've actually shipped a working product, and it's actually decentralized. Every 3 months has seen a release that marks a major step forward in usability and functionality.

The overwhelming din of pessimism of the past three months needs to stop. We are on a mission, and we are going to complete it. The community can't function when every other post is about how Sia is a waste of time. If you believe that, stop wasting your time and leave. The true community of Sia does believe in the project, because they know how serious the potential is. Sia is a revolutionary technology, and it's far, far ahead of everything that's trying to compete with it.

Thank you.

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