Once farmed, what prevents a server from dropping all its data?

Community
1

So, let’s say i’ve used the network and spent some coin to store some amounts of data on the distributed network.
Few questions here:

  • as a farmer, i get coins when i store data. If I ever hacked a server that threw away all of the stored data, do i get to keep my coins?
  • as a user, what level of confidence should i keep about the data completeness once i’ve pushed all the chunks? After a day? A week? 10 years?

Or will chunks eventually get lost over time, regardless of what happens?

Thanks

2

There are no servers to hack on the SAFE Network, data are just chunks spread across the network.

Your data will be there forever, if data is lost, it being copied by nodes who got it and placed on another node.

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I meant hacked in the noble sense, “if a maligned entity modified its own node to misbehave intentionally and throw away any data it received while claiming it stored it”.

4

  • You get coins when someone retrieves data from you (not when storing it) – you provide a function to the network in serving it and get rewarded by some probability.

  • Confidence is similar to Bitcoin. No-one believed it at first. Most people believe it today. It is sad if maidsafe has to go through a similar proof period, but understandable.

If chunks get lost over time then maidsafe has failed and it is time to abandon ship.

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5

That partially clears up the first part: data has to be given once to get coin. Or is the statistical chance of getting coin also tied to its age?

This is precisely why i’ve been watching maidsafe since 2010, but if this ever happens then it’s already too late…

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As i said, you get coin by some probability. It is a “farming attempt” which succeeds according to how much demand the network has for storage space.

7

On average you get one coin for serving up a certain number of chunks. Called Farming Rate and is determine dynamically by the network depending on the amount of free space to used or total space. It is not the “full vault” that earns coin, but serving up validated chunks to the network.

The longer your vault remains online the more chunks it will serve up resulting in more opportunity to earn coin.

If you filled up your vault then turned off, your chunks are then stored into other vaults. The network always maintains a minimum number of copies of each chunk and so when your vault(s) go off line the chunks you were storing are copied from other vaults into vaults scattered across the network.

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8

Right, but when those servers go online again fresh with no data, then you still keep your coin but don’t participate in the service.
I guess on the global scale this will work if enough nodes are reliable…

9

They are called vaults since the normal usage of “servers” is in server-client transactions, where as the vaults store only a small part of any data set.

If your vault earned a coin then it cannot be taken from you no matter what you do with the vault. The coin is owned by your ID and not the vault’s ID. Your ID will be placed in the vault’s config so that the earned coins can be “sent” to you.

That is what all the development is about. Easy to create an unreliable Massive Array of Internet Disks system, but to make it reliable is what the SAFE network is about.

SAFEcoin is one aspect of this. Obviously if people just turn on/off their vaults repetitively each hour then reliability will be marginal.

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