Network speed? Network data structures? Forever storage economics? Challenge-response authentication?

Development
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A destroyed SafeCoin is an un-issued SafeCoin, like I said before:

You somehow seem convinced that the network is going to charge uploaders more SafeCoin ($400) than it will pay to farmers ($30-40), while initially the opposite will be the case and later on it will be reach equilibrium.

I don’t see any logic in your argument to be honest, just some completely made up numbers to claim that the network won’t pay enough to make farming profitable.

The farming rate algorithm is 100% pure free market logic. If there’s not enough free space, the network will increase payment to farmers, if there’s more than enough, it will decrease payment to farmers. This way the network will always pay market price for resources.

Yes, that price may be surpressed for some time by idealists, home farmers, and optimists who are willing to run at an apparent loss because they believe SafeCoin value will increase in the near future. But that would proportionally surpress upload price, making SAFE services very cheap, attracting more uploaders, in turn filling up the network, which increases farming payment again until it’s high enough to attract purely profit driven farmers.

6 Likes
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Well that’s that, then.

The network prices storage at the margin, while investments and payments do not happen that way. We’ll see whether this will matter like I think it will.

I know that, but why would I care if I make $1/month from farming and if I buy another HDD I have to spend $99?

Don’t feel pressed to attempt to answer (since we don’t know how much people will actually make from farming, it’s pointless to argue whether SAFE reputation will be worth anything).

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I agree. The addition of speculative resources initially will improve the function of the network when needed to stabilize the network at startup. Initially a lot of stuff will be uploaded with not too many GETs, but I doubt that will cause anyone to be so pressured as to turn of their rigs right away–except the tight-margin , leveraged speculators, who deserve to get holed below the waterline for imprudence anyway.

If someone were to go out and build a mini data center and sink a bunch of dedicated infrastructure into it, I think they’d be up for a huge loss. But someone who spends a few hundred to get a nice machine and hard drive to run a bunch of vaults, is not going to he hurting by paying a bit more in bandwidth and electric costs than they otherwise would, at least for some time. Don’t think most will really analyze it that closely.

This isn’t like mining bitcoin, which has gotten to be a serious investment of dedicated resource. Bitcoin equipment obsoletes and becomes scrap. A farming rig is just a nice computer or set of them plus storage devices, which can always be used otherwise.

All I’m saying is that there is an awful lot of squishiness around the edges. Lots of margin where people can speculate without much risk. By the time the network stabilizes enough to attract real investor types, it will be big enough to absorb them more efficiently. Individuals should always have an advantage over these anyway, in terms of margin and flexibility, because the design is slanted in their favor.

3 Likes
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I really doubt that the Safe Network will grow into a ubiquitous and global dominating network without a large contingent of “pro farmers.”

Time will tell, of course. But, I would wager that 1000 laptop users who are sometimes turned on / sometimes turned off can’t compare to one small sized pro farmer with a couple of high-speed connected always on servers.

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I wonder how this logic squares against this (figures are adjusted for ease of use):

  • Availability on Day 1: 430 million SAFE coins (converted MAID that was sold for BTC and MSC)
  • Storage availability on Day 1: 4,300 TB (close to 20 PB raw, if replicas and RAID overhead is counted)
  • Current market cap (of all MAID): $8,6 million
  • On Day 1 (forget about network minting) there will be 430 million SAFE (aka $8.6 million dollars) chasing 4,300 TB of available storage space, i.e. it will take $2,000 to buy 1 TB of storage on SAFE
  • Meanwhile, 1TB HDD can be bought for $100 on Amazon.com.

So, what happens on Day 1?
How many people will upload stuff to SAFE at a price that’s order of magnitude more expensive than elsewhere?
Would that mean that MAID is today overpriced by a factor of 20x?

On Day 2, assuming SAFE doesn’t drop 95%, the network should figure out there’s no demand, so it will generate no (or will generate very few) SAFE coins.

Day 3: assuming SAFE is still expensive, more of the same.
Do farmers switch to a network that actually let’s them start earning today?
Or does the price of the coin come down 90% to make the cost of storage competitive?

Am I wrong in my assumption that 430 million SAFE will exist on Day 1?

A large (8TB) HDD can be bought at about $30/TB. If someone actually buys capacity on SAFE Network at a high price on Day 1 or Month 1, is is hard to see a situation whereby a farmer deploys a HDD for $260, gets it filled up, gets no GET requests (too expensive!) and then has to wait forever while enough new SAFE’s are minted or the price of SAFE comes down (which wouldn’t be fun for those who own MAID today, but also seems like a confusing scenario considering this graph that predicts that the value of SAFE will increase, not decrease, with time).

