@dirvine I am questioning this as well. My initial reaction was that it would potentially tank the price of the network token short term and limit its speculative value long term. Having more scarcity would be preferred I would think to give a better return to long time initial investors and the network would just adjust prices down the decimals. Also wondering if this affects long term growth? Idk this came out of the blue to me not that I’m closed off to ideas or change but this could definitely use some more explanation and consideration to instill more confidence in such a move.
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No worries @Nigel always glad to hear thoughts and this is a community who looks deeply, so I am grateful.
It’s all brainstorming at this time. IF we focus on pure security then mint and distribute them all is best, if we consider only economics (if we can ever tell how that goes) then perhaps as slow as possible.
I often hear new terms in tech these days, like scarcity, inflation and much more, it’s all interesting but I even think there that base assumptions can and should be tested. i.e. what if the thing is not scarece, what really happens, beyond the headline scarcity is essential for value increase etc.
Also what if there was no inflation, but instead deflation? So the opposite of inflation? (i.e. not scarce so deflationary due to increased supply, then scarcity as supply is capped and so on?)
At this brainstorming session, I am all ears to all ideas and that has to be good. It’s not my decision alone in any case, so I would like some freedom to explore. Deflationary currency can be a good thing (no hoarding or that terrible phrase hodl) maybe that is better for the transfer of products and services?
All I mean is there seems no economic model that is the one but many ideas and I think the bitcoin space has fixed ideas with sometimes invalid terminology.
I am no economist and am keen to listen/learn and more, but I am also sceptical of all the economic experts who currently are not trillionairs 
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I agree with this concern. I think “quickly” is probably still on the order of decades here. This is because there are other serious implications besides tanking price and long term investors who supported the team through the hard times not being rewarded. Namely, all of the supply would go to a lucky few who heard about the network early enough. I doubt the team wants that based on everything they’ve stated so far. For the whole world to benefit, the supply should be released slowly enough that everyone hears about it and is able to join and take a fair (based on work) piece of this future world resource.
But clarification would be good to be sure. In the highly unlikely event that we’re indeed talking about very fast release of all the coins (months to few years scale), one way to reward the early investors might be to increase their share, e.g., Maidsafe’s goes from 5% to 10% and ICO investors’ goes from 10% to 20%, leaving 70% to be released at once for everyone else (still better distribution than most other networks). This is highly unlikely to be the case / needed though, as it would be counter to everything else stated so far.
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//still brainstorming
Not all mind you. Only initial supply, it recirculates forever. So clients pay - nodes provide the service. If humankind keep creating data then this continues.
So the initial supply get released to a few lucky early adopters (bit like bitcoin) and then circulate. So perhaps not as bad as you think there? (I do see your point though)
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Me too in yours and the teams willingness to respond to such probing questions and in general considering the will of the community quite often.
Well that is either human psychology or it’s just so deeply engrained in our thinking through economics courses in schools that we think so but I’m pretty sure it’s human psychology. Just the basic idea of supply/demand. Something is scarce it has value because you can’t just make it and he who holds it has power whereas if it’s in high supply it becomes less meaningful. I am only pointing out the obvious to lead to this, the network is changing the power dynamic by allowing almost anyone to run a vault and earn this scarce asset but if it isn’t scarce then it changes the psychology a lot I think and makes contribution to the network less advantageous which is negative to the network overall. So not only is there a chance to perturb long time investors but network contribution and adoption could be affected. At least in the scenarios I’m running in my head.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the questioning of the status quo but the network relies on human behavior/psychology to serve humanity so we need to ensure the two are in symbiosis.
Please don’t take this as a stop sign to your brainstorming but as a dog ear on the map as you travel through this thought experiment.
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Because it’s often the greedy bastards who don’t mind taking advantage of human nature who become the trillionairs. Economics is a form of history really. Market forces are real, and those who are able to study history and base their bets on that have done the best (e.g., Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater, Simons’ Renaissance, D.E. Shaw, etc.) History has shown that disregarding human nature is a bad idea. Look at the US right now.
It might be that we’re misunderstanding what “initial supply” means here. Is it the 15% that is owed early and ICO investors? Is it some portion of the remaining 85% after that? Or is it the entire 85%? I think not trying to re-invent the wheel when it comes to the economics is a good idea. There’s nothing new under the sun when it comes to economics. It’s all been tried. Just look at history and choose the best.
I trust you’ll make the right call in the end!
