[ericflo]

In that case, Sia provides an avenue for an new company with access to cheap electricity to compete with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft without investing a cent in marketing or product. They will just plug in and start receiving payments, and strengthen the network and lower the price in the process.

Another cool thing is Sia lets hosters set their storage and bandwidth prices, so specialized hosts will likely pop up. For example one host might use tape drives, set cheap storage cost and expensive bandwidth cost. Clients can prioritize as desired. SSD servers with good peering can do the opposite.

The real interesting part will be when you can create one-time-use URLs to pass out, which connect directly to the network - effectively turning it into a distributed CDN.