Sia Network FreeBSD update

Sia is an interesting distributed storage network.

It functions thanks to contracts executing on the Sia blockchain. One big feature is that it removes the need for trust when storing your data online.

In a normal data storage environment, you have to trust your data storage provider to do the right thing. You trust they will refund you if they lose your data. Trust they will really keep your data while they say they are. Trust they will not snoop on your data. Trust they will not change the terms of your contract whenever they want, like charge you more, or reduce your space or a zillion other possible issues. And your only recourse is to sue them. Did you try suing google lately ? I thought so… therefore in all practicality, you have zero recourse.

With Sia, you can define how many hosts are actually storing your data to gain redundancy. Typically you would store 3 copies of your data, split ten times, accross multiple hosts. This way even if many hosts fail, you still have your data distributed wide enough that it can be recovered.

Contracts defining duration, cost and data size are negociated automatically according to your criteriae. Hosts have a monetary incentive to store your data and make it available to you when you want: to gain a contract, a certain amount of collateral is paid into the contract by the host, at the same time, you pay some amount in the contract to secure your claim. Therefore both parties have an incentive to respect their agreement: the hosts get paid the hosting fee and collateral back at the end of the contract only if they were able to prove the data was held for the duration agreed on. Meanwhile, the renter pays some upfront fee to secure the storage (so the host knows he will get paid) and also pays along small fees while submitting his data. Any unused part of the upfront fee is automatically returned. So, everyone is kept honest, everyone gets his service or gets paid.

I think it is a great model, it is decentralized, it is secure, it is inherently honest. And cheap too: the cost of a Terabyte of storage per month is about 2-4USD.

Right now it is a bit complicated to setup as a host or renter of storage, but the installation manuals to rent and host are well written and easy to follow.

A ton more information on Sia is available on the Sia website.

There are no FreeBSD ports yet available, so I made them. Binaries for FreeBSD 14 :

• hostd
• renterd
• walletd

Port submitted to freebsd here: hostd renterd walletd