I’ve been doing almost nothing but reading and watching videos on maidsafe and maidsafe/SAFEcoin in my spare time these last few days and here is a short list of things that I as a beginner and non-techi am having trouble understanding.
I think it is good to get this feedback as I would probably encompass much of the larger population of regular technology users.
Who pays for all of this? I understand the Bitcoin comparison perfectly however Bitcoin was created by a so far anonymous person. Maidsafe is an organisation and Maidsafe are saying that the ‘farmers’ will be paid by the network. I suppose I want to know how? HOw will these transactions take place? And who exactly is paying who and via what platform?
I have heard there will be 4.3 billion coins. Where exactly did this number come from and why?
Maidsafe are saying that the whole idea with farmers is to incentivize the economics of the network on a mass scale and again they compare it to bitcoin miners. Yet at the same time they are saying that the benefits of this system will be that the data will be spread all over the world anonymously, decentralized and not in a server model. How can this be true when we compare it to the bitcoin miner, this will mean that in a certain amount of time there will likely only be commercial farms. Take out those farms and you take out the data or at least burden the network… it seems to me that on this level there is no difference and not only this but on the Maidsafe website it says the following “the SAFE network is comprised by utilising the committed and unused computing resources of the users on the network, we call these users farmers.” so im wondering how accurate this statement is especially when we already know based on the bitcoin model that regular Joe farmers will find it impossible to compete for the incentive with the commercial farmer? Adding to this they talk about democratic farming, again Im not understanding this concept and it seems to contradict and bitcoin comparison because we know that people will figure out how to game this system no matter what.
I saw this video The Economics of Safecoin - YouTube were he talks about how much of the value is given to the developer, app builder or farmer and im wondering why so little is given to core developers and app builders when these are the guys that will be building the ‘products’ in a sense that will bring people to the network and will give regular joes a reason to use the network. No people, no reason or requirement for farms in my understanding or am I wrong?
What was the reason for preselling coins? I am not understanding how in this model there is a reason for people to buy and sell a currency that currently cannot be used for anything?
That’s all from me for now.
UPDATE/EDIT #1
Who is this “authority” that will manage the keys of the cryptography security? #2
What is the relationship with Maidsafe as a for profit limited company and the network? And how will Maidsafe make it’s money?
Sounds like you might need a bit more spare time
I’m not a techie myself, but I can tell you that you are probably getting confused because Safecoin works nothing like Bitcoin and does not use a Blockchain.
There will be no big commercial farms by design and it is the user’s hard-drive space/Bandwidth that is the resource backing Safecoin.
Try reading the welcome post and links and particularly this one as it will explain things better than I can
:
Initially angel investors that will get a percentage of the SafeCoins at launch. Afterwards MaidSafe the company was also funded by the IPO of MaidSafeCoins. Farmers will get paid in SafeCoins in a similar way the miners in Bitcoin get paid for mining a block. The rewards are issued by the network itself, SafeCoins are created.
A SafeCoin has an actual numeric ID in the network, which is 32 bits long. 2 to the power of 32 is about 4.3 billion SafeCoins.
Bitcoin mining is a matter of performing the same calculation over and over again, so it’s possible to create a specialized chip that excels at that particular calculation. SafeCoin farming is actual hosting and routing of data, which is a lot more diverse and requires general purpose computing. You can’t make a specialized chip for it like you can for mining Bitcoin. The specialized version of SafeCoin farming would be an efficient server and a good internet connection.
The reason why regular Joe’s won’t be pushed out of the market is that SafeCoin farming doesn’t eat up your system resources like Bitcoin mining does. You can farm SafeCoin as a background process on your computer when it’s turned on anyway, and you’ll hardly notice. If you have storage space left on your system anyway and don’t utilize your internet connection fully at all times, you aren’t really making any significant extra costs by turning on SafeCoin farming. Your hardware and ISP subscription is already paid for anyway.
There is another feature that will combat a commercial monopoly, but it’s a bit more technical. Farming reward chances are based on a sigmoid function of the network’s average service provided. This means that if a farmer starts exceeding the network average too much, he’ll get diminished returns. He can create a second vault, but then that second vault will have it’s own network address which also brings the responsibility of acting as a routing node at that address. This routing task can be seen as a flat, minimal amount of effort that every vault has to perform to be able to farm. So having multiple vaults also means an increase in routing required, which I believe would become a bottleneck for commercial farms.
I don’t think it’s little, I guess it depends on your expectation of the value of SafeCoin in the near future. Anyway, farming will continuously cost resources, and I believe at some point the costs being put in farming will exceed the costs being put in software development, so I think it’s reasonable that the majority of SafeCoins can only be farmed.
Getting funding for the MaidSafe company to be able to continue development and actually launch the network. We buy it because we believe it will be a lot more valuable after launch. At the same time those who bought them during the IPO supported the vision of MaidSafe (secure access for everyone), that’s worth something as well.
