As a beginner, here is what I don't understand

Beginners
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The “scattered across the network” fails when a data center has a huge part of the SAFE data. Because the single data center will be a big part of the network. So instead of the data chunks being scattered into different geographical locations, there is a significant probability that all copies for a chunk end up in the single data center.

Or think of data storage pooling, similar to Bitcoin mining pools. Maybe the incentive for farm pools will be much lower than for Bitcoin mining pools, or not possible, but anyway. A big farm pool with centralized control could cause the same problem as for large data centers.

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Well done community for sorting this out without mod intervention.

When you make an accusation of this kind (you said X, you deleted Y), it is important you first substantiate it, or be specific about what, where, in the case of deletion. That’s the first thing I as a mod will ask you to do - it’s not my job to do that work for you.

Also, when accused, especially wrongly, respond by refuting, again with specifics. If you do this you’ll gain the respect and gratitude of everyone here, especially the mods :slight_smile:

All: please don’t let your emotion override your responses as it undermines you and the original purpose of your posts - because it escalates, as began to happen here.

All: don’t get personal. Don’t use inflammatory language. Etc.

Especially: Re-read your post before hitting reply.

Thanks! :smile:

@goindeep
Welcome, and thanks for posting such great questions. I think we as a community can answer all these points (most have been asked and answered already, but not always easy to find!) I’m sorry the discussion got heated, and accusations were made rather than keeping to the data. I hope that the discussion will resume and address your doubts and queries.

The question of centralised farming has been answered several times on this forum (maybe in the FAQ? A mod should check this ;-)), including by me, so when you say:

I have no doubt there will be large commercial farms no matter what anyone says. It’s human nature.

Yes there will, but I’m confident, though not certain, this won’t be like bitcoin: damaging trust through excessive centralisation, and driving out ordinary folk. We’ll see! One reason, well here’s two:

  • scale doesn’t win all the goodies: no matter how much you throw at this you won’t earn at over twenty percent higher rate than the network average. That’s a cap on the rewards which doesn’t happen in bitcoin so even the least good hardware setup remains in the game.
  • this means that pros are always in competition with kit that costs nothing to buy and nothing to run (because it’s already owned and already powered up). So pro farmers have to cover their costs of, forever buying faster kit (to keep a few percent more earnings than my dad gets for zero cost), and to power, monitor, manage, maintain… their massive, air conditioned, high performance server farms. If they don’t cover those costs they go out of business.

You are right that there will be such guys, but their numbers will be limited by the above, and so they will be in balance with all the ordinary Joes and Jeminas sharing a bit of space in their commodity PC.

So I expect pros will contribute rather than undermine. Win, win! I welcome pros and Joes! :slight_smile:

If you disagree fine. If you want further discussion post some thought experiments. If you want to investigate, join testnet3 (soon) and try to dominate it! All welcome.

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43

Or mineral-oil-cooled data centers. :slight_smile:

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44

There will be commercial farms, but the cost effectiveness of commercial farms won’t be orders of magnitude better than casual farms, because casual farmers will usually operate at near-zero cost, using hardware and bandwidth that they would already pay for anyway. Casual farming doesn’t eat your machine like Bitcoin mining does.

It is the huge cost effectiveness discrepancy that killed all the casual mining in Bitcoin. This discrepancy will be a lot smaller with SafeCoin, and might actually be inverted when considering casual farmers that only use what they already have and wouldn’t use anyway.

This is per vault, and it’s possible to create multiple vaults on the same machine, so it doesn’t stop centralization like that. It does however increase the routing burden for that machine.

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Maybe I have no clue.

But I still think we are going to see professional, commercial grade farms and they will game the system. Morally, immorally, within network guidelines or not, whatever, it will happen and i’m willing to put a bottle of scotch on it if you’d like to wager?

I have no thought experiments because it is far too late here for me to be thinking of anything other than catching some zzz’ees right now.

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Lets hope they try, we could use a kick start to the network with a bunch of data centers on-board to get those apps humming.

