$ 0.01
A smart contract on the blockchain ensures through the use of cryptographic proofs of storage that hosts are only paid if they keep the file for the entire duration of the contract. Employment of erasure codes such as Reed Solomon codes guarantees high file uptime even if most of the hosts on the network are unreliable or have frequent outages. All data is encrypted client-side and padded, preventing hosts from snooping the contents of the files and even from guessing what the file might be based on the filesize. The distributed nature of the Sia network enables many optimizations in latency, throughput, reliability, and security. The decentralized nature of the Sia network enables anyone with storage to get paid, lowering the barrier to entry and reducing the overall price of cloud storage.