In the past there have been discussions for different cost of PUT, where public data costs less than private data. This has been challenged due to the fact that it can be gamed easily (i.e. encrypting your files before uploading them publicly). I´m very much against a general discount but I believe that there is at least some reason for public data being less expensive than private data and I wanted to invite you to comment on it, because I´m unsure whether the conclusion makes sense or not.
In an older topic @dirvine was asked whether one could game the farming reward by creating an app that creates GET requests for chunks that are stored in the own vault. David answered that it is yet to be decided how many GET request will create one Safecoin, but he made clear that it will be an immense amount and nearly impossible to do it on your own.
Assumed that private data cannot or at least is not meant to get viral (because that´s precisely the reason why it is private) the avarage reward is expected to be considerably lower. For the farmer and the network in general it´s better if files are used, because then they can work and receive payouts. In a flat price model (private & public data cost the same) the cost for the more expensive private data is subsidized. On the flipside, if public data costs generally less, it can and will get exploited.
In a way I believe that the idea that public data costs 1/4 of private data relies on the problem that private data is more expensive for farmers. The solution however to set an overall discount doesn´t sound economically feasible to me, because it does not relate to actual user behaviour within the system.
I wondered if the problem could be solved if vaults are allowed choose how much space they want to allocate for private private. In this case there would not just be space scarcity but two types of space scarcity resulting in different prices for public and private data. While this can still be exploited, in comparison to the fixed 25% discount the market would react to it immediately and higher or lower prices.
I don’t know much about the technical details but from an end user perspective, very few people among the general public will bother with setting options manually. Most people will just run the farming software with default settings. And that’s the way it should be. It should be super simple for people to start farming.
Bad idea, to let people choose allocation of private/public data. Data should be data and discrimination should be present. It might also perpetuate bad ideas, like that money/SAFEcoin is everything. Support of the SAFE Network should be the goal, not ideas like, I’m only allocating space for public data, because that makes me money.
I´m not arguing from an ideological but from a pragmatist point of view. Ideologically I´d even support the idea of everyone having free data and free lunch, but that´s not the point. I´d had problems with data discrimination if it would be dicriminated along users (i.e. people with fame pay less because they potentially generate more clicks). However, I am discussing discrimination along use case. This could mean a more fair distribution of cost (private data on avarage requested much less than public data) while at the same time generally lowering the price of public data (making the network more attractive to newcomers). Currently David forsaw that private data should cost 3x more than public data. I believe it makes more sense to let request and offer decide what the rate should be.