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Either way its not like SAFE is going to be an inefficient brittle server system based on centralization. No matter how much people want to scam the system and add profit inefficiencies its bound to cut down on that. You cant cut and paste the Google model over. The SAFE culture has never been about cash in.

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It is nice to see someone bringing up the hard issues. This is a fear of mine too, but this is all speculation until the network goes live. The Dev team is aware of the issue and will continue to be aware of it.

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How could they game the system than? And what’s the difference between a commercial farm and you farming at home? Maidsafe will run in the background on your computer for farming. You don’t need to login for that. So you’re computer is up and running, your vault goes online, and you make some coins. You almost don’t have anything to do for that. So I think a lot of people are motivated to do so. Just like in the beginning with mining crypto-coins. But the great thing here is, you don’t need a new GPU. Just your PC that’s online.

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If you can make money from it, people will be motivated.

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@goindeep

If you can make money from it, people will be motivated

Indeed, and the network stays in balance because the amount of money that can be made is limited, and rapidly decreases the more commercial farmers do this.

This sets a limit which ensures ordinary users can always participate. I don’t think you’ve taken my post on board - if you disagree with the logic presented, please address this with specifics rather than just repeating that you believe X.

To be honest, you are not very clear about what X is. Are you saying the will be commercial farms? We all agree on that so far, so why repeat it?

Are you still saying commercial farms will drive ordinary farmers out (as with bitcoin mining)? If so, please explain why by addressing the rebuttals on this thread. People have taken the time to explain their reasoning, please reciprocate or stop spamming your belief.

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I was replying to polpolrene.

And it’s not spamming, how can I spam a thread I started when all im doing is stating my opinion.

I dont have a technical reason because my understanding is limited which is what I opened this thread with. I just have a gut feeling and to me that counts for something, im basing it on what I know about human behavior and history.

There has never not once in the history of mankind not been a network, platform, idea or anything that has ever not been exploited when money is involved, so to me as a not very technically savvy person, I see the idea of trying to secure this network from monetary exploitation by farmers as just another thing people will learn to game. Another hurdle.

You know people aren’t supposed to escape prison and they do, people aren’t supposed to be able to rob banks and get away with it and they do that too. Just the other day I was watching a documentary on a guy in the US who hacked a gameshow called Big Bucks - Press Your Luck just by watching it over and over again until he worked out the patterns that nobody else had spotted. And before that I watched (and highly recommend) The Imitation Game (Turing Machine movie) and about how they hacked the Nazi enigma code. I know these analogies aren’t exactly that relevant and I might be wrong, I probably am. I suppose all I am really saying is that nothing is impossible and the biggest banks and biggest casinos have all been cracked.

To fill the gap in my arguments i’ve offered you a fun wager, so you can take me up on it, or not.

Im saying that commercial farms will most definitely be a real thing and I am saying they will figure out a way to profit and make gains no matter what obstacles are put in their way and if the formula counteracts their farming power with decreased coins then maybe they will figure out how to correctly balance their farming power to continually profit from it, skating on thin ice I guess.

I suppose none of us really know what will happen.

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@goindeep I hope my saying spamming did not offend. I meant it in the technical sense of you repeating the same statement, again and again, without elaboration or reasoning. That is not useful or respectful IMO.

Thanks for clarifying, and explaining your reasons - they don’t have to be technical as you demonstrated by explaining. To me, gut feelings based on experiences (especially when cited) are completely valid reasons, and provide others with the opportunity to accept or challenge - which is not the case with spam repetition of “I still believe Z”.

You say:

Im saying that commercial farms will most definitely be a real thing and I am saying they will figure out a way to profit and make gains no matter what obstacles are put in their way and…

I think we’ve already agreed this is the case, and I’ve said it is desirable. So it’s not a point of contention.

…if the formula counteracts their farming power with decreased coins…

This is the case. As I mentioned, no matter how much they spend they can only ever earn at a rate 20% higher than the network average. This is designed to ensure there is diversity among farmers. This will no doubt be tested during testnet3, and adjusted if need be.

