But do you have the same level of durability and availability of your data? Do you trust the storage nodes to not be making copies of your data? Can you pay with dollars instead of bitcoin?
I'm paying for trust, and it is a hard sell that a distributed storage system spanning worldwide jurisdictions is inherently more trustworthy (although it is possible that it can be as durable and reliable as traditional storage systems, but the proof is in the data).
> Do you trust the storage nodes to not be making copies of your data?
No, I trust the cryptography to, I sure as hell wouldn't trust Backblaze, let alone Amazon not to do that either. I use Restic when using such services to encrypt before sending anything to them.
> durability and availability
This is IMO the only real question. I want to see some numbers and I think their blockchain should actually be able to provide values for this theoretically.
Okay, so after some reading: Sia uses Reed-Solomon coding in a 10 of 30 configuration. This means that as long as any 10 out of the 30 hosts you upload to are available you can download your files. There's a quite high failure rate for contracts at the moment as it's not very profitable, around 9%. In order for this to be a problem, over 20 contracts would need to fail. If my math is correct we're talking about that should achieve approximately "20 9s" of reliability. Now there's one major catch with that, which is that your hosts must be chosen in a properly random way, but there's some cool tooling for Sia to help with that available like Decentralizer.
Overall, given this, while I'm not 100% confident in their software and cryptocurrency yet, given time I think this could prove to offer an even higher guarantee of reliability than traditional cloud storage services at much lower prices.
I'm paying for trust, and it is a hard sell that a distributed storage system spanning worldwide jurisdictions is inherently more trustworthy (although it is possible that it can be as durable and reliable as traditional storage systems, but the proof is in the data).
I would like to be proven wrong.