Problems of the Sia decentralized Internet - we will probably encounter them as well

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Long story about not bright future of Sia project from group of big supporters in a past:

short version:

  • Sia: The product has many technical issues which make it unstable and unusable, issues which have persisted for years
  • Skynet: It’s a poorly thought out extension of Sia which will never compete with the traditional Internet, and is more similar to GeoCities than Web3
  • SC/SF: Sia’s original self-funding methods have failed, and no Siafund holders seem to want to admit it
  • Sia Team: They have no direction and still act like a startup full of pretentious college kids which think they know better than everyone else
  • Sia Foundation: A new money-printing entity funded by a large block reward, which may not really be separate from Nebulous or work in the community’s interests
  • Sia Community: They idolize the team, can’t tolerate criticism, will push objectors out, and will go down with the ship
  • Conclusion: Sia and Skynet aren’t going to work out on their current trajectory, and we’ve been banned for articulating why
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I do not agree with these conclusions for the future of Sia. I have been testing their social network for a few days now and I think that things are becoming more usable compared to 3 years ago. Note: a few years ago I was a Sia farmer + I had ASIC miners, but I didn’t like where things were going and I sold all my Sia for MAID and currently do not hold any Sia for me.

This is my profile in Skyfeed:

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Anyway it is good to read if you are watching this project. Their current vision is far from what Safe network should become and I as agree with you that they made some progress in a last 3 years I also believe that their current model of Sia and Skynet is not viable.

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It does not matter. People are not interested in decentralized services at the moment anyway (to use them; for speculation they are very interested). It doesn’t matter if the product works well right now because no one is using it right now. All that matters is whether people want to speculate on the product. Sometime in the future, things will change, so there is time to fix all the technical difficulties.

Sia are the closest we have to a decentralized internet right now so I plan to keep watching them.

Edit: I want to add that their observations are 100% in line with my views on decentralization and the attitude of 99% of humanity towards it:

… most Internet users really and honestly don’t care about decentralization … Additionally, we believe that users are not going to tolerate the cost of infrastructure shifting onto them, as we explained in the section above - users would rather see ads than open their pocketbooks.

I have said it before and will keep repeating it until I see evidence to the contrary. Very, very few people will pay for decentralized internet, but many, many people would like to get paid for their free computer resource.

So I believe that what we will see is how the Safe Network moves the printer for new money closer to the people and as a result produces freedom, security and anonymity.

But the current design relies on people to pay to upload information so that the network can grow and accept new farmers, but as we see from Sia, Storj and Filecoin, people don’t want to pay for this right now.

That is why I continue to claim that the solution of the problem is part of the inflation in the Safe Network to be used for free uploading of data through the Foundation.

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This is where we may fail, it’s not decentralised Internet, it’s a Safe Internet. The fact it’s decentralised is like RNA is a vaccine entity. To me, folk knowing this Internet is Safe, i.e. not tracked or run by corporates is the line, decentralised is too much talk of carburettors and not how fast a car goes.

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He describe there lot of good points.

The pay for upload problem could solve users running node, while providing only bandwidth for caching.
So they will not earn enought to upload large files, but it will cover cost of their daily browsing.
They could not need to run node 24/7 and be still useful.

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But data shows that people do not use their money to use Sia, Storj and Filecoin. People hold these coins to sell them at a higher price. Because at the moment they have a centralized service that works and which they are used to using every day.

It is much more likely that farmers will not spend the new coins they receive from farming and the network will grow extremely slowly, which will allow another safe network to appear with another funding model of work (for example with a foundation that subsidizes data uploads).

We need an option in which the network can grow and accept new farmers without enough people which to pay to upload data…

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David, let’s be honest, people are not interested in Safe Internet, too. Everyone shares their personal data everywhere without thinking and most people on the planet have no problem with that. Or rather, they have a problem, but they are not ready to act to solve it, otherwise they would be here with us or in some of the other projects that are working to solve this problems.