Ok, so you know how in Bitcoin, when you solve a block, the code automatically generates to the winning miner a mining reward. This is proof of work, it shows that you have the (truly massive) computing power necessary to mine this block.
Maidsafe is proof of resource. You as a farmer have been entrusted with chunks of data. When someone requests that data, and you deliver it, you have proved that you have a resource. Then the code generates a safecoin (or rather attempts to generate a safecoin, the more safecoins, already in existence, the less likely the attempt will be successful, similar to the bitcoin difficulty level).
The transactions take place on the network. The whole point of maidsafe is immutable data, which can be controlled by a particular user ID. Safecoins are special files which allow themselves to be signed from one person to another. That is the SAFE network, and that is the network on which the transaction takes place.
And secondly you are not understanding human behaviour… you can’t expect to offer a monetary incentive and not have people wilfully create a commercial project around that. There are already people here on this very forum stating the obvious.
This is the part I am having trouble understanding. There are no farmers currently but there are coins. This seems a little unfair or seems as though others are receiving an unfair advantage. Maybe I am completely wrong.
How is it an unfair advantage? people bought the coins in a sale that was available to everyone.
Also there are technically no coins currently, they exist in token form on the mastercoin protocol. The ability to trade them in for actual coins will begin once the network is up and running.
I never said it is unfair. I said that it seems unfair because your asking people to Farm the coins with a level of unpredictability yet all of those pre-sale coins where sold out in ten minutes to essentially people in the know. I for example only found out about Maidsafe recently and judging from what I am seeing on platforms like Youtube and Reddit I gather most people have absolutely no clue what it is. This is where I say that it seems unfair. And like I said maybe I am wrong but Maidsafe should be prepared for people to ask these questions because they will.
So you said it seems (so basically might be unfair) you are effectively saying it looks unfair, which would give it the chance of actually being unfair, i was simply asking for clarification of why you state it seems unfair and pointing out that it wasn’t
Those who purchased the coins had the problem of unpredictability on the price, infact we saw that effect directly, as soon as there was an exchange to trade maidsafe coins it was possible to purchase them for less than they cost during the IPO/ICO
The ipo was not sold out in 10 minutes either and the fact that you could of bought litterally 10’s of millions for lower than IPO price once it reached an exchange doesn’t exactly make it “seem unfair” infact it could be argued it was unfair on the people buying during the IPO but that would be ridiculous , if they purchased for the future potential then they would be in profit right now and its not even launched yet so surely they haven’t sold
There are MaidSafeCoins now - set up as part of the IPO spring 2014 - that can be bought and sold on poloniex.com . Anybody can acquire these coins using bitcoin. The market seems liquid. If you feel confident in Maidsafe, as many do, grab a few .
Yep …went pretty quick… a little delay and yes some controversy…but thats what happens in an unregulated world. Its the wild west with crypto… a great time to be in it.
GL
Which flies in the face of what Gohan is saying… thats all I am saying as that it can seem unfair and clearly I am not the only one saying these things. Im not pointing the finger at anyone by the way.
yeah it was around 6 hours , i was stating it wasn’t 10 minutes long it would be an over exaggeration of the length of time people had, There was plenty of reading material leading up to the event, even many people screaming scam because of the amount of money that was put into maidsafe in such a short time and that it cant be genuine interest because the person in particular reads 5 websites and didn’t see it there.
But the other thing i mentioned , the ability to buy maidsafecoins from exchanges shortly after the IPO was possible and at a cheaper rate than the people who were in the IPO got them for . so an even better deal than if you invested into the IPO .
please explain how it flies in the face of what i am saying? you said it was 10 minutes long, i said it wasn’t 10 minutes long , you prove it was 6 hours, proving yourself wrong…
If you feel its unfair I respect that… Life and business are unfair. Anyway, get involved at some level… you wont regret it. You are asking all the right questions.
well done on deleting it , Now try to explain how me saying “the IPO wasn’t 10 minutes long” and you saying it was open for 6 hours flies in the face of what i said
Deleting comments to cover tracks is not respected in any forum. If you want to engage further it would be proper to acknowledge this deletion…as the Mods can easily wind back to the deleted text.
Edit: There was no deletion and confirmed by a Mod. The poster disowned the ‘10 minute’ remark, which threw us all off I think…so I take back my finger waving to @goindeep
The comment occurred lower down in the thread:
I never said it is unfair. I said that it seems unfair because your asking people to Farm the coins with a level of unpredictability yet all of those pre-sale coins where sold out in ten minutes to essentially people in the know.
By the way I can say all those bitcoiners in the pre 2011 days are unfair because they brought bitcoins when no one knows about it…lol same logic applies to every opportunity we have missed since we were born.
