It has been said before that it doesn’t matter to have a large datacenter or sharing a humble hard drive to have higher chances of earning safecoins.
Anyone can explain why having such disporpotionate amount of resources aren’t really an advantage?
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As far as I understand it upload speed is the biggest advantage, since it is the resource most likely to be in demand.
Economies of scale shouldn’t matter, in theory, since spare resources (aka free) will always be able to outcompete. If you already own the stuff they have to buy then it doesn’t matter how cheaply they can do it, the average user will always be competitive as their only cost is electricity.
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Having a data centre will give you a greater chance for earning a safecoin.
But its the economics that discourages data centres over the “humble” home vaults
Home vaults are using spare resources (approx no costs). Each coin earned cost virtualy nothing in costs
Data centres can earn good money from hiring out their resources
Data centres have to cover all their costs even if just powered up
Data centres will pay $$$ for each coin earned.
Data centres IF they farm have to guanartee resources to farming, so it will not the unused capacity
Also its been suggest using botnets, but again botnets can earn more money from being hired out for whatever than to have to tie them up for days (except people turn off their computers) to fill their vaults enough to earn. More money in hiring the botnet out
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Data centres spare resource could be put to use if profitable. Many home computers are powered down a lot of the time - leaving it on all the time will impose a significantly higher cost for the home user versus the data centre as the home user will likely pay a higher cost for electricity than the data centre. Mobile devices often have much more expensive data transmission cost, so again we have the profit advantage going to data centres.
In the end only time will tell. We have to see it working to know how people and companies will respond to the network.
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But those resources are using
- power
- preventive maintenance costs
- manpower to initiate
- Tying up the spare resource long enough to actually earn a safecoin. There is a delay from setting up the vault (when resource becomes available) to when it could potentially earn a safecoin. Data centres spare resources are dynamic and for any particular resource it may only be spare for a few hours a day.
Yes and a lot are not too. Why don’t you say many home computers are only turned on once a week, which is also true. This is simply picking a portion of the home computers to make a point. I could also say many home computers are on for 18 hours a day, long enough to potentially earn a coin. Also I could say many home computers are only turned off once or twice a week for a few hours.
But data centres have spare resource for the purpose of dynamic allocation and that means that when a customer wants a particular type of resource its there, and only enough is provided to supply demand. Any more is wasting valuable profit. This means that any particular resource usually is only “spare” for a maximum of a few hours. But because there is a delay before a vault can earn coin (filling up and also being promoted to a working node) means that a datacentre has to purposely allocate resources to farming which then reduces their available “spare” resource.
Thus for a datacentre there is never a “no cost” farming situation. Is it profitable? Time will tell, but not as profitable as the home user that has their computer on for say over 12 hours a day.
The home computer on for 12 hours or more a day has the “no cost” option for earning safecoin.
EDIT: And I forgot
My $9 CHIP computer can be (& has been) a vault and draws < 5 Watts power and with its 64GB memory stick ($30) I can farm all day every day and there is no way a data centre can compete, even if they got the same setup they have employee & space rental costs to cover. (assuming I have decent internet service obviously)
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I was wondering more regarding to how does farming actually work and how it would be tecnically impacted when it is run on a datacenter… lets forget a minute about the economics of running a datacenter.
For the sake of argument, lets say that I live next to a hydropower station with infinite amount of energy for all practical purposes, I have a shitton of harddrives in raids that are donated to me for some other favors so it costs me zero dollars in running them for farming.
So what in that event? How does the farming mechanism assure I don’t get an unfair competitive advantage?
I remember reading about it somewhere, but I can’t remember where it was.
I would greatly appreciate any help in this, the resources I keep hitting are too conceptual or hypothetical and it doesn’t really go to the core of the question (or I fail to interpret them)
Regards,
PS: Btw, is there a predictable farming rate per GB of storage?
You would be looking at comparing
- vault size
- bandwidth
- processor power
Data-centre
- vault size can be whatever they wish
- bandwidth can be very high
- processing power what ever they wish to throw at it
Home user
- vault size limited by their spare capacity
- bandwidth limited by their ISP
- processing power is what they have and less than a data centre typically
Now to make sense of that.
Vault Size
Size doesn’t want to be too large, around network average to maximise farming rewards. If its too large then they rarely fill up so better to limit them to a size that fills up in a reasonable time.
In this respect the home user is on par with “free” data centre until the average vault size is larger than what the home user can provide
Obviously the datacentre will have many times more vaults than the home user
Processing Power
Vaults use very little processing, my 1 core 1GHz ARM 32 bit processor was idle most of the time when it ran a vault. So I’d expect the home user to be on par with the data centre
Bandwidth
Bandwidth is very important to the network, I’d expect that the faster the bandwidth the more rewards one would expect
So for a home user in the same physical locale as the data centre, the data centre will typically win over the home user.
But most home users will be in different locales and randomness of chunk location will mean that the home user still has opportunity to get farming rewards. Lets say the datacentres and all the home users provide similar #vaults and space then this location of vault will mean that the home user will be on par with the datacentre on a statistically average.
