Looking for topics related to Renting, Hosting, or Skynet? We also have general information on Sia, Siacoins/Siafunds, a Wallet Setup Guide and a Guide to Buying Siacoins.
This page was last updated on March 4, 2021 with Sia version 1.5.0. Not all FAQ entries may have been updated, but we make an effort to look over each entry and make relevant changes with each update.
Sia has to download the entire blockchain and build a consensus database in order to synchronize. This requires several gigabytes (as of March 2021, about 20 GB) of data to be downloaded, and frequent read/writes to your hard drive. Sia will synchronize much faster if your primary hard drive is a Soild-State Drive (SSD) and you have a fast internet connection. Sia can take several days to synchronize in certain cases. Some users have reported that disabling write caching may improve performance while synchronizing, though we haven't tested this.
We provide a download of the Sia consensus database, built nightly, which may help you speed up synchronization. You can check it out on our Consensus Download page. Note that with a new Sia installation, this option will still take several hours to build other data from the consensus, but it will be faster than synchronizing normally.
Yes! Glad you asked. The most important thing to save is your wallet seed. You're told to write it down when you create your wallet. If you lose your wallet seed, you can view it again by clicking on More > View Seed under the Wallet tab. If you no longer have access to the Sia installation where your wallet was set up, and you don't have your wallet seed, you're out of luck and your wallet (and Siacoin) is gone. There's no way to recover it without your wallet seed.
Another good thing to back up (outside of Sia) is your Sia-UI data directory, especially if you're renting or hosting. As a renter or host, you may lose stored data if you do not back up these files and you encounter an issue with your Sia installation or your computer! The location of this directory on various operating systems is provided in this FAQ topic. The main directories to back up are your renter
or host
directories if renting or hosting. More information on backing up relevant data can be found in this FAQ topic for renting, and this FAQ topic for hosting.
Sia stays open and leaves an icon in the system tray by the clock. Right-click on that icon and select Quit, and Sia will shut down completely. Prior to v1.4.0, there was a configuration option to disable closing the Sia-UI to the system tray, and close Sia completely when the window was closed, but this appears to have been removed.
If you're using siad
and want to stop it gracefully, use siac stop
. For more information on siad
and siac
, see this FAQ topic.
You may want to reset Sia to a clean state for some reason, such as if you're having a problem that other troubleshooting methods aren't fixing. To reset Sia to it's original, new, out-of-the-box state:
Sia-UI
folder found in: $HOME/.config
$HOME/Library/Application Support
%APPDATA%
(or an uninstaller is located in C:\Users\[Username]\AppData\Local\Programs\Sia-UI
)When you open Sia, it will act like it's the first time you've opened it and will start to synchronize from the beginning again. You can then use your wallet seed to load your wallet into Sia again. If you want to speed up synchronization, consider using our Consensus Download to bootstrap the consensus file.
Follow these easy steps:
You can also upgrade via the Sia-UI under About > Check for Updates and downloading the update there, though sometimes this does not work properly.
In the Sia-UI, you can click the About (i) icon at the top of the window, then Open Data Folder and you'll be taken to Sia's internal data files. Sia keeps internal files related to your specific installation in these locations:
$HOME/.config/Sia-UI/sia/
$HOME/Library/Application Support/Sia-UI/sia/
%APPDATA%\Sia-UI\sia\
If backing up these files, you can skip the consensus
folder if you'd like, as it takes up the most space (around 20 GB) and is what Sia downloads when it synchronizes. Sia can download it again if needed; the other files are unique to your installation, and your renter or host setup if applicable. Without them, you can lose access to your files or lose your storage contracts. It's a good idea to back them up regularly!
There are two ways to relocate your Sia data folder. You may want to do this if your default OS drive isn't a solid state drive, or doesn't have about 20GB of free space to hold the consensus database. Keep in mind that if you move the data folder to a traditional hard drive, Sia will synchronize more slowly and may perform slowly in other ways.