…then maybe they will figure out how to correctly balance their farming power to continually profit from it, skating on thin ice I guess.

Indeed, and this is desirable. The only problem would be if that lead to dominant centralisation as in the case of bitcoin mining. I’ve explained why Safecoin farming differs, and has been carefully designed to prevent it happening. Your counter is simply that you believe pros will exist (agreed as noted). You seem to imply that this is bad, but don’t say why. I don’t think it is bad, I think it is good, so long as ordinary folk are not driven out as they have been from bitcoin mining.

Also, should something shift the balance in the future, the update mechanism for SAFENetwork will provides for later refinements as necessary - without the difficulties of updating bitcoin core.

This is because SAFENetwork updates are accepted or rejected automatically by the network (not a central authority) based on whether they enable the network to operate more or less efficiently, and according to the mathematical rules that ensure correct function.

I suppose none of us really know what will happen

Never let that get in the way of a good discussion :slight_smile:

BTW I think you’ve made some great posts and helped create several useful discussions.

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That’s right. Although even the term money is a bit strange in this case. Let’s say some 16 year old has a gaming PC. He likes to game, surf some internet etc. He’s excited about SAFEnet and want to join, but he don’t want to spend any money on it. This is how he could do it, he just installs the client, creates an account etc. Now he becomes a farmer, “donating” 2 TB of disc space to the network. He’ll leave on his computer for a week, becoming a high ranked farmer. Now he had made some coins and is finally able to use the network without paying a dime. He can still farm while he uses his computer. This way it’s more a get-what-you-give thing. The coins aren’t used as money. They’re just used to trade some harddrive and resources.

And about commercial farmers. Well, I don’t think that’s a problem. They join the network, have to hire/buy harddrives etc. They also have to pay for the people working for them, and to rent a location etc. So when the price goes up quite a bit, they can make some money, but on the other hand, I think the 16 year old using his PC can provide to the network with way lower cost. And it’s pointed out before, the network adapts to the number of resources available. So if a lot of people start to farm, the number of Safecoin made for Gig of data supplied to the network will go down.

Really? So once people become a company, they’ll always make money and profit? Do you really think all the Bitcoin-miners make money? I really don’t think so. Just like all the people who bought GPU’s to mine altcoins didn’t make money, even with their fancy hardware.

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@goindeep 's gut is right, there will be commercial farmers. But that is OK as long as the average Joe can compete with them. I have a gut feeling that because of this level playing field of competition, the average Joes will provide more network resources than the commercial farmers.

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I have a feeling that there is a ton of unused datacenter resources that could be ported to serve SAFE…

No harm no foul in my book – The more the better…

So long as everyone can play, centralization isn’t really an issue.

Of course I tend to see the network as a benefit unto itself – not a messianic economic redistribution like some are gunning for…

It isn’t about the money - it is about the freedom and the security

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A cognitive tip:
Gut feelings are mostly accurate in your areas of expertise.
Gut feelings comes from unconscious empirical knowledge, the more you are exposed to facts and experiences, the more accurate will be your “gut feeling”.
If you use gut feelings in subjects you don’t understand, it will be mostly wrong because the experience is irrelevant.

Example: if you are a graphic designer and you have a gut feeling that a design won’t be popular, listen to it.
If you are a graphic designer, never flew a plane and you “feel” that a plane is malfunctioning, most probably your insight will be wrong.
If you are a graphic designer with several hundred hours of flight and you got a gut feeling that the plane is malfunctioning, probably you are right.
If you are a graphic designer with a pilot license and several thousand hours of flight, and you got a gut feeling that the plane is malfunctioning, better listen to your gut.

Learning to use your gut feeling will help tremendously in your everyday life to make quick decisions, but it will be only useful if you know when to listen to it.

If you declare you aren’t technically savvy, and you got a gut feeling about it, you got to learn to ignore it because any reasoning or extrapolation you might do will be from an imperfect understanding of it, which in turn is irrelevant because it doesn’t reflect the reality of it.

Regards,

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