In my “Day 1” example above demand for space will be very low, so according to you the network should decrease payment to already starving farmers, making an already high price of capacity even higher. That’s because the network doesn’t (and can’t) know SAFE is too expensive.

I won’t go in similar detail regarding the other major issue (that farmers don’t get paid today, but after a long delay).
I just wanted to show how even simple starting conditions look weird, there are no recent (or even old - at least I couldn’t find them) details of what might happen on Day 1 (the only semi-ancient attempt can be found here, and even according to it the big issue No. 1 is whether the 430 mil MAID will be turned into SAFE on Day 1)

As usual, the Liking Team gave you 6 likes, so you’re winning despite content-thin comments that mix up the buyer and seller (i.e. you seem to assume that the selling of capacity for SAFE tokens done by the network equals “earning” of revenue accomplished by the farmer).

1 Like
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I am of the opposite opinion.

The reward of the network is the network itself. The incentive to use is for security is massive… Getting paid for hosting it is an afterthought…

Other peer to peer networks exist and thrive long before cryptocurrencies existed. (Skype, Bittorrent, etc) SAFE is a better product and it should thrive without payment as well. Payment is nice if it works, but could cause more trouble than it is worth. (if it incentivizes the wrong things)

The big benefit with SAFE is that duplicate data doesn’t need to be stored… That means thousands and thousands of cat pictures and Obama memes and blockchains can be stored once rather than thousands of times… This changes the economics substantially.

1 Like
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This is nonsense, almost all of those SafeCoins are bought for speculation, not for storage of data. You also disregard how the algorithms work. The storage costs starts very low, and rises as the network fills up. So even if there is massive demand for storage on day 1, the network will be filled almost completely and not stay empty. That in turn makes farming immensely profitable and attracts a lot more farmers the days after. Not everyone may be able to upload at a normal price on day one in such a situation, but that will smooth out the days and weeks after and it would result in an immense growth spurt of the network.

On average this must and will be the case, yes. If not, the total supply of SafeCoin would be consistently shrinking.

I never knew this was about winning, and that Likes are the score…? It’s a discussion, not a debate.

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@janitor You think too much about money. You’re not here because you’re in tune with the aims or values of the project, and I think that’s why you find it hard to see the value here, and why you seem so ready to criticise the project. I don’t understand why you hang out here so much given all that, but you must get something from it! Anyway…

Safecoin is not the value, or the core. It was an afterthought, but it still fits and works as a means to exchange value between those who use the value and those who provide it. Safecoin was added so that others can access the services too - even if they can’t provide resources.

You see this in terms of profit making suppliers and out of pocket consumers, rather than a community pooling resources and creating value in which they all share.

If your analysis is correct, you are right to say there won’t be pro farmers (businesses) and consumers. But that doesn’t mean the network won’t exist, it still leaves a community who exchange resources, who don’t care about the fiat value of the token, because they can create enough to serve their needs by sharing resources, and they do so because they do see value in what SAFENetwork provides.

If the fiat value settles at a level which allows others who can’t farm to join, then it will grow beyond this core community. If not, the fiat value will fall until it does, with the base of the network held together by the core of users exchanging resources for services.

So rather than failing if there aren’t pro farmers, the network and Safecoin will find a base level from which it can grow, and so the question rests not on viability for profitable farming, but on how quickly or slowly the value it provides is recognised and needed by people outside this who both value it and can join based on exchanging resources.

Before Safecoin was added, exchange of resources was the entire basis of the network - like Tor, BitTorrent etc. By adding Safecoin the network was not made dependent on pro farmers and their business model. The service usefulness was extended beyond those able and willing to exchange resources for services, to everyone willing to pay what the network prices them at. If demand grows because if this, the network rewards those providing resources more, and vice versa. But not everyone is affected by this.

It makes no sense to me to see this additional market as making the network unviable. Instead it makes the network attractive to more users and developers, further increasing its value. Obviously you don’t see this, but I think the reason is because you are approaching it from a particular angle. You see it first as being about profit seeking farmers and fiat paying consumers, which is simply not true.

The same goes for investors, maybe Safecoin will actually drop in value after launch. Who cares? Well investors obviously (and I am one), but it won’t kill the network, it will still work, people will still join, and it’s value will grow. Those who are here for the aims and values win either way, and in time who knows what will happen to the value for investors who stick with it.

If the technology works, this network will be big. I don’t think there can be any doubt about that because there is a clear need, and plenty of people who can supply resources in exchange for that.

2 Likes
29

None the less at some point in the future after threatened authorities had tried to crimp the expansion of SAFE by clamping down on the manufacture of memory and other needed components it was found that SAFE had spawned self replicating SAFE hardware node fabers. .

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i think @janitor has a point here

how really is the price of storage space calculated …?
I know storage prices are supposed to go down when there is over-supply - and go up if storage space is rare … on day one … what is the starting point here …?