To relocate the internal data folder:
sia
data folder - leave the folder open as we'll come back to it shortly. Alternatively, you can see this FAQ topic for the location of the data folder. From here, you've got two ways to proceed - you only need to choose one:
sia
folder you opened earlier to the new location. For example, we could copy the folder to our D:\ drive so that the folder was now D:\sia
. If you clicked Open Data Folder earlier, you may need to navigate up a level to move the entire sia
folder instead of just moving the folder's contents. Don't delete anything in the old folder yet. sia
folder, i.e. D:\sia
. You can also change the Log Path to match. When you click Save, Sia-UI should restart and use your new sia
folder location. sia
folder (i.e. the one in %APPDATA% or $HOME), except for the config.json
file and the sia
folder itself. Do not delete the old sia
folder completely, and do not delete the config.json
file in the old sia
folder. The config.json
file contains the Sia-UI settings, i.e. the data directory path we just changed, so Sia-UI still looks for this file in the old sia
folder to know where to find the new sia
folder after you moved it. Why the application was designed such that the settings allow you to change the data directory, but it keeps the configuration file in the default data directory which we just told it not to use instead of some other directory, who knows. You also need to leave all of the other files and folders in the parent Sia-UI
folder (i.e. in %APPDATA% or $HOME).
Sia-UI
folder found within %APPDATA% or $HOME to the new location. For example, we could move the folder to our D:\ drive so that it was D:\Sia-UI
. If you clicked Open Data Folder earlier, you may need to navigate up two levels to reach the Sia-UI
folder. Make sure you move the entire folder and not just its contents. Note that unlike Method 1, we are moving the Sia-UI
folder instead of just the sia
folder within it. Sia-UI
folder in the original internal data folder (i.e. the one in %APPDATA% or $HOME). "D:\Sia-UI"
with the new location you moved the Sia-UI
folder to, and including the quotes): mklink /D %APPDATA%\Sia-UI "D:\Sia-UI"
. ln -s "$HOME/Library/Application Support/Sia-UI" "D:\Sia-UI"
. ln -s "$HOME/.config/Sia-UI" "D:\Sia-UI"
. When you open Sia, it should now use the data folder in the new location. Make sure you protect this folder (back it up and don't accidentally delete it or disconnect it if on an external drive), as it contains your wallet and renter/host data.
siac
and siad
located when Sia-UI is installed? What are those, anyway? The siac
program is the command line interface for Sia, and siad
is the Sia Daemon which is the background program that actually does all the work for Sia. If you installed Sia-UI, siac
and siad
are installed in an internal location. You can view this location in Sia-UI by clicking the Terminal (>) icon at the top of the window and looking at the output, which includes a path (i.e. near the bottom, with the path C:\[...]\siac.exe
):
Opening the Sia-UI Terminal shows us where siac
is.
The easiest way to use siad
is to open the Sia-UI and leave it running in the background. You'll want to do this if you plan on using siac
, as siac
talks to the Sia Daemon while it's running and the Sia-UI will start the Sia Daemon up for us.
If you want to use siac
, you can open a Command Prompt or Terminal window on your operating system and go to the location shown in the Sia-UI Terminal above. On Windows, we can open the Start menu and start typing Command Prompt, and open it from the list of results. Then, we can change directories to the one shown in the Terminal using cd [path]
, replacing [path] with the path shown in the Terminal. You can copy the path from the Terminal, and paste it by right clicking in the Command Prompt window - you may need to wrap your path in "quotes" if it contains any spaces:
Opening a Command Prompt window and changing the directory to our siac
location.
Then, you can use siac
commands by entering siac [command]
. You can type siac help
for a list of commands and what they do, and you can type help behind any subcommand to get more information and additional commands related to it, i.e. siac renter help
.
Sia-UI now labels different transactions with a "Type", which can be handy for determining what transactions are for. Here are the ones we're aware of and what they mean:
The transaction status indicates if the transaction has been processed into a block on the blockchain and considered complete and legitimate. A fractional status (0/6, 1/6, etc.) refers to the number of confirmations, or blocks, since the transaction was first included in a block. In cryptocurrencies, 6 confirmations are typically considered safe to prove that a transaction was legitimate. After 6 confirmations, the transaction status will change to a green checkmark to indicate it is confirmed. If you're receiving Siacoins from another party, you should wait for 6 confirmations and for the status to change to fully confirmed, especially if the transaction is related to exchange of goods or services outside of the Sia platform.
