Buying SNT means that the buyer can spend it on data uploads. But, surely at some point in the future, the number of PUTs that burning 1 SNT would yield would start going down. Once this happens, I think it might continue spiralling down due to the effect I’ll describe below.
If the SNT:PUT value decreases, that means it makes more sense to hold PUTs rather than SNT. That means people could buy huge amounts of mutable data rights, and then there would be not only a price for SNT, but a separate price for mutable data. If someone wants to upload data, they then have a choice between: buying SNT, burning it for PUTs, then uploading their data; and buying rights to mutable data, then updating that data with their own.
There are good sides and bad sides to this. The bad is that it could cause some complicated economics, where SNT might be inferior to mutable data rights as a store of wealth, which would be a shame because SNT looks to be more easily transferable. The good is that the higher prevalence of mutable data could mean that junk data becomes less of a cumulative strain on the network over time.
Could you link to a resource on this? It’s not really relevant to what I’m saying, because I’m talking about using mutable storage rights as currency, not PUTs, but I haven’t heard of being unable to reserve PUTs for future use before.
That shows the opposite though. It means you indeed can buy PUTs for future use. For immutable storage, those PUTs would be limited to the exact data they were created to account for, but that’s not relevant to what I’m saying, because I’m talking about transferring rights to mutable storage data, not PUTs.
Not necessarily. I know a lot of people here assume that, but it doesn’t hold up as far as I see. The amount of data that humans want to store goes up exponentially, as does humanity’s storage capacity, and there’s no reason to assume that the former won’t overtake the latter. Also, it could be that people are enthusiastic about farming for the first few years, then market forces and various other factors reduce the enthusiasm and storage costs go up again. None of this is a problem until the deep-future endgame of data being lost, except for the fact that mutable data rights could become a problematic rival to SNT.
There is different causality then you think. People store more data because storage is getting cheaper. If for whatever reason storage becomes more expensive, people will simply store less data, they wont drive the price to some crazy eights.
Under current designs, you can’t ‘reserve’ PUTs for any-old future use, only specific data. It wouldn’t be useful for creating a secondary market for PUTs, only for allowing you to store specific data at some point.
David said they are only looking at buying (relatively small) batches of puts when uploading large files to save on number of transactions when uploading large files.
Also the number of puts per coin will vary but be more stable as time goes on when there are a large number of nodes. The effects of farmers joining and leaving will have much less an effect on Puts/token. Plus as price of storage drops then farmers will be more willing to get less per Get with the other effect of more people using the network the number of gets rises, so there will be some relative stable returns per TB of storage.
But there is no ability for anyone to transfer their PUTs balance (if it is implemented and larger than a few thousands). The SNT will only purchase the number of Puts it can at the time of buying.
But YES there is incentive to get your SNT when its lower in price so future use is cheaper (ie cheaper Puts at the time of buying them)
As to the network being affected by farmers leaving such that data is lost would be game over for the network since it is then seen as unreliable and not suitable to be used. Other than that there would be an increase in farmers as the network grows until we reach world wide adoption and then the collapse is less likely than ever. Maybe though a new network rises and takes over, who knows, nothing is certain.
EDIT: This is the pay for multiple puts at once. Its not a balance but allocating puts to specific data to be uploaded and thus prepaid but only for the actually data chunks paid for.
It is, but if it wasn’t self encrypted it would still have a hash, so that’s about how the address (hash) of the data is arrived at, and if a different method (e.g. just hashing) was used then it would have the same effect.
Why would they store less, unless the price goes up way too much? If the price is £0.01 per TB at some point, they aren’t going to start storing less just because the price goes to £0.02.
Again, I’ve acknowledged that and it’s not relevant to my point. I’m talking about a market for rights to mutable storage, not the preceding PUTs themselves.
Person A suspects that the cost in SNT of PUTs will increase. Say it costs 1 SNT to upload 1 GB of mutable data, and soon it will cost 2 SNT for the same amount of data.
Person A therefore pays 1000 SNT to buy 1 TB of mutable data.
After the price increase, Person B would have to pay 2 SNT to upload 1 MB.
Person A tells Person B that, instead of paying 2 SNT for the required PUTs, they can instead pay Person A 1.3 SNT for ownership rights to 1 MB of Person A’s mutable data.
Person B accepts this offer as it is financially better than burning SNT, Person A makes a profit of 0.3 SNT, and a new market is established.