This is the premise that, from the beginning, is wrong.
A farmer will hardly move to a new network that does not ensure any continuity and that requires him to start everything from the beginning.
At most he will continue in both networks and the one that offers more services to users (which are data and applications) will be the one that will succeed.
Did you see the case of UniSwap and SushiSwap? During the relocation, the farmers paid 50-100$ in fees. Exactly how much do you think a Safe farmer would risk losing? I think it will be between 1$ and $ 10 per farm…
UniSwap or SushiSwap are decentralized exchanges and have nothing to do with Safe which is a data and application network.
If you don’t even understand something so simple, it’s normal that you end up running around without any sense.
Of course, they are different in what you say.
What they have in common is that people who provide liquidity are similar to farmers in that they have provided a resource (liquidity) and moved it when there is an opportunity for more yield.
It’s been proposed that the foundation would mainly be intended to pay for uploads, but I’m not sure if that’s the right approach.
Looking at the wikimedia foundation financials the total expenses was about $112M, of which $2.4M (about 2%) is for internet hosting. It doesn’t sound like a company that needs help paying for uploads (especially with $191M total assets).
Looking at the size of wikipedia it’s 18 GB compressed and 78 GB decompressed. That’s probably not something that needs a foundation to help with upload costs. They say all revisions for all pages is terabytes of data, so maybe there’s something there that may need help?
I suspect they will mostly need help with knowledge, staff, ongoing support, education, onboarding etc. Maybe there’s a role for the foundation there? Maybe a business opportunity?
Looking at the internet archive tax filing, total expenses were $18M. There’s no hosting expense listed but Computer Technology is listed as an expense of about $1.2M, about 7% of expenses. It seems like paying for these uploads is probably not especially useful compared to the additional services and labor they’d require to transition to a new system like Safe Network.
The storage is about 50 PB (not the greatest source but I found this figure on /r/DataHoarder). So that’s a decent amount of data (18x more than everything on filecoin!) and perhaps finding a way to cover the cost of this could be useful.
My point is, maybe uploading or hosting costs won’t end up being the bottleneck. These figures suggest labor, knowledge and support will probably be most valuable in getting the job done rather than subsidizing upload costs.
If that’s the case it would have very significant impact on the role and structure of the foundation.
To me, the foundation idea for upload subsidies seems like a bad one. Starting a consulting business is probably a better way to go about it. And leave the network and token creation / economics completely out of it.
Thank you for the analysis Mav! I hope someone find a better idea than mine for the Foundation.
Great post @mav! I feel like I’ve gained more value in reading that than the the majority of the posts on this thread put together.
50PB would likely keep farmers busy for a while. I suspect the Internet Archive would pick Safe Network and stick with it if they are investing to upload to it. It likely aligns with their principles and I suspect that would be a big draw.
Perhaps safe network just shouldn’t try to appeal to the get rich quick crypto speculators. I’m not convinced they will have long term network interests at heart in the same way as an enthusiastic user base would.
We can’t stop clone networks, bribing farmers to join them, while it remains void of data or users. If they want to all play ponzi, let them. The last one out and penniless can switch the lights out.
If Safe Network can attract the likes of Wikipedia and Internet Archive early, without incentives, great! Moving everything of that size over to a new network will involve great effort, though, as @mav explains. You have to ask yourself: why would a large-content entity choose to endure the inevitable laborious, probably time-consuming work in order to switch? Will the meshing of their goals with those of Safe be enough or will there need to be something extra to entice them over? It is worth a lot of thought and probing, though I suspect that is already going on.
I think there’s a bit more to @dimitar’s aim. This is how I like to think about it.
What goal is to be achieved?
Create and satisfy massive demand for storage: I don’t think this should be the goal of this particular exercise. (I do think that if you go beyond the organizations you pointed out and start considering scientific organizations like ERC- or NIH-affiliated omic data repositories, a lot more storage need would be found. But there are other avenues to fill that need and that task will be easier if the network has positive goodwill.)
Manage public relations and create positive goodwill in the mind of the general public: I think this should be the primary goal. Helping with even 1% of the running costs for an organization whose usefulness to society is widely recognized would be a huge talking point to help counterbalance the negatives uses of the network that will gain a lot of attention. There’s also helping people understand and use the network.
What form should the effort take?
Individual actors could play a significant role, but I think an entity with a brand and a single, unified strategy/message would be optimal.
For-profit entity: would meet a higher barrier of skepticism in the general public’s mind.
Not-for-profit entity: would best create trust in the general public toward generating goodwill since they know the entity isn’t seeking to exploit them for profit.
How should the effort be funded?
Directly from network rewards: I don’t think this is a good idea. The economics of the network need to be robust and completely unencumbered by anything other than market forces.
Donations from the network’s supporters, maidsafe, or existing foundation, etc.: I think this funding approach would be better.
Who should lead the effort?
It doesn’t have to be MaidSafe. Anyone from the community can take the lead. (There are other issues involving trust and management that would have to be figured out if the entity would be relying on external donations.)
Both Internet Archive and Wikipedia rely on links to the Web, which is a drawback when thinking about porting them to Safe. Scientific datasets and archives are better use cases IMO, especially in the early days before apps arrive. Ultimately I think storage by itself is a dead end and we’ll need to move rapidly beyond that, but getting a large institution on board to put a lot of data - possibly low-importance stuff they have to keep for regulatory purposes - on Safe will certainly help to get the network up to scale.
It’s a bit chicken and egg though - the network will need to prove itself trustworthy before anyone’s going to spend a lot of time, effort and money to use it at scale.
That does create a problem. Or maybe an opportunity for someone.
For internet archive, moving to Safe maybe more than just moving the data. They will need to change focus in some areas.
Their backing up of CC Books, videos etc would continue
Their backup of the current Web could continue but require web servers on the current web for current web users to access the store on Safe.
But for Safe “web pages” then Safe itself is the archive without need for Internet Archive to do anything, no one needs to submit pages to be archived.
Thus the future goals of the web archive would needs to be updated to reflect this.
Well it only needs to have web servers accessing Safe for those users remaining on the current web. And a interface that allows Safe users to search using old web links.
Very important. Could this interface, eventually, be part of the Safe Network api?
I suspect any app could have a “mirror this” capability easily enough. It would be a nice addon to the browser perhaps.
When I wrote that i was thinking it would be part of the archive APP where you request old web address and the APP retrieves it from Archive’s data on the Safe network.
How would that work, for example, with Wikipedia’s articles if they ported over only the main body of the articles (with links embedded as usual) but did not port over the actual works cited in the referral links?
You could retain relative links. External links could either be opened in a clear net browser or copied to safe.
While viewing the article on Safe Network after it had been transferred (and assuming the article referenced by the link had not been transferred), could clicking on the link automatically take you to the reference on the clearnet, either by automatically launching a clearnet browser or otherwise, without the awkward step of manually launching a clearnet browser and then copying the link?
Pretty sure there will end up being a browser that supports both SAFE and clearnet, either via SAFE plugin for a traditional browser or via native support for both
Thanks, let’s hope so!