Okay, so from this perspective, PtP is used for marketing. I very briefly touched on this aspect in my last post, but I agree it’s a point of view that warrants further discussion.
First, let’s view the network as a company, or perhaps more accurately, a worker collective. What’s good for the workers/farmers is good for the network/company.
Company/Network
Provides the infrastructure
Workers/Farmers
Provide the resources
Customers/Uploaders
Pay for the resources (good for farmers)
Consumers/Retrievers
Are potential customers (good for farmers)
Increase power consumption (bad for farmers)
PtP would subsidize the uploaders based on the exposure they provide in exchange for reducing the (value of)¹ rewards given to farmers. That said, rewards can be raised back to the normal levels (or higher) if PtP increases demand without increasing the supply (i.e., number of nodes). But then, would the network ever add more nodes than necessary to meet the demand + a fixed/relative buffer? And adding fewer is certainly not a good idea.
I can understand wanting to increase demand early on to head off any competition, but there are plenty of ways to accomplish that without making a marketing gimmick (unless you see it as more than that?) a permanent part of the network. I also don’t think this network could possibly fail no matter who tries to compete with it, considering the trust MaidSafe have built as maintainers and the first mover advantage, not to mention a strong initial community.
¹) I don’t know if it’s necessary to elaborate on this, but I’ll do it anyway: If there is a fixed number of coins, the network can’t give more to farmers than what is burned (spent on PUTs). If more coins can be minted, it’s probably possible to keep the rewards equivalent with/without PtP, but inflation has problems of its own.
Please let me know if I’m missing something. It’s not easy to keep up-to-date on how the network works, and a lot of what I said would change if a cost has been added to GETs or the coin supply isn’t (eventually) fixed.
Content monetization allows creators of content such as blog posts to attach a price tag to their work. This price will be paid by the portals on behalf of the users when the users view the content.
From reading that, it looks like they are doing something similar to Medium. They are charging users for access, then the network pays out some of that fee to content providers.
The difference with this approach is that users have paid to view the content. With the safe network, users can always browse for free, with no restrictions (throttling, etc). There is also no portal (like skynet) on safe network.
Economically, this closes the loop. Users pay indirectly for premium content, just like Medium. There is nothing wrong with this model and I think it works well on Medium. However, it is quite different economically for PtP on safe network.
I do think this sort of thing could work at the app level on safe network though. Paying a monthly fee (like skynet, Medium, etc) to access premium content, which can then be used indirectly as rewards for popular content can work well. It just isn’t really PtP as we are discussing on this thread.
This is the purpose of Sia portals too - browsing is free, you pay if you want to upload more than 100 GB and for faster speed.
In practice, they introduce a version of my proposal to seed the network with a useful data. They understand that after 4 years of use, few people are willing to pay to upload valuable public data and therefore subsidize it through part of the monetary inflation they pay to their foundation.
Before Sia launched portals, I argued with @Neo that we would most likely see such portals for Safe as well, because this is the easiest way for an intermediary to take part of the pie (save on infrastructure + opportunity for rapid growth if it manages to attract customers ). The fact that Sia has reached to the same conclusion and introduces it only confirms my assumption that we will see Safe portals too.
Well, it isn’t free though, is it? The underlying Sia network still charge for reads, so those who pay for priority access will subsidise throttled connections for those who do not.
Sia needs portals as I suspect people don’t want to pay for downloading data. I understand the user experience working directly with Sia network (instead of skynet) isn’t the simplest either.
I don’t think anyone here has ever argued there wouldn’t be folks hosting portals. However, you lose many of the advantages of safe network by doing so. You have a single point of failure, a bandwidth choke point, lose your privacy, etc. Much like you could have a safe network plugin to a browser (like IPFS + their ipfs.io portals), such things are technically possible. It is a question of how much you want to trade decentralisation for centralisation and the trade offs that brings.
Regardless - this is all beside the point. Perhaps a thread about Sia, IPFS, etc, and their portals and economic models should be reserved for another thread?
The point is, this isn’t the same as PtP as being proposed for safe network. People don’t pay for reading data (subsidised or not), so there isn’t a ‘pot’ to pay the providers with directly. Instead, it would come out of the fee to store data. This is quite a different dynamic.
Same as farming rewards. Farming rewards are paid from consolidated funds. PtD is also paid the same way and PtP would also be paid the same way.
Consolidated funds is made up of initial funds, and payments for storing. Why we can have permanent data is that a significant amount of the data is one of
private data
backup data
useless data
public data of peoples vacation etc, you know the mostly boring stuff
public data of old movies rarely viewed
and so on
All this data is going to cost more to upload then all rewards paid out ever.
The really popular data will have caching reducing the rewards that would be paid without it. Thus a super popular meme or movie in the first week might have 5 to 20 times the views of a popular item, yet have the same rewards because of the amount of caching. Estimation of course but in the realms of probability and testing will educate further on this.
And nigh on all data will stop being popular relatively quickly. Like a decaying curve.
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My main point is that core dev, app dev, farming, rewards are all paid from the network’s pool of tokens. And PtP would be the same, albeit at a much lower rate than farming. There is no purchase of resources pays directly any rewards. If there was a reward for storing the chunk then it could be argued to be a case of that.
The assertion that Sia introduced it, suggesting that Safe Network should follow, is therefore stretching the argument. Sia didn’t introduce it, Skynet (a clear net web portal) introduced it along with user download charges for premium use. This is how Skynet funds it, which is quite different to Sia or Safe Network.
I just wanted to make sure the focus is on this point and not what should or shouldn’t come out of PUTs or token supply. That seems like a separate issue, no?
Free accounts are at the expense of their foundation, because the money comes from there. They had a hard fork a month ago with which they punched in the Sia blockchain an address of the foundation and part of the monetary inflation is paid there.
I’d say that would be the equivalent to Maidsafe, or the network itself, providing users with ‘free’ PUTs. I have raised this a number of times as a potential way to attract users. However, with safe network, GETs are free either way, so maybe less of an issue.