Poll: Should MaidSafe implement PtP (Pay the Provider)?

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But that’s the thing: The user doesn’t pay the system anything save for what the pay in fair exchange for space on the network. I really don’t understand what you’re on about when you talk about 100% taxation because I don’t know where that figure is coming from at all.

  1. User exchanges computer resources for safecoin. That’s not taxation that’s an exchange. And one they have full control over to boot.

  2. User trades safecoin for space on the network. That again is not taxation that’s an exchange.

The only point the network does anything like taxation is with PtD. And yes I am aware it’s a ratio. So the user doesn’t actually lose any safecoin but still it’s hardcoded in. What if the user wants to offer more or less? What if they want to offer it some other way? Frankly network developers are just another form of content producers but the content they produce is the network itself. It’s like the job security of cooks, plumbers and funeral directors. Yep, they all produce content and provide a service just like anyone else but it’s pretty much guarenteed EVERYONE will use it. But great job security doesn’t mean they aren’t providing content and a service just like everyone else. So the fundamental question isn’t how do incentivize developers as opposed to content producers but how do we create an app that can be used to incentivize content producers and other services because developers ARE content producers, just with awesome job security.

Tanstafl. The “network” doesn’t have a wallet. If the “network” is paying out then where is the money coming from? Answer? Everyone! There’s where the “obligation” comes in.

It’s an algorithm dude. It’s a decentralized network. The whole point is the have nothing but the user’s point of view. But let’s think of it like the network paying in exchange for resources. Developers contribute code which is a form of resources. If that’s the case shouldn’t it be variable on how much demand there is for work to be done on the SAFE network? Just like there is for farming? Lot’s of demand = higher rewards. Less demand = lower rewards.

How would you measure such demand? Measure the number of bug reports, patch requests, RFCs, APP idea submits, etc etc. You’re devs I’m sure you’ll figure something out. Build a “request a tech” button.

But also the same principle could be applied to artists and other forms of creativity as well. Build a “Request an Artist” button or “request a writer button” or measure the number of times that one posts on social media or something. How urgent is it for social media sites to get users? Very. Maybe not so much for the rest of us. But they’d be hitting that “Request Social Media posters” button a lot. How important is it to your average teenager how the events of a soap opera might play out… not so much. But to a bored housewife it might be just the ticket. So my point is design a system to measure relative value. The majority of people will be whacking that “Request a tech” button hard and frequently. We know that, it’ll need to be made of industrial strength rubber. But there will also be other buttons people will bang on that can measure reletive value. And from there the network could measure how much demand there is for any given service. Then you take these various service ticks and feed them into apps and voila you have PtD/P apps.

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The SAFE network can guarantee with near 100% certainty that data can never be compromised unwillingly because of the mathematics behind encryption and the algorithms that ensure pieces of the data are distributed so no one can decipher its contents. Attacks from hackers such as sybil attacks have been addressed by the way the SAFE network works and we have a high degree of certainty that SAFE can repel a good number of attacks.

But the same can never be said that would prevent gaming the system through generating intentionally useless content or creating gaming apps for the sole purpose of trying to generate safecoin. With farming, there is proof-of-resource. Bitcoin has proof-of-work. Peercoin has proof-of-stake. Counterparty has proof-of-burn. These are mathematically indisputable proof that gives certainty that coin can be rewarded.

There’s no such thing as proof-of-useful content or app. The proof is driven by the market. Who wants to use a network clogged with garbage where the incentive is to produce garbage for the hopes of generating safecoin? The SAFE network will quickly become of cesspool for hackers. Would I want to transact with such a currency? And the price of safecoin will plummet. That endangers the incentive for the farmers and that in turn threatens the safety of the network.

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No the network is paying out from its own reserve of unissued coin. No One has lost anything, the network did not take from everyone’s “wallet”.

The network generated the coin. It was the networks to give. If the network ever runs out of coin at a particular time then it doesn’t issue the coin. It doesn’t take from anyone, it does not raise the price of anything because it ran out.

The put cost does NOT account for the PtP or PtD coins it issued. Look at the safecoin RFC, so it does not take from anyone nor cost anyone. Hell even farming rewards is not “earmarked” out of the put costs. There is a disconnect between paying for a put and generating a coin to pay for services.

EVERY coin issued by the network comes back to the network.

From the network view, there is no loss, there is no problem.

Maybe this is why you cannot see. You do need to see it from the network’s need, treat the network as if it did exist as part of the coin cycle.

