Sia (SC) Calculator

Sia is a decentralized cloud storage network that turns unused disk capacity into a secure, market-driven resource, where renters and hosts meet through on-chain smart contracts that specify terms, pricing, and performance, with payments settled in Siacoin (SC) and guarantees backed by host collateral and cryptographic proofs; files are encrypted client-side, split via Reed–Solomon erasure coding into 30 shards, and distributed across independent hosts worldwide so that data remains private, redundant, and retrievable even amid host churn, while background health checks and automatic repair maintain target redundancy without exposing keys or complete files to any single party, a design that elevates privacy and reliability beyond centralized providers and typically reduces overhead through competitive pricing; under the hood, the network’s Proof-of-Work consensus employs the BLAKE2b hash function, rewarding miners in SC for validating transactions and securing the ledger, with a block reward that begins at 300,000 SC, decreases by one per block, and stabilizes at 30,000 SC to provide enduring incentives; Sia’s file contracts enforce storage commitments over defined durations, requiring hosts to submit time-bound storage proofs-compact Merkle proofs linked to contract roots-that verify the continued custody of data, and noncompliance results in lost collateral and forfeited payouts, aligning economic behavior with uptime, bandwidth, and integrity; the ecosystem’s revenue model includes a 3.9% fee on storage-related transactions distributed to holders of Siafunds, a separate token representing a share of network revenue, adding a transparent, protocol-level dividend that supports sustainable development; unlike generalized decentralized computing platforms, Sia remains a focused storage layer, allowing targeted optimizations in shard placement, retrieval latency, and repair economics, while renter software scores hosts by price, historical reliability, geographic dispersion, and performance to minimize correlated risk and ensure smooth renewals; launched in 2015 and refined over years of open-source engineering, Sia stands as a technically mature solution where cryptography, incentives, and distributed systems form a disciplined architecture for private, durable, and cost-efficient cloud storage that invites users to step beyond the limits of a single data center into a resilient, borderless fabric.