[Freedombox-discuss] Decentralized backup: sia?

[Michael]

Hello,

I had a look at various decentralized backup solutions recently, and sia
(https://sia.tech) looks promising.

It's based on the sia blockchain, storage contracts are smart contracts
that are to be paid in siacoin*. The data itself is not stored in any
blockchain.
Hosters offer storage capacity with a certain uptime guarantee and get
paid in siacoin if they fulfill the contract - and pay a collateral if
they don't.

Sia is integrated in some other products (e.g. Nextcloud, Minebox) and
it's in the Debian repositories, so it's rather advanced: 4.5PB
available with 207TB currently used - storage space is really cheap
right now ($2/month for 1TB).
There are some nice features like contract renewal or automatic file
repair when hosters go offline.

Downside / possible problems:
FreedomBox users would have to buy siacoin to use it. Also being a
hoster requires having siacoins first to provide some money as
collateral for the smart contracts. Earning siacoin could then still be
difficult because FreedomBoxes might not have a huge storage capacity or
reliable uptime.
And there could be security issues in the smart contracts, or value
fluctuation of siacoin.
There are many similar blockchain based projects but all of them are in
earlier stages. One where you don't have to buy coins before offering
storage space would be ideal.

The main advantage over TAHOE-LAFS is that users wouldn't have to take
care about creating and organizing a storage grid themselves, which I
imagine to be quite hard for many users.

What other / better solutions are there for decentralized backups?

Cheers,
fonfon