Sia’s David Vorick: Outcompeting Amazon Web Services, a $35B Revenue Giant

Host Tom Shaughnessy talks to David Vorick, CEO, Co-Founder, and Lead Developer of Sia and Skynet. They discuss the benefits of a decentralized, free Internet, competing with Amazon Web Services, cloud storage pricing, security, privacy, and more.

Key Points:

1. Open source programming encourages innovation.
2. Sia gives users back control over their data and privacy.
3. Just because a certain technology exists, does not mean it should be leveraged.

Episode Highlights:

• Sia gives users a cloud experience without requiring users to commit to a cloud provider.
• Now they have to make Sia competitive with AWS, because it isn’t enough to just make something decentralized, it has to also be competitive.
• David is confident that their technology is superior and that they can reach a point where they have the momentum to overtake Amazon.
• Sia held a hackathon where someone figured out how Sia could support livestreaming on its existing code, which developers had previously thought wasn’t easily doable, so something like that wouldn’t have happened in a centralized system.
• Sia currently secures its data through encryption.
• Traditional web apps store their data for their users on AWS, but in a decentralized model like this, users have complete control.
• Users pay for the bandwidth and the data themselves, so they aren’t losing money or revenue to a separate corporation hosting the data like you would on YouTube, for example.
• David doesn’t like the current trend of platforms preemptively censoring or filtering content and thinks it leads to limiting good faith conversation on the internet.
• Ultimately, users should have control over whether they opt into or out of filtering and censoring content for themselves.
• Amazon Web Services charges about $20 per terabyte per month, which is roughly the same as simply buying a new hard drive every month. Sia, by comparison, charges $2 per terabyte per month.
• The price of a Sia token is independent from the price of their storage.
• Data on the Sia network naturally gravitates towards high-performing nodes.
• Sia’s purpose is to be a technology that could be shut down or abandoned by David but still live on and still function.
• They’re trying to get to a world where infrastructure is taken care of for content creators, and those users don’t need to rely on advertising and product placement to get paid.
• High levels of tracking exist and corporations have access to these tools and this information, and we have no way of knowing whether they are using these dystopian tools responsibly.

Quotes

• “We’ve seen with the open source world, when you open things up and allow tinkerers to mess around just because they have an idea, the amount of innovation you get substantially outpaces anything that a single centralized entity or corporation could do.” –David Vorick

• “I think that it should be possible to monetize without ads and it should just be automatic. If you create something that adds value to a bunch of people’s lives, you should automatically be paid for doing that without having to i