A lot of money for what's basically Pied Piper without middle-out.
Seriously though these coins won't be worth much given a competitor could either a) dominate mining or b) fork it.
Seriously though these coins won't be worth much given a competitor could either a) dominate mining or b) fork it.
I'm actually more confident in Sia than Filecoin, despite them flying much more under the radar. Sia devs are more transparent (you can reach the lead dev here or on reddit pretty easily), have software that's in early stages but works, they've been regularly putting out new releases with new features, bug fixes, and polish.
But Filecoin does have the funding, so they might be able to sweep the rug out from under Sia just by paying serious money to close the gap. I'm hoping Sia ends up the dominant player, though.
No wonder nobody has heard of them. /cynicism
Edit: Cynicism is not wholly unjustified. A while back I was taking to a big marketing guy about how marketing teams in big companies often get less excited about products once they hit prototype. Something that doesn't exist is just so much more exciting than something that does. Real things have caveats, limitations, and costs.
A startup I worked for actually had exactly this problem when they had a big idea the company was founded for, but wanted to put out a couple small apps first as a warmup for the team. When those ancillary practice apps didn't perform amazingly well, the board of directors got nervous and killed the company before it even got started on the app that the company was founded to do in the first place. I'm pretty convinced in hindsight that if we just worked on the big app in the first place, the company might still be around today.