But comparing one home user in the same location to the datacentre and the datacentre’s similar #vaults/size, then the datacentre will win out on average. The issue is that the data centre is in one location and the home users are scattered everywhere.
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The vault has to be filled up to participate on the rewards?
I am trying to understand this passage from the FAQ: https://safenetwork.wiki/en/FAQ
To prevent centralisation, the use of one huge farming rig will be economically discouraged as compared to running multiple smaller nodes. As the following diagram demonstrates, the safecoin earning algorithm is based on a Sigmoid curve, in that all Vaults earn, slowly at first and the rate increases as the Farmer stores up to the network average. The earning rate also takes into account the rank of the Vault, a process whereby the network scores the usefulness of each node from 0 (being the worst) to 1 (the best). The safecoin farming rate is ultimately the result of the network rate (a balance of the demand and supply on the network) multiplied by the Vault rank. The network rate will start to level at 20% above average, thus discouraging massive Vaults which would bring centralisation to the network’s farming process.
Is this understanding correct?
Any Vault will earn poorly until “Farmer stores up to the network average” does that mean that the network is aware of the average amount of data that each node stores? How does it calculate the average?
Regarding to the rank, if I remember correctly, is it that the less churn the more rank?
“The safecoin farming rate is ultimately the result of the network rate (a balance of the demand and supply on the network) multiplied by the Vault rank” I guess that means that the more popular a data becomes (more gets), the more rewards the for the vault hosting the file?
I don’t understand what it means that the “network rate will start to level at 20% above average”, how does it level? What is leveling? The get requests get redirected to other vaults? Or the safecoin rewards?
Regards, sorry for being extremely n00b at farming.
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NO
Say I have 1000TB
If I make one vault then the network is only filling one vault at say “Y” chunks per hour. Then in 1000 hours I get 1000*Y chunks in my vault.
BUT if I have 100 of 10TB vault then in 1000 hours I get 1001000Y chunks
So by keeping to smaller vaults I get more opportunity to serve up chunks
Obviously this assumes that Y <10 But the reasons for smaller vaults should be obvious from the example.
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Latency is also important because it is the first vault to serve the chunk that gets the farming attempt.
In this case having a data centre gives you a geographical location, which means you’ll do well in some situations and less well in others - if they can serve the chunk faster due to physical proximity. This is complex, but it does have an effect I think.
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I would think that latency could be a dominant factor. Say for Australia - within Australia the latency is low but to the outside world can be high. I would think that an Australian farmer servicing an Australian client could complete the
retrieval before overseas farmers could start to respond and vice-versa.
Could be wrong.
Although not powered down I suspect that many/most home computers would have entered a sleep mode, thus not be available to process data retrieval. Keeping them, awake all day would involve an increased usage of electricity and increased cost. Not sure about increased wear and tear on the computer/hard drive.
Alough I guess not an issue here increased CPU usage over time could be a problem. Basically because it can create excessive temperatures. I found this mining Bitcoin, thrashing the CPU hour after hour did raise the internal temperatures (and presumably premature failure rate) with caused me to discontinue mining - its a consideration (especially if the resource usage moves on to sparing spare CPU capacity).
This is an issue for sure. I guess if you want to earn coin then you would need to disable this. Although it is possible to power down your vault and rejoin next day. Just not sure how much this will affect node aging at this stage as that dynamic is still to be tested and that node aging is still being developed.
My thought is that there will be a market for these SBC computers (eg RPi, CHIP etc) to become the vault where one simply adds an old harddrive or cheap drive (eg 1TB)
Now this should never be an issue for SAFE nodes/vaults. The vault CPU usage is very small and never cause the CPU to heat up past the amount used for say browsing. There maybe occasional spikes with section splits etc, but even they are not likely to be big or long.
Now as we move to supplying compute capacity then it would seem likely that even less nodes will qualify for this feature. I cannot imagine a SBC with a single core ARM, which can run a vault will be able to compete with multi-core intel computers for running compute feature.
So for compute I would think that the user enabling this feature would have to realise that it will load their computer and may have heat issues associated with that. Be nice if a warning is displayed for those not so technically educated. But even then unless the compute feature is very heavily used then the load will be intermittent unlike mining.
Compute is really an area we have no real ability to quantify yet. Maybe if you look at the seti project and their use of distribute compute and how it affects the people who participate. It is also a heavy number crunching system, but I still feel that mining is an extreme case by far and compute will not reach that level and that the seti project is a better model for comparison.
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The issue here is that any chunk is hopped through many nodes from farmer to requester. Since it is XOR space the location of the nodes the chunk is hopped through is fairly random.
So while Australia presents a final or initial hop additional delay this is likely to be very much less significant than it there was a direct link between vault and requester.
It is possible that for a particular chunk an AU farmer will have only one hop out of Australia and the rest of the hops are around europe/americas. Whereas a vault in europe might have that chunk hop to Australia then back to europe, so that EU farmer has two large lags whereas the AU farmer only had one.
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