Much of the digital world now operates in the cloud. A handful of companies are responsible for the massive market, and the centralization makes many people worry about censorship, privacy, and network resilience.

David Vorick’s passion for distributed file storage had him start Sia in 2014. He’s been working fervently ever since to develop a viable competitor to the centralized solutions that are responsible for much of the content on the internet today. David aim’s to create a more private, resilient, and secure alternative to Amazon Web Services while also outperforming it.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Why David started Sia rather than taking a job in big-tech
• The Sia launch in 2015
• Why Sia has prioritized development over marketing in the beginning
• The importance of decentralized storage solutions
• How decentralized storage can be cheaper than AWS
• Why Sia needs its own blockchain and protocol's tech stack
• David's views on Proof of Work how that lead him to start a mining company
• The circumstances around the Sia blockchain fork of 2018
• Where David envisions decentralized storage in the next few years

Episode links:

• Sia API Documentation
• Sia Blog
• Decentralization & Cutting-Edge Cryptography - Starkware Sessions Talk
• Busted Setup - MIT Bitcoin Expo 2019 Talk
• Recovering Payment Channel Midstates Using only The User's Seed - Scaling Bitcoin Talk
• The Sia Ethos (Sia Blog)
• Blockchains of the Sia family
• Obelisk
• SiaStats
• David Vorick on Twitter
• Sia on Twitter

Sponsors:

• Pepo: -
• eToro: Automatically copy every trade of eToro's top crypto traders at the exact price in real-time - https://www.etoro.com/

This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/318