I wonder if relying on reported size is reliable enough, or maybe would allow a potential attack (for example, lots of vaults being made to report vastly inflated spare capacity) . Better if the network can use trustable metrics.
My non tech lady (she’s very good at answering these tech questions nonetheless) and I came up with a couple that might be used to adjust farming rate:
- vault fullness: look at how frequently vaults report they are full and can’t take a chunk. There’s not much incentive to lie about this, and it provides a way, by factoring in node age into the calculations, to estimate if the network has sufficient or insufficient spare capacity. This could be used to decide if farming rate needs increasing or decreasing.
- vault satisfaction: look at the number of vaults joining / leaving at various trust levels (ie by node age) to gain a measure of how attractive farming is, and whether capacity is increasing or decreasing, and at what (qualitative) rate (eg high/med/low). This gives you insight into the supply side, in terms of whether the farming rate is attracting capacity or losing capacity. This could be used to determine how fast to be adjusting the farming rate.
Those measures are qualitative, but if they reflect reality well enough, that would be OK. The network won’t need accurate numbers in terms of bytes, but needs to know whether to adjust farming rate up or down, and how fast to be changing it.
PS this thread should probably split to a new topic!