The real question is not if the network can support itself paying users for doing things for it. But to develop the methods/algorithms that do it fairly. No one has problems with paying the farmer for doing their part for the network, after all it is only the network paying rewards to the farmer. It has NO connection to the put cost either. The farmer getting paid is not from anyone “wallet” but the network generating a new coin for the farmer.

From the network side coins generated will find their way back to the network.

From the users point of view they are worried about what the coin they get is worth in fiat terms and that is a different issue, the network is not concerned.

Gaming the system well pirates will be doing that with or without PtP. Just being able to have secure storage for their pirated goods is worth a lot. Tell me how much is a pirate going to get once PtP is included. Well if what you say is right then 1000’s will copy each item which is 1000x the coin given to put that work once onto the network. And the PtP spread across the 1000 pirates. So once they game they get next to nothing. How long are they going to pay to make extra copies when they get back less than they paid because of all the others uploading the same stuff to make next to nothing. Yes some may get a little but it hurts the network nothing.

So you are saying because some will pirate some stuff and game the system, wasting their time/bandwidth to make a tiny amount if at all. That you should not give the real artists something by the network because they upload content and make the network more usable.

AND still have all the other good ideas to support and pay the artists that people think of. Have the APPs that allow the artists to sell, etc.

But from the network’s view PtP is encouraging more quality uploads, which is better for everyone.

BTW I really don’t see why you cannot understand the taxation issue.

  • If you don’t refer to any payments as taxation then its fine to see it as just paying for uploads. The network takes in coin and just deletes it. No earmarking some for farming and PtD, PtP or anything else it just deletes it. If you have coin in you wallet it also is not touched, no taxation.
  • but as soon as you refer to a portion as being taxation, then looking at the whole it is all taxation. Just like all the money you pay a government, 100% of that money is taxation. The network is like the government, it is the network it takes all the money paid to it so it is 100% taxation by the network, that governs the operations of the network.

Basically I am saying that referring to any of what is paid for upload as taxation for this or that then you have to refer as all of it being taxation because that is all the network does, take coin and pay coin out for services.

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You must remember that anyone trying to game a VERY low paying reward such as PtP or PtD incentives will be playing a forever diminishing returns game. The more they game the less the ROI. This was discussed earlier at length.

The reason why lies in the fact that they have to pay to upload all that material they try to game. The more they upload the more they pay, and the more they have to download to get 1/10 what the farmers get, They would be more profitable to just farm than get 1/10 what farmers get.

Then also if they try to get too often caching kicks in and they get nothing for all their efforts. They have to find a balance between speed of gets, costs of the uploads, their ability to download large amounts of data (even with a botnet).

Simply put the botnet is still going to be tiny compared to the network and caching will reduce the results even further. If one account gets a chunk, then gets it again soon afterwards the 2nd get gives them nothing because it is cached, and this is true for a botnet, but worse because maybe 1/2 the machines always get from caches, likely more.

So then lets make many chunks to spread the requests out to reduce caching. Still will have a lot of caching till you have say have more chunks than machines. By then you are going to lose any ROI because you would still see caching till there are so many different chunks for each machine to be able to cycle through them when the first chunk is flushed from the caches in the route to the chunk. By that stage the gamer has paid so so much in uploads that they are unlikely to recoup the cost within a month or more of gets. So lets speed up the rate of gets, oh no the chunks are no longer flushed from the caches.

For an artist the access will be from across the network from a wide range of people and not relatively centralised in a botnet from a set number of machines. If an artist is so popular that their work is cached across the network then that is also a balancing factor to boost the smaller Artist against the popular ones.

In any case the incentives are very small which reduces the effects of gaming. Testing will show if the gaming can even succeed on small scale or not. But as I pointed out before gaming on as small a scale as this can be will not harm the network and likely only gong to be a blimp on the exchange prices.

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That’s like saying “the network has not yet put coin into circulation yet.” Dude not having issued a coin does not equate to having a wallet. The network has a set amount of safecoin that will ever exist. Okay that’s like saying there is a set amount of gold that exists on planet Earth. Farmers farm safecoin just like you need to go dig gold out of a mine. And the only difference between the safe network and our current system is the SAFE network sensibly returns the gold to the mine (destroys it) after it’s spent to purchase computer resources that are used to “dig” it out of the “mine”. Or you could stick with the orginal metaphor of farming. You put resources into the land (computer resources) and harvest safecoin. Yes there is only a set amount of resources already in the planet so you need to replenish whatever you take out. That’s what the “unissued” safecoin represents. But arguing that “the network” is putting out coin is ridiculous. Look what would happen theoretically if all safecoin were issued, all 2^32 of it? What would happen to the price of data? Either you’ve got a network maxed out on farmers or you’ve got a sudden demand for farming. Either we’re talking wild price fluctuations or late game SAFE network. But if we’re talking late game when farming is no longer useful how profitable will PtD be and if we’re talking wild sudden fluctations how profitable will such things be? Not very. No. PtD and PtP really come in to play during early and mid game where people are still farming primarily to get safecoin. Because PtD and PtP work by getting a ratio of whatever is farmed. No farming, no PtD or PtP. If all the coin is already issued then this whole conversation becomes moot.

