Siacoin (SC)

Siacoin is a decentralized file storage system that incentivizes people to rent out their unused hard disk drive space to earn Siacoin, or SC. It does this by using a blockchain technology whose design is similar to Bitcoin with a few unique technical tweaks that allow it to be used efficiently for file storage. The main difference is the “file contract”, a special kind of blockchain smart contract that provides a way for hosts (people offering storage space for rent) to get paid for proving that they have stored a file and made it available for a user over a period of time. To protect user privacy, all data is encrypted before being uploaded to the network, and only the user can decrypt them again. Other technologies like payment channels further optimize the Siacoin network for file storage. Combining this with redundancy and error-correction, codes yields a self-bootstrapping ecosystem where the cheapest available excess storage capacity is automatically used preferentially by the network.