Filecoin is selling and shipping hard drives with data for you to upload to the network for $265 
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Is this dumb or genius? Canât decide.
I donât know anything about Filecoin but it seems they are happy to have countless copies of the same data.
Not a bad move in my opinion - in fact $265 seems cheap for an 8TB hard drive. Not much info in that article but if it included a big red âclick here to start contributing and earningâ button that would be a very simple way to get involved without having to understand all the confusing and scary crypto stuff.
Sounds like they took a page out of AOLâs playbook. From the mid 1990âs to the mid 2000âs they mailed out about a billion CDâs, giving everyone an easy way to sign up. Hugely successful. Now thatâs marketing!
@sotros25 China is back open for business - get quotes on large qtys of big HDDs and we will put our own images on them. #Marketing
Seems like a gimmick for a company with more money than sense to me. Maybe it will have a marketing impact, but it will come at a high cost.
People tend to have plenty of space on their machines to share already; they just need an easy way to do it. A simple download with a usable interface would suffice.
In terms of moving big data around, yes it is costly and takes time. However, you only need a handful of copies for redundancy, so why clone the same data so many times?
Ofc, filecoin isnât an autonomous network. It requires people storing data to fulfil contracts, IIRC. There may be different mechanics at work as a result.
I could see this working well in a pure marketing play kind of way, somewhere in between what AOL did mailing discs for free and what social media influencers do with free giveaways in exchange for engagement (e.g. for every join, repost, like, sign up, etc. enter to win X). I could imagine building a marketing campaign around the opportunity to win a SAFE Network imaged HDD and auctioning off the remaining drives to raise further funding. E.g., we get 100 drives, 10 are give aways to raise awareness, the other 90 are sold at a minimum price of x that covers cost and also allows people to add y as a donation.
Some key questions Iâd have around something like this would be:
I did a little bit of digging, and think that we could pull off a âlightâ version of this for $10-15K (inclusive of buying the disks, shipping the disks, and marketing the initiative itself). Here are a few price estimates:
(Sidebar: itâs almost obscene that âFilecoin was one of the biggest initial coin offerings (ICOs) of 2017, raising approximately $257 million as one of several projects out of Protocol Labs.â Imagine what we could do with a 10th of that fundingâŚ)
The main purpose of this, I believe, should be to provide an easy on-ramp for SAFE Network install, not for the actual vault provision of the network. With that in mind, a USB drive might be just as practical. One thousand pre-loaded 1GB USB drives with logo could be had from a reputable company for less than $12 each it looks like.
In addition to the SAFE Network install files we might want to include the Folding@home setup file as part of the pre-load. The SAFE Network install file on the USB drive should be small enough for someone to send to an acquaintance via email and it would be great to include some kind of incentive for them to do so. As such, this project would probably have to wait until the network was in Beta mode.
That would be fantastic if thatâs the case! Also think including the Folding @ Home setup is a great idea too. What else might it be good to include? I guess there might be multiple parts/answers to that question that would change depending at what stage the drives are shared (i.e. once multi-section networks come on line, at beta, at launch, etcâŚ).
Why not do both?
Update from a reply I just received: Ten thousand would be less than $6 each! Next question: how do you distribute them? Possible answer: you donât. Maybe we are over-thinking this. Skip the USB drives and just provide an incentive for people to send the install file to their friends. Basically, no cost.
I prefer to give with zero profit than things for free. People will not care to run a vault or update it if they could get it for free.
Iâd give away say 10 as prizes and auction the rest.
I agree just giving stuff away on anything other than a very small scale will "distort the market"but also the recipients will not value the item as highly as if it was paid for. We see the same problem with airdropped coins.
A billion people over ten years sure valued those free AOL disks.
Really like the branded usb drive idea⌠If somehow it could be sold at close to cost (or why not a profit??). If inexpensive enough people or even just holders of coins may be inclined to buy as gifts to non holders.
This is certainly an alternative view that I think we should do (Iâd kind of bucket it somewhere between the SAFErace and output of the SAFE the Internet initiatives from the proposal) irrespective of giving away & auctioning off drives. There are other lower (but not âno costâ, i.e. thereâd still be the cost of getting the word out there) ways to encourage trial. The shipping of a drive is truly âpure marketingâ (i.e. an act to grab attention) as opposed to driven by optimization of functionality. The USB drive is âadded valueâ, something that builds goodwill, and (especially as itâs so portable) can build brand awareness if the SAFE Network logo is attached.
If itâs a small fraction of the drives (which ~10 would be), I donât think this matters. Plus a USB stick is such an infinitesimally small part of the operating cost of farming. Theyâd still have to provide their own bandwidth, electricity, etc. on an ongoing basis. Plus, the good that SAFE Network provides is storage, access, and transmission of data, as well as the ability to earn rewards from farming. The SAFE Network isnât in the business of selling drives; theyâre just a complementary good). Seeding farmers is never a bad idea. Most products subsidize adoption at the beginning (e.g. free trial, discounted pricing, etc.). Besides giving away a USB is cheaper and can have more utility than giving people tee shirts 
Definitely!
If for example there were 100 total drives, Iâd see something like âfirst 10 people to do X engagement promoting activity win a drive for freeâ and the remaining 90 drives are auctioned off at a price of cost + Z.
Provide 10 free MaidSafeCoins with each drive? Right now, that would only cost an extra $1 each. That is something the drives could provide that just downloading the SAFE Network install file might not.
HmmâŚthatâs like an alternative kind of airdrop. Could incentive people to stay involved/engaged at least until they can exchange the MAID for Safecoin, so long as the recipients donât dump the coins as soon as the value of MAID starts to rise. Even so, maybe if they were to dump the coins prematurely that could boost trade volumeâŚ
Whatever is done in this regard needs an incentive mechanism that will result in exponential increase in awareness and/or adoption. Each person sends it to 10 other people, each of whom send to 10 others. Pretty soon, vavoom! SAFE is safe at home.
Interesting note:
âWhen a partition is created and formatted a Volume Serial Number is assigned under Windows and a Filesystem UUID under Linux. Under Linux, you can use the âlsusbâ command to view the serial number of a USB device and âblkidâ command to view the Filesystem UUID. In Windows, use the âVOLâ command at the command prompt to view the Volume Serial Number of a drive.â
These identifiers could be used to verify a request for MaidSafeCoins from a special address we have set up for the distribution of all the free coins. Allow each recipient of the USB drive to send his drive identifier to 10 other people and each of those could send to 10 others. We could make a commitment to honor the first 100 requests for MaidSafeCoins generated by each drive. That would mean we would need to set aside 1000 coins for each drive ordered. If we could get this organized (not by me) I will pledge 1000 coins for the project.
The more I think about it, the more I think this could be (if nothing else) an interesting experiment. Iâve found a supplier offering 4 GB USB 3.0 drives at ~$3 a piece. If ordering more than 10, the supplier will provide free engraving.
Could you say a bit more about how one might do thisâŚkind of in a step by step way?