Sometimes the Sia-UI will show a negative transaction status of several hundred thousand blocks. This happens when Sia-UI is still loading the consensus database and hasn't caught up to the current block yet. Wait for Sia to finish synchronizing, and transaction status should appear normally.
For more basic information on how cryptocurrencies process transactions into blocks, see the overview on our Mining page.
When you open the Sia-UI for the first time, you'll have two options: "Create a new wallet" or "Load a wallet from a seed". Select the second option and enter your wallet seed. Your password will also be your wallet seed. If you choose to, you can set a new password after your wallet is imported and unlocked by clicking on More > Change Password at the top right of the Wallet page. Custom wallet passwords are only valid on each local Sia installation.
You can also load a seed via the Terminal or command line with the command wallet init-seed
.
You have two options to recover a wallet, depending on if you want to simply add the funds from your old wallet/seed to your current wallet or if you want to use the seed you're importing as your main wallet:
To transfer the funds from the old wallet seed to your current wallet, click the Terminal icon (>) at the top of the window, type wallet sweep
and press enter, and then type the wallet seed for the old wallet and press enter. This is also known as sweeping the old wallet, and upon completion the old wallet will then have a 0 SC balance. You should not sweep an old wallet if you are using it for renting or hosting and want to move the contracts over from the old wallet - this will not work. Only funds are moved, not renting or hosting contracts.
If you use this method, make sure you have your current wallet seed written down too, as this is where your Siacoins will be now. You can click More > View Seed at the top right of the Wallet page to see your current wallet seed again if you need it.
To load a wallet seed to use as your main wallet, click on the Terminal tab at the left of the Sia-UI and type wallet init-seed --force
and press enter, then enter your wallet seed and press enter. This will replace the existing wallet in the Sia-UI with the wallet your seed is associated with, so make sure you have your existing wallet seed written down if it's not empty or if you plan to use it again in the future.
You may need to force your wallet to re-initialize in order to find a missing transaction that isn't included in your transaction list.
siac
) and type wallet init-seed --force
, then enter. Your wallet will re-initialize and rescan the blockchain for your transactions. This should find any missing incoming transactions that were included in a block and successfully sent to you, but that didn't show up in your transaction list for some reason. The process can take a long time, depending on your computer hardware. The scan will continue even after the scan message disappears - see this FAQ topic for more information on how to check the wallet scan status if you've loaded your seed and you don't see a balance.
If you need further assistance finding a missing transaction, see the Transaction Troubleshooting topic below.
You should create a new wallet and seed, and transfer all funds over to it. Note that if you're renting or hosting, this will likely ruin all your contracts and lose all data, but if your wallet seed is compromised there's not much you can do to avoid it unless you want to risk all your funds being stolen. If you're a renter, you may want to download your files from Sia first if you don't have local copies, so that you can upload them again after switching wallets if your contracts don't carry over.
To transfer your funds to a new wallet:
siac
) and type wallet init --force
, then enter. This will create a new wallet for you and replace your old one. wallet sweep
, then enter your old seed when prompted. This will move all funds from your old wallet to your new wallet. Your new wallet may trigger a rescan of the blockchain for transactions, during which time the Sia-UI may say it's scanning the blockchain. The process can take 20 minutes or more, depending on your computer hardware. Your new wallet should contain your Siacoins, and your old seed will be empty - save the new wallet seed, as it is now your main wallet.
If your wallet or wallet seed is compromised and Siacoins have already been taken from your wallet, you're likely out of luck. Transactions can't be reversed, and likely can't be traced to a real person. You'll still want to create a new wallet and use that instead, because if someone has your seed and stole your wallet funds once, they can do it again if you continue to use the same wallet. Make sure you take steps to protect your new seed - don't store it digitally, and keep your wallet locked when not in use. If you can't lock your wallet because you're a renter or host, password protect your computer and keep it locked, and control physical access to your computer.
