I've been steadily adding support for the new Sia protocol in my side project, and I'm quite happy with the results so far. Aside from all the new functionality, it's also super fast and allocates almost no heap memory. 
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Cool things about the new protocol: * All communication with the host is encrypted. Your files have always been encrypted, of course, but now all metadata (such as the contract ID) is encrypted too.
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* The host can provide a Merkle proof for a set of modifications. Previously, when you added or modified contract data, you had to calculate the new Merkle root yourself, but now the host can prove that "old Merkle root + modifications = new Merkle root."
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This means that the renter needs hardly any info to upload or download: just the host's public key, the contract ID, and a secret key. That's only 96 bytes -- small enough to fit in a QR code.
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* Multi-sector downloads: previously, each download request could only fetch data from a single sector. Now you can fetch any concatenation of bytes within the contract, which greatly reduces latency and allows for nicer IO abstractions.
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* Sector metadata: you can now download the metadata of all your contract's sectors from the host. This enables you to implement an entire "filesystem at a distance" on the host, 100% trustlessly. It also lets you periodically challenge the host by requesting a random sector.
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I plan to use these new features to implement high-performance FUSE bindings for Sia. Read-only at first, but eventually writable too. A clean and efficient file-like abstraction will make Sia much more approachable for new developers. Exciting times ahead!
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Forgot to mention -- I'm planning to release this new code shortly after siad v1.4.0 is released, once most hosts have upgraded. Perhaps on my birthday? :)
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