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All good, I wonder though about how it would work btw I have no idea how we could get the coins out as fast as possible without maidsafe being seen as being unfair etc. in fact the in house team are very good at looking for fairness, as is this community. I love the fact us, the early adopters look to make sure early adopters are not benefiting unfairly, it shows great levels of honour IMO. Anyway it’s all a thought experiment for me this evening.
- So early farmers get huge amounts more for each Put than they should.
- The price tanks dues to the numbers of coins being higher than they could be
- Farmers don’t care as they demand a daily payment for running their nodes, so lets say $5 per day. They don’t care if this is 10 safecoins or 1 million safecoins, as long as they can get $5 (value or fiat) for them
- Price to store is soo soo cheap everyone wants in (user base massively amplifies)
- The network supply empties
- Coin amount capped, no mare can be made available. All we have now is humans with their wallets sending cash to each other.
- Ability for the network to create and not be caught is removed/reduced to a tiny attack surface now.
- Price starts to climb, people have so much data invested they are happy to keep paying
- Farmers still happy with $5 per day, but now that’s 1 safecoin
- Users start to send money to each other for goods/services, the inital rich cashed out some to fiat or services/goods etc.
- The world benefits
I don’t say I like this, but how different will it be if we make this very very slow (decades). Early adopters still benefit now and also as above, but do they benefit more from the above or from the current thinking?
Taking into account point 5, is the more likely with swift dump (not pump dump malarkey skulduggery crypto talk) of supply or without it and costs to store stay closer to reality from the get go?
Again all random thoughts and brainstorming, who knows if we find anything useful here. Certainly will make folk think after they initially hate the thought of it. Don’t worry though we are not gonna be e-corp 
Wee are making the code simpler and easy to clone and change etc. WE should not be able to be evil here or as much as possible we are trying to make sure we are not.
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Yes it’s this part.
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Yeah I’m wondering if we misunderstood the initial supply release as well. If it’s 15% all at once, I don’t think something like that is problematic. It does make you wonder what human behavior would be in reaction to token supply dumps in the future. What would be the mechanism or timing of such a thing? Is that all arbitrary and in the code from the get go? Some people like that about bitcoin, it’s predicament and that gives so many people comfort. It’s supply and distribution is almost like it’s constitution and I think there are benefits to that level of certainty.
What I think makes a difference here is the utility part. So the value is not tied up only in the scarcity of a “thing” but it’s a utility token above all else and backed with data protection (it’s purpose is to protect the worlds data which should increase in quantity). So I wonder is there a difference when the utility is tied to the token.
However when/if (again DBC not there yet and may never be) the network supply disconnects, there is an argument that says it could at that stage be any token?
All valid questions I think.
This scenario doesn’t sound so bad but it does follow a path very similar to bitcoin as I think you have mentioned. I feel like bitcoin was destined to that path being the first in the game. It may have been abundant and easy to mine early on but it was the built in long term scarcity and use case that the Silk Road gave it that began to legitimized it. I think most projects now can kind of skip some of those first steps with so much interest in this space?
But I can’t argue against that farmers should earn far more early on and that basically means you need a decent supply from the get go. Maybe they get a huge reward for certain percentage token dumps and it would be less each sequential token dump much like the bitcoin halvening?
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Playing on that thought experiment, five very likely outcomes:
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Loud accusations that Maidsafe itself set up early nodes and owns most of the actual supply of the coin. There would be no way to prove otherwise because the owners are completely anonymous.
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Most of the supply is owned by an anonymous few who ensure scarcity so that normal economics resume for everyone else, i.e., billions of safe coins to an anonymous few and a few nanosafecoins for everyone else if that.
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Trust in the network evaporates along with the wild stories and tanking prices. No one uploads any data. No one ever holds any safe coins fearing when the uber whales will dump. More wild stories that the CIA and NSA set it up. Can’t trust the economics, can’t trust the data holders.
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Competing networks sprout up and quickly take over given their better economics. (I didn’t take @Dimitar’s concerns about forks seriously until now).
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Others benefit from the hard work and toil of the MaidSafe’s team and from the investment of its early investors and supporters.
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Human psychology is a tremendously difficult thing to alter—largely for good reason. Much of what is ingrained in our subconscious understanding is what keeps us alive. That, of course, isn’t to ignore the existence of subconscious (as well as learned/conscious) biases that are detrimental to self and others. Rather, it is to say that the choices we make and the actions we take signal things we may not have intended whether we like it or not.
Dumping billions of Safecoin on the market in a short amount of time will signal low quality and untrustworthiness. Even if these signals aren’t necessarily true, the impact will be harmful all the same. For example, long time token holders would quickly shed the weight of (i.e. sell) what they’d come to expect to be a poor investment with little prospects, further tanking the market and discouraging engagement with the Network itself.
