Luke Champine

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.

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.

* 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."

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.

* 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.