Hello,
Been following this project on and off since 2017! Congratulations on getting so far.
I have 1 question, I remember back then the tokens were not going to be divisible at the beginning, will they be undivisible at launch? If so then will this not limit buyers to when let’s say the coin is worth $5000?
1 SNT is divided to 9 decimal places.
People often call them nano SNT
Oh good. Thank you!
They haven’t raised this yet? Nanos are not quite enough to be future proof if Fiat inflates a lot. 
fair point
I know. As far as I can see if Fiat increases then the smallest amount will still be the same real value. IE by inflation.
If SNT price in fiat increases without fiat losing value (ie little inflation) then this is the real problem
I would not like to think that 1 nano equals more than 1 milli-cent. That is one SNT is $10,000
To be honest I do not think SNT will follow the BTC style massive increases. It will always be somewhat tied to storage costs with very significant extra value due to bartering on the network being possible.
I agree with what you say before this - so nanos should be fine.
But I think the value of SNT could still grow dramatically. The effect of being able buy storage with it will I think be more a damping effect than a peg. Fiat to SNT will be supply/demand for SNT. If a rise makes storage expensive, demand for it will drop and nodes will reduce their fees to restore balance. At least that’s what I understand is the plan - testing the economy will be interesting!
I agree that we will see increases. What i was meaning by “somewhat tied” is that storage will have a significant effect on keeping prices lower related to storage costs. Damping if you want.
But also you noticed that I did say a significant extra value when SNT starts being useful for more than storage.
To be clearer by what I was thinking is that initially (after the rush to own effect) that it will come to a point that is related to storage. No way of knowing if it will be actual cost per MB of disk or more likely a much higher price reflecting a perceived value for storing on a forever storage network.
Then there will be “very significant” (maybe 10x or 100x or 1000x) extra value as people learn to barter on network.
Longer term though I am not certain nano will be small enough for things like micro-tipping/transactions. And maybe the minimum cost to store a chunk will end up higher than desired by the algo
I should be possible in the future to increase the decimal places by some means if needed. So there is no real problem here.
Just consider that dust is best for spam and keeping extra space everywhere.
Also the nano is income for farmers, so if we reduce the absolute minimal payment value we increase the minimal profit.
I think, that if that would be one day issue, there will more ways how to deal with it.
There is no points to allow smaller than 0.000 000 001 digits to move, when the expense (electricity) pay node operators.
Not sure what is the rule in NANO currency network now, but the nodes could ignore dust transactions to reduce the spam. They have 27 digit currency and no real reason to use it than spam.
I see it like this:
We have 2 moving objects here.
The amount of storage per SNT
The USD price of one SNT
Legacy storage costs less over time in USD.
Over time you will get more storage per SNT (ignoring short term availability issues)
SNT can rise with inflation, but you will always get more storage for your SNT.
But now we have a crypto-token that is backed by a real commodity (encrypted, anonymous etc storage) without transaction costs. So it should be attractive to all kinds of needs that we havent considered yet. The price can go where it wants, and if its the moon, network forces will naturally increase the amount of storage per SNT.
I like to look at it as a token backed by data. As more data is added to the network, the more valuable the network becomes and the more valuable the token becomes as a side-effect.
I was thinking long term for this situation. And if we follow the speculation that $100K or $1 million will happen then the minimum cost to store a GB becomes (2000 chunks) is 0.2 to 2.00 and $200 to $2000 per TB. Or 2 cents to 20 cents dollars to make 100 comments on forums etc.
But if we take a more realistic value (still high imo) of the speculation that in 10 years SNT is $10,000 then at 2 cents per 1000 chunk/forum post/updates people will complain it costs way too much to participate in forums, etc, etc and its $20 per TB and in 10 years a drive of 200TB is < $1000. Even at this point people will go back to local storage. It might take a few chunks to do one post with the text, and the index entry/entries (maybe more than one level of indexing), because you must remember that now the user pays and each write needed to maintain the forum with that post is likely to be done by the user.
So while farmers will profit greatly for what is stored they will find people give up storing as SNT approaches $1 million and buy their own NAS or Drive
And I didn’t even look at micro payments. Not really micro payments at $10K
Will it reach 10K, well I am not so sure, and why its something that should only be considered at this time. That is considering the upgrade path available not suggesting it needs to be done now.
Now to farmers getting enough, well it doesn’t matter if its nano now or 1000 decimal places. The algorithm decides the SNT to charge. All the algo has to do is have a starting point and move up or down from there as needed. There wouldn’t be any suggestion the storage charging algo would shoot down to any low point and could even have a minimum point set which I would suggest anyhow.
BUT I am not suggesting going to 1000 places LOL or even 100, but I would suggest the upgrade path is there to increase the number of decimals if needed. It doesn’t change the value of SNT and doesn’t mean people can use 0.0000000000000001 (very small dust) SNT to store since the store cost isn’t the minimum possible value unless the algo wants it. 1 SNT is still 1 SNT whether their is 9 or 100 decimals. And in practical terms it doesn’t take too many more decimal places to become impractical (consider atoms in the earth). For instance for storage 3 more decimals covers storage being reasonable if SNT ever got to above 1 million. 6 more means micro transactions remain possible.
After that wall of thoughts/opinions of mine I seem to remember that the potential to upgrade the integer which holds the SNT amount to be larger (more decimals) is there. But not sure.
And of course at this time and foreseeable future nano is plenty and I’d suggest that the starting point for storage should be like 10 or 100 nano anyhow.
Can it me made more diversible down the line ? Move from 9 decimal places to 50 with just a code update ?
Or pre-pay system would reduce the total payment transaction movement.
Pay one nano and that would allow you to make fifty smallest put later.
It is stored in a 64 bit integer as nanos. To increase requires a larger variable. One idea is to keep the 64 bit integer and add a second holding more decimals, and making it an integer too. That way a version 1 transaction still works and version 2 has the extra digits. So something like 0-999999 giving 15 decimals total.
As to 50 decimals - there is only approx 10^50 atoms in the earth, I doubt we need to go that low. 15 decimals covers micto payments with the whole earth’s economy in SNT EDIT:If not 15 then 18, I didn’t carry the maths through but 15 allows true micro transaction where 1 SNT is 1 million dollars (4x10^15 total dollars) and 18 allows true micro transaction when 1 SNT is 1 billion dollars
Am going to stock up on wheelbarrows