Your wallet is a collection of several receiving addresses, especially when renting or hosting - many addresses are created automatically to facilitate contract payments. Sia occasionally consolidates and combines balances on these addresses in the background in order to make future transactions more efficient. To do so, each consolidation requires a transaction on the network. The small "setup" transactions you see are the network fees for sending these transactions, just like the small transaction fee when you send any amount of Siacoin, and are nothing to be concerned about. Unfortunately, they also can't be avoided when using the official Sia-UI.
Transactions related to announcing a host on the Sia network are also categorized as "Setup" transactions, and are usually 0.018 or 0.02 SC.
The following information is not investment advice, and is SiaSetup's opinion only. You are responsible for understanding the risks of any investment, and should consult with an appropriately qualified financial advisor if you have questions on investments, investment risks or investment strategies.
Sia/Siacoin is already on several exchanges such as Binance, Bittrex, Poloniex, and many other smaller exchanges. Certain exchanges are sometimes requested, but the Sia team has so far been unable to reach an agreement to be listed on these exchanges that doesn't involve an exorbitant listing fee. Considering the Sia project is still in development, getting listed on new exchanges has not been a huge priority.
Because Sia is a utility token (it is exchanged for services on the network, i.e. storage via renting and hosting), the price of the coin is intended to remain stable. Listing the coin on a new exchange may result in a temporary increase in price, but this is almost always temporary and short-term. In the long term, it is more beneficial for the Sia product and users of Sia for the coin price to remain fairly consistent. Exchange prices are generally fueled by speculation anyway - cryptocurrency coins often increase and decrease in value for no real reason, or in relation to another coin like Bitcoin. There are hundreds of other coins and projects that are better suited to price speculation - Sia is probably one of the worst projects around in regards to expecting high returns.
Exchanges are a unique use case for the Sia wallet because they handle millions of transactions. Sometimes new issues with the Sia software are discovered based on the heavy usage of exchanges, which can cause an exchange to stop all Siacoin transactions if things aren't working properly.
The Sia development team is usually aware of these issues, and works to fix them. However, some exchanges are both difficult to communicate with, and elect to not use any Sia version that isn't a full release (i.e. release candidate versions that may have fixed the issue, but are still being tested). For this reason, resolution of exchange issues often takes several weeks or more. There isn't much you can do except wait for a fix to be completed and accepted/implemented by the exchange.
Try using your wallet seed as the password. Sometimes if you upgrade Sia, the wallet password reverts to default, which is the wallet seed. The password may also be blank. Sometimes a correct password needs to be entered multiple times. If you're importing your wallet seed into a new Sia instance or installation and you previously set a custom password, that password was only effective on the old installation.
The Sia-UI v1.4.x and v1.5.x doesn't properly show wallet sync progress. Your wallet will still be scanning for transactions after the initial scan finishes. Your wallet also won't show your transactions if Sia-UI isn't fully synced (i.e. it doesn't say "Synced" in the upper right corner). The following should work to see your wallet balance and transactions:
wallet
and hit enter. A number for wallet height will appear. If this height is lower than the synced blockchain height (visible by holding your mouse over "Synced" in the upper right corner of Sia-UI), your wallet is still scanning. You may not see your wallet balance or transactions until your wallet height reaches the synced height. This may take an hour or more - you can run wallet
repeatedly in the Terminal to monitor progress. wallet
command height show the same number, double check that it's the current block height as shown on SiaStats. If not, your Sia-UI isn't fully synced. If it doesn't sync further, you need to follow the instructions in this FAQ topic to reset your consensus database and re-sync. If you've followed the steps above and you still have no wallet balance, and you're sure you didn't spend the Siacoins in this wallet or sweep it to another wallet, you can ask for help using some of the resources in our External Links, such as the Sia Discord Server or the official Sia support channels.
If you've sent or are expecting to receive Siacoins and they're not showing up in the destination wallet, follow these steps to troubleshoot. Please follow along carefully and follow all steps, and your transaction issue will almost certainly be resolved.