I pretty much don’t care why anybody is hanging out here :wink: and i’m very glad @janitor is here! =)
He criticizes often and his way of arguing is … well … let’s say his way … sarcasm rarely solves problems but it makes people think about stuff again =)
(if we all had the same mind-set we would probably not recognize faults by design …)

sooo - day one: there are 4,300TB space available - how much would i have to pay to outsource my private porn collection (70GB) into the safe network?

ps: please don’t take me serious here - in my head it sounded/sounds a funny example

1 Like
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The very first chunk will cost 1 coins and keep halving for each chunk until the formula stabilizes it and then it is according to supply/demand formulas built in. (Well according to David that is)

If one assumes the whole 430 million coins will be used initially for storage then of course the figures will be crazy. More like a few thousand on day one.

Startup assumptions made here are wild ones at best, maybe some class as guesses but ALL seem to ignore the fact that in the first few days most will not care about price (unless it gets tooooo high) and the ones worried will be the people in it for profit.

Truth is that the network will be very small at the start (day 1), most will join some time after day one. Even after a month it will still be small and I wildly guess about 1/2 of the forum members (and an equal number not in forum) will be running a serious node in the first week, and almost nobody will be trusting their data to the network. In other words not that much PUTting which will be mostly testing the system out. If anyone expects to be farming for profit before the network is 3 months old then they have rocks in their head. Growth will be ever increasing (power/exponential initially then ‘S’ curve) which is the nature of these things.

Another truth is that people will change their actions according to PUT costs (& other factors) and so the system will never follow anyones predictions that assume a certain course of action will continue for the first day, let alone many days/months.

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xD
i’m pretty sure are right here :smiley:

but

sounds amazing … so with 3457892% over-supply at starting phase it would cost … say … 2 coins + supply-depending costs … wildly speculating … 20 coins for all my data … this makes at the moment … 40 cents … I’m willing to pay that :slight_smile: … and even if it was 4$ i wouldn’t care to just get some data in the network and check if any chunks get lost over time … (and here we have the “don’t-really-care-factor” you mentioned :wink: )

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Who knows. The halving from the first chunk only occurs UNTIL the network supply/demand formula kicks in. Don’t expect to store all your data for 1+1/2+1/4+1/8… which approaches 2 for all data. But expect that it will stabilize when the first few GETs are done. You might see network wide a few thousand PUTs done before supply/demand takes over.

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Chunk are 4K minimum and 1M maximum. From what I read is the first payed account will get 1M of storage(maybe minus the account storage).

So your 1 coins for a chunk is false.

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I thought of that too. But the problem with that idea is, the price of SAFE would be $0.02 (the current price of MAID) and if you want to buy any SAFE, you need to get them on the market where the price is what it is.

My scenario was about ample supply (4.3 PB) and very limited demand because of the high price of SAFE (i.e. MAID now).

I’ve been trying to explain that on average won’t do it, because the network would be constantly “front-running” (not the right term, but close) the farmers.

Likes aren’t the score, but when they come from top members of the community (site) they form opinions on the topic.

Unfortunately, I don’t think enough about money. I’ve put fair chunks of money and labor in various crypto projects and my personal net in financial terms is negative. But it doesn’t bother me nearly as much as it should - I am actually quite happy about non-financial outcomes and plan to keep doing it as long as I can afford.

That is precisely why I frequently raise the question of economics: not everyone is a fan of free markets (or freedom). In the medium and long term, the economics must work out or the freeloaders will ruin the system like they ruined the physical world.

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Had a change of heart on climate change or extinctions or polution or deforestation or blighting or urban sprawl? Going green?

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It can’t do something close to front-running, because the network itself isn’t profit driven. The network is a non-profit organization that sells lifetime storage contracts to clients, and buys the required resources from farmers in an open market in real-time.

It seems the latter aspect is what bothers you, and that you want to have a contract-based system instead so that you get a guaranteed payment to store a particular amount of data for a particular amount of time?

I’m a big fan of free markets and freedom, I don’t see any freeloader aspect in this particular part of SAFE.

1 Like
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No its chunks, and are you sure that chunks can be as low as 4K (anymore). How is Data Stored and Retrieved?

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From where did you get we pay for chunks instead of size?

From @dyamanaka from the same topic:

I recall a discussion on the main dev list. The client can be adjusted to break down files into smaller chunk sizes such as 1Kb. But the default is 1Mb.

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I get your point, but one could say almost the same for the U.S. Social Security system. Not profit driven, sells lifetime service to clients, and to accomplish those noble goals it pre-collects resources from farmers. And workers, doctors, lawyers, engineers…

We’ll soon know if these semblances are coincidental.

Any thoughts on my SAFE coin count on Day 1?