jinglan/sia

Blockchain-based marketplace for file storage

Sia 0.3.0

Binaries can be found at our website.

Sia is a new cryptosystem designed to enable incentivized, decentralized storage in a Byzantine environment. The consensus protocol has been finished and is partially explained in Consensus.md. There is a working reference implementation in the consensus folder. While this implementation is well- tested, it is not guaranteed to be bug-free.

While many of the components of Sia are well understood and trusted cryptographic ideas, Sia itself has not had a lot of academic review. As such, Sia should be seen as highly experimental. As per the license, Sia is software that comes without any warranty, and the developers cannot be held responsible for any damages that occur. We encourage you to use Sia, but only with files and money that you are comfortable losing.

This release comes with 2 binaries, siad and siac. siad is a background service, or "daemon," that runs the Sia protocol, and siac is a client that is used to interact with siad. Siad exposes an api on 'localhost:9980' which can be used to interact with the daemon. There is a front-end program called Sia-UI which can be used to interact with the daemon in a more user-friendly way. Documentation on the API can be found in API.md.

Usage

siad and siac are run via command prompt. On Windows, you can just double- click siad.exe if you don't need to specify any command-line arguments. Otherwise, navigate to the sia folder and click File->Open command prompt. Then, start the siad service by entering siad and pressing Enter. The command prompt may appear to freeze; this means siad is waiting for requests. Windows users may see a warning from the Windows Firewall; be sure to check both boxes ("Private networks" and "Public networks") and click "Allow access." You can now run siac in a separate command prompt to interact with siad. From here, you can send money, mine blocks, upload and download files, and advertise yourself as a host.

Troubleshooting

• The client does not appear to join the network.

  There should be at least one peer online for you to connect to, so if you cannot connect, you may be experiencing connection issues. Ensure that you are connected to the Internet. You may also need to forward your ports (see below). If you are confident that your connection is okay, contact us! Our server may be experiencing problems.

  You can also opt not to bootstrap at all by passing a "-n" flag to siad.

  Port forwarding: Port forwarding is how you let your router know that it's okay for other Sia peers to connect to you. If you are behind a firewall, you will most likely need to do this. By default, Sia traffic happens on port 9988. The specific instructions for forwarding a port varies by router. For more information, consult this guide.

  In future versions, we will add support for UPnP, which will allow you to skip this step.

• The block height has stopped increasing.

  This is usually caused by a minor desynchronization. The client should automatically attempt to resynchronize every two minutes. You can also manually resynchronize by running siac gateway sync.

• siad complains about "locks held too long."

  This is debugging output and can be safely ignored.

If your issue is not addressed above, you can get in touch with us personally:

email:

[email protected]

[email protected]

IRC: #siacoin on freenode (ping Taek)

Version Information

• Please mine. Mining helps keep the network running smoothly. It can also cause changes to propagate if they seem to be taking a while.

• Uploading may take a long time, since the file contract needs to make it into a block. The default redundancy is also set very high, so uploading may be more expensive than expected.

Please tell us about any problems you run into, and any features you want! The advantage of being a beta user is that your feedback will have a large impact on what we do in the next few months. Thank you!

Version History

v0.3.0: Second open beta release.

v0.2.0: First open beta release.

v0.1.0: Closed beta release.