MaidSafe as an alternative to Dropbox/cloud storage?

[Artiscience]

@neptune

Farmers are paid based on their uptime, but does their uptime determine what files they get? Because I thought that when a farm goes offline, whatever it had gets replicated elsewhere. So, the farmer who has less uptime gets paid less that one who has better uptime, but all have the same chances of reaching their full earning potential, by balancing the ratio of active vs inactive files.

Farmers are not paid based on uptime, but based on GETs. If they have useless content stored they will receive less. However, since content is splitted into small pieces, it is impossible to only store “valuable” or “worthless” chunks. You will receive a fine mixture of the content-confetti that exists throughout the network. Therefore, yes, uptime effects your rewards, however network activity and usage of files as well.

[janitor]

@neptune

Farmers are paid based on their uptime, but does their uptime determine what files they get?

It should be said they are given new data based on decent uptime track of record (eg if one farmer is always online and the other has episodes of extended downtime then the first farmer is more likely to get new data).
The both will get rewarded after/if they serve data, but the farmer with better uptime should have more data and therefore a higher likelihood of getting read requests).

[neo]

@janitor

It should be said they are given new data based on decent uptime track of record (eg if one farmer is always online and the other has episodes of extended downtime then the first farmer is more likely to get new data)

The network does not do this.

When your vault restarts then it is given a new ID, so there is no concept of past history of a vault that has restarted.

A vault that remains online without issues, has the advantage of being able to have more chunks in its vault (if large enough obviously), than a vault that restarts more often. But they both restart with the same “rank” and only lose rank if they misbehave or are too slow.

[janitor]

@neo

A vault that remains online without issues, has the advantage of being able to have more chunks in its vault (if large enough obviously), than a vault that restarts more often.

How’s that different from what I said?
If your vault is not online, it won’t get new data (regardless of anything else).
And consequently (regardless of anything else) a vault with more data is more likely to receive GET requests.

[neo]

My point was in regards to [quote=“janitor, post:109, topic:3229”]
they are given new data based on decent uptime track of record
[/quote]

There is no track record kept by the system, and unfortunately your statement gives the impression that the measure used to help determine which vault gets a chunk is its uptime track record.

Both the long time on vault and the newly turned on vault have EQUAL chance of getting a new chunk. Not “the first farmer is more likely to get new data” Obviously if a vault is not on it won’t get data so the context is obviously when both are on, and both then have equal chance.[quote=“janitor, post:109, topic:3229”]
but the farmer with better uptime should have more data and therefore a higher likelihood of getting read requests).
[/quote]

And this part I reiterated, agreeing with you. On average the longer the time between restarts the higher average chunk storage they will have, so you are right that they will “therefore a higher likelihood of getting read requests”

Really it was the concept of a track record of uptime that is incorrect, the network simply doesn’t keep one and with a new ID on restart it cannot.