I liked Sia from the beginning, I bought in early, and sold out far too early. Anyway, the only issue I see with Sia is they are going after businesses, and things like regulatory compliance need to get dealt with somehow. As a business you cant have someone in North Korea hosting a backup of your data, even worse you cant send or recieve funds in payment for said storage.
If they deal with that Sia is a brilliant tool.
Interesting point about regulatory compliance. It goes against the grain of a lot of current cryptocurrency setups. By that I mean primarily talking about Bitcoin and the slightly sketchy brush it's often tarnished with.
Equally though as DApps start to take shape for example, this cryptocurrency-entering-the-real-world thing is going to happen way more. There are going to be a lot of clashes with the 'old system'.
It's going to be interesting to see how it plays out and most importantly, see how old institutions adapt.
Yeah for crypto anarchists its not an issue, but businesses have to comply and also have reputational risk to handle too.
I did see a new lending platform white-paper Dharma where they have integrated KYC/AML identity checks into the architecture, so its possible. Whether such infrastructure would be cost effective and clunky for data storage is unknown (by me at least).
I sense Sia and data storage can work in this type of framework because it offers a better redundancy and resliency model than current centralized providers.
Where I think the problems really occur is on projects like Golem and SONM where they offer no advantages except (possibly) price, in these cases I see this being a stumbling block.