You have a set number of safecoin right? The cost of data is based on how many unissued safecoins there are combined with how many have been issued with how many resources there are. Like the network knows how many safecoins will ever exist, it knows how many it’s issued to farmers and it knows how many resources are needed, so it takes those numbers and plugs them in to calculate the cost of space right? My question for you is if all that is true how do you figure the network issuing new coins will not affect that calculation and will not cost anyone anything? Bob devotes x amount of resources to the network and in return gets x amount worth of safecoin. Fair exchange. But over here Fred gets y safecoin on top of what he farmed, x + y. So he spends x amount of cpu resources but also gets y safecoin for dev work or whatever. Does that not throw the calculations off a tad? The question of the day is what does safecoin represent to the network? The amount of computer resources? Or is it more abstract?

I’m not worried about this at all as it’ll be worked out at the exchanges and free market like everything else.

If you had been reading my posts you’d know I’m not concerned about THIS at all and am quite in favor of piracy. In fact I’m in agreement with you that the affects of piracy would end up being rather negligable in the grand scheme of things. So really this isn’t what I’m saying at all.

What I am saying is PtD and PtP should be at the app level so that users have freedom and choice. The freedom to opt in and out. The freedom to adapt the methodology to their liking. The freedom to change how donations are given or the amount given. All those lovely things.

Okay you just get further off base the more you go on. When did I ever say anything about PUTs being a form of taxation? In fact I explicitly stated:

I was talking about PtD where 10% of farmed safecoin (1:10 of every safecoin) goes to the devs. And you know what? I have less of an issue with a ratio than I do a percentage but given it’s hard coded instead of user controlled it’s still an issue.

Look if this is about how much the network values certain activities then what’s it saying?

  • It values cpu resources enough to pay for them at market value.
  • It values devs 1/10 the value of cpu resources.
  • Assorted content creators aren’t even on the radar.
  • It’s making a political statement of valuing technical devs over other content creators. (Which is something the internet shouldn’t do.)
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@TungSvard:

These are all good things I think the most of us want. But this can be addressed better at the app level than at the infrastructure level.

This is your contention, or assumption, but the two approaches are very different.

Doing it at the App level is not very different from what we have now. If that’s what you prefer, then you might think it “better”.

I think what we have now is terrible, and I’m willing to try and devise radically different solutions.

Claims about Safecoin valuations without any justification is not helpful to clarify what the effect of these approaches would be.

If you want to argue why your statements have validity, please do, or why the points I’ve made are unlikely to deliver what I have suggested, please do. But just saying that doing it at the App level is better, or Safecoin investors will not like something you’ve not explained the reasons for, isn’t improving our understanding here.

I’ve made a case, you can address it if you want, but simply dismissing it without critique is pointless and wastes my time.

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Putting these “radically different solutions” into the infrastructure of the network as a way to make better what is used today is also an assumption.

And who will code up these “radically different solutions”? The SAFE team? SAFE in itself is a radical solution and is a monumental effort. If more ideas and solutions are added (i.e. scope creep), it will never launch. The generation of safecoin should be designed only to keep the network secure via proof-of-resource. Incentivizing via safecoin outside of this scope such as devs and content adds additional layers of risk into the system. To say it won’t is presumptuous. SAFE will not crash or be unsuccessful without paying devs or content providers. They are not needed for survival of the system. SAFE will be successful because of the tremendous value it has. It is a better internet so it will be used. The internet today didn’t need to incentivize devs and content providers.

Regarding valuations, safecoin when launched will be both asset and currency. The financial community will naturally examine the risks of any asset or currency. With more risk, there is more uncertainty. That affects valuations.

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No problem: When you said “you need to compel someone” I translated your compel to mean incentivize or to provide (someone) with a good reason for wanting to do something (please correct me if I’m wrong).

To me an incentives can be objective (tangible such as monetary) or subjective (nontangible such as our inherit need to give to others, volunteerism).

Considering that as a farmer I do not volunteer my resources to the network, safecions to me is an objective incentive to @traktion’s point. [quote=“Traktion, post:172, topic:5805”]
Farmers are selling a commodity whose value is easily measured objectively
[/quote]

I’ve seen others making the same case for developers and producers with their commodity being what they produce or develop for the benefit of the Safenetwork.

