I personally desire a fair farming system that allows all people to participate in farming on a relatively level footing. I want to see unused resources put to work. I’m really interested in doing better than blockchain and proof-of-work.
But despite that I’m going to dig the hole a bit deeper here against my own interests. I’m finding it hard to see the ideal scenario playing out in reality, and no matter how we approach the economic algorithm it will probably struggle to ‘enforce fairness’. Fairness is not an emergent property of a competitive system (which the economic algorithm must be, or so it seems to me).
From the sia mining article linked above:
“The ASIC game has become such an advanced game because there is so much money on the table. Even small coins can be worth tens of millions of dollars, which is more than enough to justify a high-risk production run.” (feel free to replace ASIC with purpose-built hardware in the case of SAFE).
MaidSafeCoin is already well across that ten million dollars threshold. Imagine the value on the table when the network is functional and using real safecoin. Will we really be able to keep everyone in the farming game? Even if it’s not ASIC as the target of production it will be whatever the bottleneck is, and a lot of people will be producing to out-compete others.
I hope it isn’t like that, but from the existing evidence I see in decentralized projects this will be very difficult to avoid.
Looking at stats from burstcoin, a proof-of-storage based blockchain, it’s kinda staggering how far beyond consumer-level let’s-just-have-a-go it is. The middle ground for being considered a small miner is 10 TB (see small miner pool stats below). That’s huge!!
Burstcoin is #339 on coinmarketcap with a market cap of $11M.
Total network size is about 300 PB - https://explore.burst.cryptoguru.org/chart/supply/network_size
Using the cryptoguru pool stats below, that pool accounts for about 17 PB or about 6% of the network total.
From this you could extrapolate and say there’s about 6500 miners on the network (284+96+14)/0.06
“Small miner” pool
https://0-100-pool.burst.cryptoguru.org/
Looking at the All Miners tab
284 miners
Median capacity: 9.815 TB
Avg capacity: 24.971
Total capacity: 7066 TB
Medium miner pool
https://50-50-pool.burst.cryptoguru.org/
96 miners
Median capacity: 36 TB
Avg capacity: 55 TB
Total capacity: 5236 TB
Large miner pool
https://100-0-pool.burst.cryptoguru.org/
14 miners
Median capacity: 434 TB
Avg capacity: 419 TB
Total capacity: 5454 TB
To be fair to the SAFE network it’s not quite right to directly compare these storage figures since burstcoin storage is done by generating offline chunks whereas SAFE storage is done by downloading chunks, so will be constrained by bandwidth rather than storage.
Might be worth asking when comparing burstcoin and SAFE, is bandwidth a more openly and fairly distributed resource than disk space? Is bandwidth going to give a more fair mechanic than using storage? Disk storage can be privately purchased and owned and operated, but bandwidth cannot. I would guess that bandwidth being the bottleneck probably makes the network more at the mercy of ISPs and external authorities than if it were purely storage based.
Just stirring the pot here, I want to reiterate my personal goals are to arrive at a more efficient and fair system than the blockchains have done.
@VaCrunch I think you’re referring to the sigmoid concept, I can’t find it now but I do remember this concept myself too.
@happybeing, you have the right idea of my intentions at the personal level. But at the analytical level I can’t yet find a way to believe that industry won’t dominate SAFE farming. As you have identified, rewarding participation rather than performance is probably a pretty good heuristic to start from.
@southside you put it nicely, it would be great to be able to get the most out of what we already have. But I feel there’s a balance between using the current tech and pushing toward better new tech. Hard to say where the balance lies.
@neo really appreciate the analysis. Interesting idea about portioning the reward.
“the vault that supplies the chunk the fastest”.
Would love to hear more about this. Especially some details about what ‘fastest’ means; fastest to the client, or to the elders, or what… It’s not clear to me how to measure fastest, but it could be handy to have it.
“Compare the average block compute time to the average disk access to Internet time and therein lies a major part of the equation.”
This sounds a bit mixed up to me. Disk access time is more comparable to hash time in bitcoin, not block time. Maybe you could explain this comparison a bit more? The way I would differentiate this is one is a ‘unit of work’ (hash / chunk access) and the other is a ‘unit of reward’ (block / reward payment). The unit of work can be optimised by the miner/farmer, the unit of reward is the lever of control for the network.
“There are 3 major areas where improvements can be made for a vault performance”
This is a really nice compilation and analysis. It gives me reasonable hope that whatever competitive edges are discovered in the future won’t push out smaller farmers. I wonder how high frequency traders would compare with these figures. I think the HFT mob are probably the best point of comparison rather than retail or consumer level networking.