Attaching a cryptocurrency to Sia allows us to draw a distinction between producers and consumers.
In typical p2p networks, you are expected to be both in roughly equal proportions, which means your network gets polluted by a lot of low-quality users who are just trying to do their part.
Sia has the consumers pay the producers, and has a marketplace mechanism that selects the highest performing producers to perform the jobs and receive the revenue.
This allows the network as a whole to be much, much more efficient.
Doesn't paying encourage useless sites highly optimized to grab user attention, low quality content, shock sites, cloned sites, site bloat (if payment is per KB), and so on?
That said, I think there's definitely a space for paid internet. I was just surprised because siasky homepage says "Build a Free Internet" - perhaps it should say "Build a pay per view internet" instead?
I would argue that the current model is more friendly to attention grabbing content (clickbait, etc) because advertising has the limitation that all views are worth the same value. In a pay-as-you-go Internet, users can whitelist high quality content sources as being okay to charge 10x or 100x what you'd typical accept to view a webpage. This would incentive content creators to build a brand and reputation that makes users comfortable putting them on the 'high quality' list, so that their content can see a massive revenue multiple relative to the number of eyeballs.
This may work, but the problem is, that'll encourage internet made of content creators whose goal is to get a revenue out of the websites.
There are certainly a lot of those, but they are not nearly the whole internet. A lot of interesting sites would not want to be on the "pay as you go model" at all!
For example, we are on the news.ycombinator.com in the thread discussing datprotocol.com, and you are pointing me to siasky.net. Right now, the top 5 HN pages are adecentralizedworld.com, handsonscala.com, arxiv.org, a16z.net, and torproject.com. None of those websites make money from webpage ads. None of them are likely to move to pay-as-you-go internet -- because they care about their audience and not website revenue.
I suspect that Sia's decentralized pay-as-you-go world will be much worse (productivity-wise and information-wise) than the current internet -- all the interesting technical/science blogs and docs would be missing; while buzzfeed clones will be plentiful. There might be occasional high-quality journalism website, but most of those are getting paywalls anyway, so will they justify all new protocol?
It's perfectly possible to not ask for a fee on your websites. Plenty of websites will continue to exist for free even though they could ask for money.
Also, the internet is already something that users have to pay for. Users pay their ISP every month for access. We envision a world where this utility payment extends to cover the content creators in addition to the infrastructure providers.
As far as I understand Sia is functionally equivalent to S3: You're not getting content the "producer" wants, you're getting exactly the content you, as a consumer, want.
In typical p2p networks, you are expected to be both in roughly equal proportions, which means your network gets polluted by a lot of low-quality users who are just trying to do their part.
Sia has the consumers pay the producers, and has a marketplace mechanism that selects the highest performing producers to perform the jobs and receive the revenue.
This allows the network as a whole to be much, much more efficient.