What PtF, PtD, PtP all have in common is this objective incentive we call safecoins.

Ideally, your statement is true

However, this is not practical in all situations IMO. So we are all left to decide where we want to draw the line. I draw mine at PtD. PtP seems a lot more complex to me and I error on the side of simplicity.

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The ability to measure objectively is key here.

You can literally measure response times in milliseconds, data amounts in megabytes, up/down time in minutes. The are standard measurements that anyone can make. The numbers are not disputable.

Can you measure art like this? How about music? Does the length of a song make it better or worse? Does the number of colours in a picture make it better or worse? These things are subjective and completely in the eye of the beholder.

With this in mind, tell me how much an artist should be paid? Tell me how much a developer or a musician should be paid? What universal measurements are you going to use to objectively price what has been delivered?

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I completely agree and to be clear, the objective and tangible incentive that I am referring to is the safecoins that farmers, developers and potentially producers will receive for what they contribute. Measuring what they all contribute is another story and farming resources is the easiest to measure of the three to your point. :slightly_smiling:

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It isn’t an assumption, I’ve made suggestions as to what the impact of the scheme might be - the positives. Again you’ve ignore those. I can only assume this is because you agree with the points I’ve made, but have other priorities. If you disagree, please say so and present some reasoning to explain what you think is wrong with my reasoning.

It has already been pointed out on this thread (by @neo) that PtP and PtD are, according to David, trivial to implement. So this is not the case. I also pointed out earlier that the network is due to launch without PtP because it had not gained community support, but was to be discussed later and could be added in afterwards. You seem not to be reading the posts on this thread, and just coming up with new, but as I’ve pointed out, fallacious justifications for your belief.

I haven’t said this. It may well add risk - but this is a separate point and we can debate this issue as well, but I would like you to address the points I have been making before we move on. Or concede them if that’s where we are. Once we establish whether the positives are real we can begin to weigh up the pros and cons and come to a more complete view. At the moment the debate is completely unbalanced - mostly people just stating they don’t like or want PtP rather than saying they disagree that it has benefits, or explaining why they don’t regard my suggested “benefits” as desirable.

This again is fallacious. We’re not building a replica of today’s internet. The whole point of SAFEnetwork is to build something radically different.

You appear simply to be of the view that the benefits I have highlighted are unwanted (from your perspective) - which as I say seems to be what most of those arguing against PtP are saying. Rather than it won’t achieve the things it is designed to achieve, you seem to just not want those changes, because you have other priorities (investment seems to be what you care about most) rather than the core aims of the network, which are about a far more ambitious and far reaching change.

Clearly this is your priority. That’s fine. I’m glad we’ve cleared that up.

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Yes but it depends on how it is implemented.
How many are going to lose access to their wallets associated with the content they have uploaded? I would like some educated guesses as to how much SafeCoin will fall from the ecosystem due to forgotten and lost wallets not to mention deaths of users (who kept their access keys private) each year.

It may make more sense for the reward to go into a PtP pool to which producers are given access up to the amount they have been allotted. And if they do not access their allotted amount within x amount of time that SafeCoin is pushed back into the ecosystem. The time allotted could be 1 year from time of reward. With this system a producer might even be given the option to push their unclaimed coin automatically to a specific project or a proxy. I would add that it would be a great feature that every client be given the option to push SafeCoins from personal wallets back into the ecosystem after their account has been inactive for say 100 years. For those of you who expect to have life extension/singularity experiences you can change that push to 1000 years :smile:

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I agree that PtP has benefits. I am not convinced that the benefits out way the risks.

The benefits you highlighted are wanted but at what cost? Many of the more technical people who have argued against PtP don’t seem to be motivated by investment to me. I see a genuine concern for the risks and complexities involved if implemented at the core level.

Also, am also still not clear why this could not be achieved at the App level. N99 plans to give content producers 99% of the safecoin profits generated by that app. What’s wrong with that model?

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It replicates the current model. What is the difference between this and Spotify and a host of other portals, if a creative has to partner with an app - we will see those apps that gain traction in this way bought up and promoted until there is no difference between this and the status quo.

One of the big differences here is that the content itself accrues revenue that is returned to the uploader/producer regardless of where it is served from. If it is filtered by the app, the revenue has to flow through an intermediary, and we can expect that to be a centralisation point that will be exploited.

That is an enormous difference.

