I’m not important. I have decided to use part of my tokens for the network and keep the rest in case of need. But other people are important. See Sia, a project that has been running for 4 years, see Storj, see FileCoin. Speculation of 99.99%-99.99999%. The difference is only in the number of 9 …
I am not saying there wont be massive amount od speculation with SNT, it will be. I am saying Safe Network is targeting completely different user experience and has potential to start very differently from those networks.
I have been watching Sia/Storj/FileCoin closely from the beginning and they are all somehow halfcooked. All of them cut corners to be done faster and reduced the original vision to something, that mostly doesnt bring people anything, that is why people dont use them and only speculate with the coins.
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That was pre-cloud days though. I wonder if the sentiment has shifted - not in terms of the privacy and security aspects, but the ‘universal back end accessible from anywhere’ ones?
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One of the ultimate differences is the end game and whether the networks potentially form a Schelling point. Can Sia/Storj/FileCoin be more than they say on the label? Some minor use cases yes, some more with development. If you start using them, can you keep incrementally adopting them? Can you imagine your neighbor doing it? Could they plausibly complete your entire vision? Most importantly, do you believe that others believe that they could do whatever they need to on that network?
If not, it’s like the temporary selection of a vendor to evaluate how they fill a business need, and that is about how much thought they deserve.
SAFE is an endgame. I am not a smart man, and I can see, down to the code level, how it could be used in many different domains and for many different ends. There is always another use case, the next business process can be put on there as well. It can eat blockchains, compute (eventually) as well as a huge chunk of the conventional web.
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But which Safe? Ours or someone else’s? Because we have no guarantee that it will be ours. We need to prepare for attacks:
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There are no guarantees here. But the network effect is real, and this will be the one that can complete the vision and has a community with history and experience codifying ideas. It will be ours to lose.
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I also believe that it will be so. But I’m not ready to leave it to chance, so I open my mouth. There are things we can use. Things that the competition will use against us. Why not make them our weapons too?
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I think it would be really great if Maid team, post beta, would make it a priority to build a decentralized exchange on Safe. Something simple, like localbitcoins, not a complex exchange like binance … maybe there is a way to simply convert Bisq to WASM and adapt the networking of it to Safe Network.
Any easy way for people who are actually USING the network to trade the token for whatever currency they like would be a huge plus for stability of the token price IMO.
Of course it would also be a huge plus for the security and privacy of the network as a whole.
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I agree that tooling a SAFE native dex should be a high priority. I think another, slightly orthogonal, template that can be learned from is Decred’s DEX. Somewhere between Decred and Monero is what bitcoin should have been. SAFE should learn from both.
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2 Days later:
Cost per GB: $19.871 USD
Cost vs Amazon: 71x more
Last 8 days they stored 0.1207PiB and add other 71.68PiB
Which is also 135 896GB stored and 80 704 505GB added.
Anyway last 2500 deals they stored only 2 212GB and spent 22FIL to keep files only 15 days.
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Does this show the woes of speculation on top of data coins? Is this the tail wagging the dog, or is there something I’ve missed with filecoin?
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I don’t get it either. So much storage available but those offering storage don’t seem to want to use it to store data. They seem to only want to use it to mine coins.
Why is the price so disconnected from the consumed:available storage?
From the filecoin whitepaper Section 2.5.3 p27/36, hopefully we can understand a bit about storage pricing.
Clients and Storage Miners submit their orders to the orderbook by submitting a transaction to the blockchain (step 1). When orders are matched, the client sends the piece to the Storage Miner and both parties sign a deal order and submit it to the orderbook (step 2).
So, storage cost is based on a market. Sellers are presumably setting an extremely high price. Why though? I am not especially up to date with filecoin tech, but something is really odd about the interactions going on between price / supply / demand. Any further insights available?
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I wonder are they choosing price based on the fiat value of the coins? To me this is where it falls apart. The tokens FIAT value wrt to the networks requirements needs to be disconnected and having humans set costs like this breaks it apart.
Perhaps @Dimitar who has experience of sia/storj could comment as I think they allow humans to set price, but I am not sure they have seen the problem in this way?
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I’m not sure this should be Maidsafe building this, for multiple reasons, tbh.
- They are not in the money exchanging business and nor do they want to be.
- Maidsafe are most qualified to work on the core Safe Network. This is the hard, grisly, low level stuff that takes a good deal of time to get familiar with.
- App developers often have a different focus. It is usually on providing an application to serve specific needs. They are more concerned with catering for a specific use case (or user group) and are probably financially motivated to deliver this, irrespective of the underlying technology/platform.
Maidsafe should provide the documentation and support for helping external application developers and their teams. These other teams, with their tighter focus on this and other app goals, can then tackle them actual app development.
This leaves Maidsafe to focus on the core, nitty gritty, stuff that they love. The wider social and developer community then reap the rewards of this.
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Are they trying to recoup costs of the kit needed to participate? Perhaps they are just many times less competitive than AWS? After all, AWS have centralised systems they can tune and huge economies of scale.
Perhaps this is being masked by pure bubble speculation at the moment? It feels like it is disconnected from reality.
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One way or another 
There is a difference between speculating in a bubble because everyone else is and speculating on a technology that may change the world. Yes, both are speculators. The latter may be considered more of an investment, but at this early stage, much of what may materialise is speculation to many.
Filecoin doesn’t seem to be ground breaking technology with good use cases to me. Unless they can be cheaper than centralised systems like AWS, I’m not sure what the benefit is. When considering the additional user complexity and risk, even less so. So, unless I’m hunting bubbles, why should I speculate on Filecoin?
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I would agree, we have a different skillset / management / experiences from the economics and commercialisation of exchanges. However just as we don’t have experiences of other apps that will build on Safe, we as MaidSafe don’t need to and I am of the opinion we don’t expand into more areas. I feel we stick to core and help others provide value on top of that.
A few reasons for that, but diluting MaidSafe’s role is more important than folk realise. With core we can get our investors amazing returns and that part of our job will be done. Then core dev has to decentralise and I imagine most of the MaidSafe team will feature highly in doing that, but MaidSafe the company needs to compete for every penny and never just expect it comes to us, because …
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Just some thoughts …
It appears that they have to stake filecoin to participate. Given the high price of filecoin, this may explain why they are setting such a high price.
It also appears that rewards are released over time to miners:
All mining rewards undergo vesting to encourage long term network alignment. For example, 75% of block rewards earned by miners vest linearly over 180 days while 25% are made immediately… https://filecoin.io/blog/filecoin-circulating-supply/
So looks like a high barrier cost wise to get involved … translating to miners asking a high price.
Getting involved as a miner is also somewhat technical, so those who are participating may be dumping lots of spare space onto the network as a way to further poison the well against new miners.
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If true, I struggle to understand how they will compete with the likes of AWS. Isn’t that their primary business case?
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