People are not willing to pay to upload data as long as there are free alternatives like the current internet. But this does not mean that we have no chance of success. It’s just that if we see that the network is not growing fast, we need to have a ready-made solution to help it grow without relying on people to act.

Please allow me once again to try to explain why money is the key to our success. Let me first try to explain why we use money and why money is a good thing for the human species and what are the problems of printing new money.

For a biological being, only things that can be used directly are important: water, food, and a breeding partner. Everything else only increases the efficiency of acquiring these things, ie. there is no direct value, only a virtual one.

We have created a society because it makes resource extraction more efficient. But we are biologically predisposed to live only in small groups of people. To grow beyond a certain number of people, we need a method for sorting and allocating resources without aggression and blood on the streets. This method is money.

With money, each individual in society votes for the usefulness of other members of society, so the most useful individuals are sorted at the top of the pyramid, ie. have access to the most resources because they have been most useful to society as a whole.

This system is not perfect. There are inefficiencies. These inefficiencies have improved over the centuries as we change what money is - gold was good money, but fiat money is better money. Yes, that’s right, for society, fiat money is better than gold because it allows us to have a printer for new money that is not tied to anything in nature.

Printing fiat money is good for our species, because (although it allows to extract value from the savings of individuals without their consent) this allows us to lend money to specific individuals to start a business and although most new businesses fail, those that succeed bring more improvements to the human species. Ie the loss is individual, but the gain is for everyone.

The problem with fiat money is that its printing is centralized. This allows those who control the printer for new money to pass on the losses to everyone in society and redirect profits to corporations without people voting with their money for them. So the mechanism for sorting the most useful people/businesses is now broken - we live in a world with corporations Too big to fail.

The cryptocurrencies move the printer for new money closer to the people, which reduces inefficiencies for those who use them and derives value from the fiat money to the cryptocurrencies. That’s why today Bitcoin is $ 30k and that’s why its price will continue to rise.

The bad thing about Bitcoin is that in the long run the printer for new money moves back to centralization plus there is waste in the production of the new money.

Ethereum moves the printer back closer to the people and therefore its value grows faster than that of Bitcoin. Anyone with a video card can print new money.

The Safe Network moves the printer even closer to the people and, moreover, does not create waste, on the contrary, it creates something that we all appreciate.

So let me repeat:

  • money is a sorting mechanism that allows society to grow without aggression and blood on the streets, allowing people to vote with money every day and sort the most useful members of society at the top of the pyramid.
  • a decentralized printer for new money is better than a centralized one because millions of people have a better idea of what is good and can vote with the new money more efficiently.
  • the Safe network moves the printer even closer to the people and creates something useful for the human species

That is why I argue that money is not a bad thing and we can use it to create a system that increases efficiency in our world - The Safe Network.

But for this system to exist, the most important thing is the farmers, and in order to have farmers, someone needs to upload data. We can’t afford not to have a backup option if people don’t want to upload data in the beginning. We have information from the real world, from projects like Sia, Storj, Filecoin that have spent millions of dollars, let’s use that data to prepare.

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To me this seems like something that could almost be considered part of the marketing budget/plan. Maybe some of the coins could be used to subsidize uploads until it naturally phases out when the coins in circulation hits some threshold. First million accounts can upload 1 GB for free, 1 SAFE worth of upload, or something like that and the farmers are paid out of the special allotment of coins.

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Couldn’t we use game theory to create initial or temporary incentives to provide goods, services, and data on the network? The value of a Safe Network Token is representative of the services and data the network represents. You often bring up a Safe Network clone appearing with better incentives. How would you mitigate this problem for the Safe Network? What specific things can we do that would cause to not worry about a Safe Network clone with better incentives?

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In my opinion, the price of the token is the best protection for the network. High price = more farmers = bigger network = cheaper storage space.

In order to have a high price, we need more people ready to browse the Safe Network, because although browsing is free, some of these people will buy the token and keep it for speculative purposes. In order to have something to browse, someone has to pay for uploading data to the network.

If this does not happen naturally, we have to help and the best option in my opinion is through a foundation that pays to upload for example Wikipedia, the best YouTube channels, etc.