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As my father used to say “Fair exchange is no robbery.” And more to the point a voluntary interaction is not coercion. That is you give the network computer resources and it gives you safecoin. But programming is a very specific branch of content creation. Granted it’s important but saying that is like saying society needs engineers but not architects, artists or farmers. Even now in our society we have a problem with acedemia being too skewed towards technical sciences and away from the humanities and artistic professions. And we want to perpetuate this MORE SO when creating an internet 2.0.? Building the network is like building a city but it’s not done solely through programming. You need marketing, artwork, writers, designers, UX designers, and if you’re doing game design then you’ll probably need a lot more like voice actors and motion capture and what not. It is actually staggering how there is this notion that network development is somehow seperate from the rest of content creation and that developers are somehow special and elite. Has anyone actually been reading the development update transcripts? Half of what the maidsafe development team does isn’t related to writing code at all. There’s accounting, PR, web design (okay that’s some code), art, doing presentations, people management and other such duties that have nothing to do with actual development. Nevermind living expenses and food! All these “other” professions that the devs pay for are forms of content that are valid and should be supported. Accountants, artists, PR, organizers, writers, cooks, land lords, etc. All these people are providing content! Now how does the network measure these things? Well so far we’ve been measuring the value of apps in terms of number of downloads but let’s consider this for a moment. If we applied the same argument to content would the Magna Carta be less important than the new Deadpool movie just because it doesn’t get downloaded as much or as often? If there is some uber app that keeps it’s users safe and does all kinds of wonderful things for them but is reletively unknown and less popular than say a facebook clone app does that mean it’s less important or less valuable? In short value by download = popularity contest. And you run into the same issue with PtD that you do with PtP.

Now what if we changed the equation slightly. Lots of people are willing to USE facebook but how many people are willing to PAY for facebook? Yet people ARE willing to throw money at small reletively unknown yet hugely important projects like Maidsafe. A project they can’t even use yet. This demonstrates popularity != importance. If people value devs and the network they should be throwing money at them. This can be facilitated many different ways but the point is people should CHOOSE to do it. If people value ANY kind of content then people should choose to support it. If there is hardcode at the network level that rewards a particular content creator then that is a political bias. The internet, like nature, should not be partisan to a particular special interest group.

You might draw the line at PtD. I draw it at PtF since that’s what’s required for the network to function and that’s what’s common to everyone on the network. Everyone has cpu resources. Not everyone can program.

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Well as you say how do you measure art/music?

Even though the network cannot measure those qualities yet, should we stop it at least giving a little back for the materials they used to create and/or store the art/music? The materials are costs to any artist and often the cost limits their art.

By letting the network return a little of the cost of their materials then the barrier to producing quality works on SAFE is reduced?

Let other methods of sale/tipping/whatever mentioned by others determine the quality of the works and lets have the network help out with the “materials” cost to store their works. At least test it.

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If the incentives are very small for gaming then it will be so with PtD and PtP so what’s the point with the added risk? I am confident it can be gamed because devs and content providers must generate a profit. So the costs you mention must be lower than revenue generated. So how can the system know the intent and purpose of an app/content and able to judge which one is useful and which one is not? It’s people who determine whether an app improves their lives or not.

The only way to prevent cheating is with mathematical or deterministic proof. E.g. proof-of-resource, proof-of-work, proof-of-stake, etc.

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Not even close.

The artist uploads once.
The gamer uploads 1000 or more times in an attempt to reduce caching and/or to allow more nodes to get some content without caching

The artist has their works down loaded roughly evenly across XOR space.
The gamer’s botnet is a very small subset of nodes compared to the artists potential audience. Thus the gamer’s botnet will suffer caching orders of magnitude earlier than the Artist.

Potentially the artist might receive 1000000 downloads of their file over the first month.
The gamers does 1000000000 (1000x) downloads but has most cached and ends up with 100 times less the coin for 1000 times the upload cost for all those copies used to reduce caching.

The gamer then is in the situation where they have to find the ideal amount of uploads vs caching effect to maximise their ROI. A lot of work when you also realise that it ends up being a moving target since caching is not consistent from minute to minute. So he has to increase uploads or reduce the botnet size to the minimum acceptable to ensure maximum results

Good luck to them and so lets test it. Some have said they will game the system during tests to see how much “profit they can get” So why not let us test it.

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We are talking about PtP in this thread. Dis-intermediation and democratisation are a lot more than PtP.

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An app can be programmed to generate new useless content (not just the same repeated junk) just like the artist. People can be easily phished to view that content. Lies are easier to believe than truth – i.e. it’s much easier to create bogus content for people to click a single time than to create new “quality” content.

Testing is what it must come down to. That I can agree with.

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