From here, continue to the appropriate section below to further troubleshoot why your transaction hasn't been sent or why you can't see it:
Did your transaction show up in the Block Explorer in Step 3 above?
Did your transaction show up in the Block Explorer in Step 3 above?
Did your transaction show up in the Block Explorer in Step 3 above?
Did your transaction show up in the Block Explorer in Step 3 above?
If the above steps don't help your solve your transaction issue, try some of the support resources in our External Links section.
"It may take longer than expected to finish the loading all the modules".
If you recently updated Sia, some changes can take a while to process depending on how old your previous Sia version was. Just like with synchronization, these processes take longer on a traditional hard drive, and can sometimes take hours.
If you deleted files during troubleshooting or bootstrapped a consensus database, Sia may have to go through and rebuild other information related to renting or hosting block-by-block, even if you don't rent or host. Even on a fast computer with a SSD, this can take several hours. As long as you see the update message and no other error, Sia is making progress and you should let it continue until it's finished.
If the message does not disappear and you want to reset your Sia installation to start over, see this FAQ topic for instructions on starting over with a fresh install. Make sure you have your wallet seed backed up before resetting. If you're a Sia renter or host, it may be better to wait for the message to disappear to ensure you don't lose any data related to renting or hosting.
There is a very comprehensive Sia Troubleshooting Thread from tbenz9 with many common errors and resolutions that you may also wish to look into.
There are a few things you can try, in order from least to most drastic:
For the following tasks, you'll need to open your Sia-UI data folder. Click About (i) > Open Data Folder, or see this FAQ topic for the location of the data folder.
You may have to remove some of Sia's files so that it can rebuild them. Close Sia, back up these files before removing any of them, and make sure you have your wallet seed written down! If you remove the wrong files and don't have a backup, it'll be like starting from scratch. If you don't have your wallet seed and you mess something up, you'll lose access to your wallet. You've been warned!
Start by checking Sia's log files for clues on what might be going wrong. Look at \Sia-UI\sia\siad-output.txt
, and then the text files in each directory. They might mention problems with a particular subfolder, like \consensus
or \host
. If you see an error, try removing the appropriate folder, or taking whatever other action might be necessary if the error is specific. Be advised that if you're a renter or host and you remove the corresponding directories, it may also remove your renter or host contracts. Sia may be able to rebuild them, but if not, restore them from the backup copy you were told to make before messing with these files. You did make a backup, right?
If Sia still isn't loading after all of that, or if you're a renter or host concerned about losing your files or contracts, you might consider asking for help in one of the communities listed in our External Links, like Reddit or Discord.
Sia tends to be particularly intensive while synchronizing the consensus database, and your computer may lag or stutter a bit while this happens. Sia also does not currently run well on computers with low RAM. Once Sia is synchronized, resource use should decrease. When you first open Sia, try closing all other programs and letting Sia fully synchronize before you do anything else. Unfortunately, there is no real solution to Sia's resource usage as it synchronizes, and the process must be waited out.
Note that the issues below are likely no longer current issues, and most of them addressed problems in the Sia v1.3 series. They are kept online just in case, and have been updated with instructions for Sia v1.4.0+ in the event you still encounter them. In most cases, upgrading to the latest version of Sia will fix any of these issues.
This is a known issue related to a hard fork that happened to fix a mining difficulty issue some time ago. You'll see this happen if you're running a very old version of Sia, or sometimes if you just upgraded from an old version to the current version. To fix it:
\Sia-UI\sia\consensus\consensus.db
in the internal data folder you opened earlier. Sia should then synchronize beyond block 139885 and your transactions will be up to date. If you want to speed up synchronization, consider using our Consensus Download to bootstrap the consensus file.
The Sia network forked on block 179,000 (October 31, 2018) and split into two chains - v1.3.7+, which is the new chain and the current Sia network, and v1.3.5 and lower, which is the old chain (a dead chain referred to as "SiaClassic" - more info on the different forks can be found on our Forks page). You can encounter problems sending or receiving transactions after the fork block if you didn't upgrade your Sia installation before it synced through block 179,000. Most exchanges and mining pools have updated to the new chain and the current version of Sia, so you may not see transactions go through as expected if you're stuck on the old chain.