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You have a point about getting goods, services, and data on the network. I’m in agreement we need to strongly incentivize providing these things to the network.

What is the value of a billion dollars on a deserted island where one can’t buy any goods or services? Nothing. However this same billion in an economy loaded with goods and services has value to the degree there are goods and services. Increasing the number of currency units will change no value on the network. Only increasing good and services will add value.

So I’m with you, we need to get goods and services on the network. The SNT value will measured by the amount of good and services on the network.

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But someone has to pay to upload them to the network, right? Who will invest in uploading if there are no users? The first users will be the farmers themselves. But in order to have farmers, someone needs to upload data. We come to the old problem of the chicken and the egg - who is first?

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I think this all is a argument for PtP (Pay the Provider/Producer) so that people are willing to upload what they perceive as popular content, knowing that it could pay off the tiny cost of upload (in a poor case) and provide some passive income. To be able to extend that to allowing someone to earn PtP for sharing already existing and popular content, would be even more of a stimulant to network growth and adoption.

If there can be value chains in the creation and sharing of data that goes directly into these peoples wallets to spend across the network, then it will simply be an almost instant success.

At the least I believe people will be willing to pay for what they value. Personal information they want to keep backed up, held safely and privately, etc. People torrent, or add to Wikipedia and so on, so not everything has to have financial incentive for everyone but for mass adoption and the general population, I think something like PtP would make them say hell to the yeah, download the Safe Browser and create a SafeID.

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Been pondering about this for a while too.

Agree half. I agree that general folks do not really care if their data is secured. Evidently people readily gives their life away in Facebook. There were times children would run away from home just because their parents read their diary. But those days are no more.

Having understood that, do we have a chance of success? Yes in the commercial sectors because they see data as their own properties. We can make a bang in the startup industry. I feel generally businesses are more sensitive to data security. While the big boys might already have their own data centres & are difficult to convince, the SME might need Safenetwork. Maidsafe just need to PROVE to them that it’s SAFE & Affordable. These are the important points to note:

  1. Competitive pricing
    a) free storage for the initial amount/duration of storage to lure them in.
    b) pay per use, need 1TB pay for 1TB. No need to sign up for nonsense package with contract period
  2. Proven secured - audited & recognised by as many organization as possible
  3. Up time - their data has to be always available

For common folks like you and me, by simply having great apps is good enough. Too bad I’m not a developer, if I were I would focus on building social media or e-commerce apps. Would I use Safenetwork? Yes, because I’m invested. Would people around me use Safenetwork? Not sure, is there any good app for them to swipe on? Companies like Google, Tesla & Facebook didn’t change the world. The world change because of them. There’s a difference. Would Safenetwork be the next?

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This is why I think it’s imperative to catalyze and support a thriving ecosystem of third party dApp developers. Ethereum has met with success—despite its technological shortcomings—simply because it built a strong network of developers that are willing to leverage its platform (first for ICOs, now for DeFi).

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I advise everyone to read the criticism of Sia, there is a lot of valuable information. For example this:

Dealing with Siacoin in the first place is a high barrier to adoption for the general population. Those involved in crypto projects tend to forget just how little the general public knows about crypto, let alone things like how the Internet works - most of them are not that technical and don’t care to learn

I believe that this information supports my claim that the first users of the Safe Network will be the farmers themselves.

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Let’s be honest…the only thing that Safe needs is a good porn website and maybe a Safe popcorn time version. Then the Safe Network will be ok.
Does SIA offer this?

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We have businesses being fined for data breaches. ( in UK anyway ).
Once we prove our security, I would hope that would drive business’s to use us.
We can provide online shop with built in payment methods and security.
Free uploads will be easily gamed unless managed well.

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Agreed. First the Googles, Facebooks and Youtubes of the world (should be fairly easy to convince them to get on board) then the users will follow. I know some on this forum detest the idea of the current internet heavyweights riding on the back of the Safe Network but it’s going to happen anyway so why not promote the network to those giants in the beginning?

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