STORAGE ON THE BLOCKCHAIN
With blockchain technology many markets right now can be upgraded greatly, one of these markets I believe is data storage.
Using a blockchain like structure data can be stored not on a cloud but on a fog, essentially data is encrypted and cut in peaces and distributed to many computers, these computers store the data for a small percentage of the price the client is paying. Instead of a miner the renter that is storing the data is called a farmer.
Growing fears of current data storage services getting hacked might make people lean more to this technology since it is basically unhackable do to being decentralized, not to mention it is also very much cheaper.
Currently there are two coins that offer the service:
Sia offers the cheapest prices for storage, uploads and downloads, however being so cheap might also disencourage the farmers. And no farmers means no service.
You can see the prices below for 1 TB of storage.
I've tried to farm and the interface is unnecessarily complicated, unlike Storj, you lock up collateral siacoin(SC) when you accept a contract to rent space, if your internet fails or some bug keeps you from connecting you will lose the siacoin you put on collateral.
I've seen many people with problems renting and losing their collateral talking on the forum, and there were few worthwhile responses.
I also went to their slack to ask a few questions since the tutorial they provide for renting space is lacking and not updated to the current version of the GUI, there was only a guy who responded a few hours after I asked something and he wasn't even a moderator nor an admin.
The community is very bad for this coin and there's practically no support.
The prices for this coin are significantly higher compared to siacoin but they're still cheaper then current widely used space storing services. Right now you have to pay 15$ per month to store 1TB and bandwidth costs 50$ per TB downloaded.
Unlike siacoin, this coin has a very good community and very well made and indepth tutorials. Their slack has friendly moderators present and is also very active with many community members participating in the conversations. The space renting software is very simple and easy to use but their software for storing files is still needs some work done.
What mainly worries me about this coin is the huge difference in circulating supply and total supply.
Circulating supply is 50,490,939 STORJ, and total supply is 424,999,998 STORJ. The difference is 374,509,059 STORJ, this supply is not on exchanges which means the dev team are holding this supply, which means if they start releasing their STORJ to the exchanges the price will dump hard.
However I should note in the slack they say coinmarketcap doesn't have the total supply number right.
Despite claims storj is not truly decentralized it looks to me that storj is advancing much faster and the community is very focused on improving this open-source project, so issues that it might not be truly decentralized should be eventually be fixed in the future to provide an extra layer of security. They are currently in the process of hiring a new CEO, so hopefully the new CEO gets the ball rolling faster.
Out of the two, I like storj more, and despite the difference in total and circulating supply I will invest more in STORJ coin, I doubt the dev team will be insane enough to dump their coin either way.
That will be all, peace out.