\Sia-UI\sia\consensus\consensus.db
and \Sia-UI\sia\transactionpool\transactionpool.db
in the internal data folder you opened earlier. Sia should then synchronize to the current block on the new chain/fork, and you will be on the new chain. If you want to speed up synchronization, consider using our Consensus Download to bootstrap the consensus file.
If you sent coins in Sia v1.3.5 or lower after block 179,000 and/or after October 31, 2018, you were sending SiaClassic coins and not your actual Siacoins. You may have also sent SiaClassic coins instead of Siacoins if you had updated to v1.3.7+ but your block height wasn't the same as the current block height. The good news is that once you update to the latest Sia version and reset your consensus as described above, you should still have your Siacoins intact because they were never sent on the new chain. The bad news is that you sent SiaClassic coins somewhere, possibly to an exchange that doesn't support SiaClassic, and those coins may be gone. Check with the exchange or the person you sent the coins to and ask them if they plan to support SiaClassic or if they have a way of retrieving those coins for you if you're worried about getting them back, though SiaClassic coins are effectively useless at this point.
If you were sending coins from an exchange to your wallet, most exchanges are now on the latest version of Sia - so once you follow the steps above to upgrade your Sia-UI and get on the new chain, you should see your coins appear in your wallet. If the sender of the coins was on v1.3.5 or lower, you would have seen the coins appear while you were on the old chain. You can always download Sia v1.3.5 again at a later time to see your old/"SiaClassic" balance if needed, though note that you can't run both v1.3.5 or lower and v1.3.7+ together on the same machine without special configuration.
An API password was implemented in Sia v1.3.5+ which requires a randomly-generated password to be used to access API functions. More documentation can be found in the API documentation.
This error shouldn't normally be seen when using the Sia-UI. If you do see this error, you likely upgraded from an older version of Sia and left some old files in place somewhere. Click on the About (i) icon in the Sia-UI and make sure the two version numbers match. If they don't, you have remnants of an old installation left over. Start over with a clean install of Sia (see this FAQ topic for help), and re-download the latest one from the Sia Downloads page.
API authentication is enabled for the Sia daemon by default - see the API authentication documentation for more information. An API password is generated by the daemon and is stored in a file - you can view the password using utils display-api-password
in the Sia-UI Terminal or siac
. The location of file is with the API password is:
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Sia\apipassword
$HOME/Library/Application Support/Sia/apipassword
$HOME/.sia/apipassword
You can change the password in this file to your own, use the generated password from the file, set a password in an environment variable called SIA_API_PASSWORD
, or disable API authentication entirely by passing --authenticate-api=false
to the Sia daemon when starting it. You can also set a temporary API password using the --temp-password
flag when starting the Sia daemon.
This error is usually caused by a corrupt file, most of the time in either the transaction pool or consensus. You may also see this error after upgrading Sia to a new version. To fix:
transactionpool
folder and open Sia again. transactionpool
and consensus
folders, and open Sia again. This will require Sia to re-synchronize, but it is necessary to fix the issue. If you want to speed up synchronization, consider using our Consensus Download to bootstrap the consensus file. If you still see the error, something else is likely corrupt, and it's best to start with a fresh install of Sia.
First, make sure you're fully synchronized. Check the block number that Sia says it's synchronized to.
Sia is stuck on that specific block due to a hard fork that occurred some time ago to fix a mining difficulty issue. See this FAQ topic and follow the instructions there.
Wait until you see the block number increase by a block or two (usually about 20-30 minutes), make sure all your transactions show as confirmed, and try again. This issue is usually temporary, and can happen if you try to send coins multiple times within a few minutes (more information on why can be found here). If you still have the issue, follow the steps above for Sia being stuck on block 139885 - even though you're not stuck on this block, the solution at this point is the same.
Don't see your question answered? Let us know and we'll see if we can add it to the FAQ.