@Bogard puts it very well here:
The matter of max supply is something that came up frequently when I held Safe Network meetups. At a fundamental level, many are wary of the fact that there will be billions of coins in supply at some point. Add to that the fact that coins can be burned/recycled and the uneasiness increases. What adds some sense of security is the notion that it would take years for billions of coins to hit the market, allowing the market and market participants to gradually adjust.
Much as with pricing strategy, I think it would be a good idea to draw on the expertise of behavioral economists here.
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Bitcoin have a fundamental problem, too few transactions per block. Bitcoin miners needs to mine new coins to get the profit they expect and the mining power keeping the network secure.
Bitcoin needs to always make new coins because the miners can’t cover the cost by transaction fees alone. In the future look for forks that expands the maximum limit of 21 000 000 coins or increasing transactions per block by 10x-100x depending on what people are willing to pay per transaction.
But the Safe network is different, the cost to store data should be enough to pay farmers for their service, the Safe network should have very low, if any need, to mint new coins. Only concern is what incentives is needed in an early stage to secure the network.
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The only way I can see @dirvine’s thought experiment of releasing the entire coin supply essentially at once would realistically work is if 80% of the total supply goes to the early/ico investors and 20% to the anonymous early farmers. Three reasons why:
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Precedent of Ethereum: ~80% of their coin supply went to their ico investors.
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The investors have a vested interest to protect their own investment and so will support the network through work, marketing, market support, node participation, etc.
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The coin owners are well distributed (albeit only among the lucky, currently unlucky, maidsafecoin holders and maid safe equity holders)
But I prefer the initial vision of slow release so that the whole world has time to hear and participate (that’s the kind part of me talking; but I’m very aware of market realities). Few will participate if the price isn’t attractive.
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While I am reading your brainstorming, I keep having the impression you are seriously evaluating an option to dilute investors share of all safecoins rather quickly. Can you please give us some numbers of what is the quickest brainstorm scenario in your mind now on the table? I am rather affraid answer could be less than a year. Anything less than 3 years would be a big undercut on early adopters in my estimation…
I hope I am just missreading… its rather normal, excuse me if this is the case.
I just wan’t to express my concern with rapid inflation with a thought experiment.
What if Scotland had !0% inflation rate every year and every asset you owned dropped 10% in value every year.
What if Scotland had 50%, 100% or higher, inflation rate every year and every asset you owned lost 30% or 50% of it’s value every year.
Even if the BNP of Scotland is magnitudes higher than any future Safecoin market cap, similar effects would affect the people of Scotland as the people of the Safe-network community and the future users/farmers of the Safe-network. That is why inlfation is very powerful but also very dangerous. If the people of Scotland saw the value of their assets drop example 50% every year then they would probably lose faith in Scotland, it’s economy and currency.
If too high inflation hits the Safe-network too fast, then the people using it might lose faith in the technology, economy and the currency.
Of course as with increasing wages for the people of Scotland or increasing prices of the coin, it would act as a counter weight to the inflation rate
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I seriously evaluate as much as I can
Why 3, is there a reason for that number or more a feeling?
This one is a huge issue and as with the others a valid one. I am not sure there is a possibility of a good answer here.
This would indeed amplify.
Here’s a thought. We launched 12 months ago, no exchange has yet stepped up. The coins are all in circulation with folk buying storage and farmers getting paid, all waiting for the exchange that is due any day. How does that play out?
I hope we always do, well at least the community knowledge, I have no idea who is a behavioral economist and have not heard the term until now.
This would be a massive failure I think.
So do I, What I am trying to do here is query. This is how I design systems. Take what is seen as a huge problem, look from the angle the problem is a great thing, and see what you can learn from it.
So things like, what if we expose all IP addresses of nodes. What happens if all coins distribute imediately, can we remove the network authority from all data, what would happen then (this one is a biggie right now), what if data can be swooped up by anyone (crdt remove network auth and archive nodes are a simple proposition) and much more.
So here so far I think the massive early deflation could attract more users, but upset investors (perhaps temporarily) and these might be good things, but the negatives are pretty huge. Still I feel these are things that make a lot of sense to “thought experiment” and not take the stand of the well troden road. We never know what we will find.
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keep in mind though, this is capped inflation of coins and deflation of value. When the cap is reached then there are no new coins, we enter the scarcity mode (I dislike that word a lot). Then enter an uncapped period of coin fiat value inflation (potentially)
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Massive early inflation will lead to a second Safe network without it immediately. It will be interesting to see which of the two will survive…
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