I think that this is great for people who are educated enough to have the skills to earn bitcoin by means other than mining. However, citizens of the developing world don’t have the ability to take these opportunities, and if we want them to have access to bitcoin//litecoin/store of value…whatever… this needs to change.
Proof of resource enables people to provide value to others, without having specialised skills (such as programming) or specialised hardware.
Amen.
I imagine the schoolkids in Nairobi I saw growing up being able to take their cheap little Mozilla etc smart phones and being able to start earning real money for their families instantly, while making the network much stronger and decentralised. Would be completely world changing
But are the schoolkids in Nairobi going to earn anything significant from their smartphones? I rather doubt it, especially in the early stages where folk like myself will put up 1-2Tb for storage for effectively zero cost because the platters are already spinning…
Im on “unlimited” data plan although my upload speed is not that great.
Something to remember when doing your calculations. Smartphones out number desktops. It’s not something we really think about too often but what with so many poor people in the world and with cell phones being so easy to aquire AND with the price of safecoin being determined by network average the fact you can pump out a couple TB might not mean all that much if the network consists of mostly people on smartphones and only a fraction are on desktops pumping out the high numbers. Also remember the network favors smaller vaults so just because your pumping out a large amount of resources doesn’t mean someone on a smaller vault isn’t going to make profit. Also keep in mind what with the number of mobiles that a mesh network could more easily be established and therefore reliance on cell networks and isps to generate safecoin isn’t as great.
excellent points.
BTW is anyone else noticing this site being slow to respond today? Are we being DDOS’d?
I also note my wee heart button to like your post is missing
so you got a reply instead of just a “like” 
Well no, they won’t, based on your standards, but I can’t even start to explain how different the economy is over there, how little people make in a year, and therefore how much you can buy with a simple shilling (near a cent).
Once we have the decentralised crypto to fiat exchanges, the amount they can earn will have a huge impact on their lives. No doubt about that. Not at all
That’s what I’m talking about
Oh Im totally aware that the economics of basic survival in Nairobi are different from in the West. Just as the amount of money I can survive (just) on in Glasgow is very different from in SF.
Even so, I’d be VERY pleasantly surprised if the farming profit from a cheap smartphone (even with a bigger SD card) could make a difference even in Nairobi.
The point about the no of desktops v no of phones is cogent and I confess I had not thought enough about that. However my desktop is on 24/7 and permanently connected. Smartphones run out of battery, move in and out of signal range and will lose network reputation because of these factors.
I’d LOVE to be proved wrong though.
If I wanted to I could probably keep my tablet an cell on 24/7 by just keeping them plugged in and in a wi-fi enabled area. You don’t need to turn them off to charge them and you can use them fine while they’re plugged in. And while in a wi-fi zone a cell won’t be running off the cell network to get internet. So theoretically you could mine with a cell or tablet.
Yes certainly, all these things are true. Theoretically, at least. However, in the slums of Nairobi, Mumbai, Sao Paolo power isn’t always on 24/7, people need to use the phones as phones and carry them about in and out of wifi areas, which may not be as prevalent as in the cosy West.
I’m not saying the schoolkids on Nairobi can’t and won’t contribute to the family income through farming on Maidsafe, I’m saying that its not going to be magic, instant or significant for some time to come .
I’m not even sure if Kenya has sufficient international bandwidth to cope with all the extra Maidsafe traffic if 1 in 10 schoolkids started farming say within six months of the network going live.
But its cetainly better than nothing and a step in the right direction.
One of the things a Safecoin Foundation should aim to do would be to make it simple for these kids to convert their SAFEcoin into Kenyan shillings or rupees, $Brazilian_currency (rial?) etc.
As with everything if there is a profit motive, folk will find a way to make it work. And unscrupulous 3rd parties will find a way to skim profit, especially in crypto-fiat exchange.
Also keep in mind that those 10 schoolkids could develop a network of nodes all their own and as long as they stayed in close proximity to one another they could use bluetooth, or a simple router, to farm safecoin. If they live in a high density area and enough people are using SAFE then again they could still use the network. SAFE doesn’t NEED the internet to work. It just uses it as a relay in the absence of sufficient links in close enough nodes in sufficient proximity. But you get enough nodes in close enough proximity and there’s no need for an ISP. Also you can get little solar chargers for your phone. And given maidsafe I think those will become very popular in the near future.
Yes and also the network is all about the global average.
Only 2.something billion people live in these developed areas, while the other 6.something billion live in more rural areas such as these, so the overall network average will be brought down because most of it will be coming from cheap cell phones moving in and out of whatever,
So the net effect of that is it will be easier for the school kids in Nairobi to farm a worthwhile amount of SafeCoin because they will be pretty close to network average, because of all the other developing countries with the same hindrances.
Know what I mean?
Don’t forget that it’s possible to run multiple vaults on one system. I very much doubt that the majority of vaults will run in developing countries.
Lots of people + cheap source of income and internet = lots of adoption. Majority? Maybe maybe not but a significant chunk.
^^^^^No doubt there.
Lets have more faith 
In time possibly - for the first few months at least, the network will be dominated by those on this forum and those already holding MAID.
I expect most of those will be utilising existing always-on spare capacity on their PCs and a few Odroids and Pis. Perhaps some data centres offering spare capacity as well. (Fast disks, fat pipes, clueful sysadmins who know how to configure multiple clients for max potential farming reward)
Once we get a feel for the economics of farming then the switch to dedicated low power devices will start to gather pace. Then as the word gets out we may see the influence of tens of millions of phones however I still think the extremely laudable notion of slum kids in the third world making a difference is some way off. Very happy to do what I can to bring that forward but we must temper idealism with realism.
IDK, personally I’m ready to be pleasantly surprised by masses of random people jumping on very early
I’ll be pleasantly surprised too
Just look at the shift in mobile over the last few years. From virtually exclusively being a western phenomenon, to being dominated in numbers and revenue by places like India and China. The same can happen in other parts of the developing world too, though it really only has to follow the pattern of mobile already established. I think there’s a western mindset (which I am part of) that is behind the reality in the ground.
It really isn’t great news that we’re rapidly being overtaken, and that power is shifting away from us, so we hear about it only in brief, and in abstract. I wonder what the true scale and reality of this is, and how to find out about it, short of visiting those places myself.
The big problem as of now is that people have to pay a high price for every bit of internet data in most Africa. They don’t have landlines with unlimited data plan like most of the western population.
We’re not just talking about Africa, and this can change rapidly there too. Mobile has grown massively outside the more developed countries in the last few years.
Also, SAFE doesn’t have to solve all these problems, it is a part of this process, though it will I think also be a major catalyst, a motive as well as a means for this change.