Safenetwork sustainability concerns - Bandwidth has an ongoing cost however Safenetwork is a pay once, benefit forever model

Safe-Node
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Also i do want to mention, even Sia have monthly costs and download bandwidth cost, so does every company that ever existed. you can check their cost in fact on https://sia.tech/ (scroll down)

Safenetwork doesn’t charge anything. And everyone here is expecting it to somehow sustain and not have issues? I think everyone need to take a step back and realise how hard it is.

I think one of two things will happen, at first storage will be cheap enough that everyone will start storing on it, then the network space starts running out, then there will come a point where the cost of storage will hit a point where many people are not willing to pay that high to store any longer, but will of course continue accessing their stored data, farmers will realise slowly the safecoins they’re being paid is just too little to bother, maybe $0.03 per month isn’t worth the time for someone to have their computer on 24/7 and their internet speed throttled when viewing videos.

Anyway, then as the farmers leave, the cost will be even higher and the safenetwork will slowly lose storers of data as well as farmers, and it will hit a point where there’s a number of people who who pay any amount to store data on there, powered by some farmers who would have the hard drives up and running even if they do not profit. And the network would be sustained by that, just like BitTorrent, it just won’t hit mainstream adoption unfortunately with the current model, just like how there isn’t many BitTorrent seeders and it takes ages to download small files, safe won’t have the exact same problem, but rapid initial expansion followed by farmers quitting can cause network redundancy issues.

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The website is hosted by the safe network too - it goes into the same pool of data, which people glean value from when they retrieve it from the farmers, who in turn are paid to provide the data.

Advertising and its profits are tangential. A successful portal site will need to curate good content. To get good content, a portal site needs to remunerate content producers. Therefore, this is a relationship between the portal site, the viewers and the content producers. It has nothing to do with the infrastructure costs, as these are externalised - the content producers have paid the network to host their videos, the portal site has paid the network to host their site, which has then subsidised the users to view the videos.

The bandwidth costs have been internalised, by the farmers, as part of the costs of running a vault. As has been pointed out, underutilised storage/CPU/memory/bandwidth will make this super cheap for many. However, the cost of a PUT will encompass all of these data points.

Of course - the network technology will evolve over time (adding compute, fixing bugs, improving performance, etc). Data chains will help here too, as it allows the network to easily be ‘rebooted’ (or have a catastrophic failure), while retaining data.

There will be rules governing what changes are deemed acceptable by other nodes and so forth, but it is a bit different from blockchains. As the data is distributed across the network, rather than just duplicated, there is no concept of the longest chain as a single source of truth. Instead, there will be a network with mixed capabilities at times, but a node must still provide the appropriate data when requested or it will not be rewarded (and will potentially be downgraded if deemed malicious). This is a whole other thread of debate in itself though.

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That’s a nice story, but there is little fact to anchor it to. In fact, it seems more like a smear or FUD.

People have patiently explained the relationship between PUTs and their costs, along with GETs and the rewards to farmers. Saying that “Safenetwork doesn’t change anything” is clearly false. The rest is conjecture, based on this flawed premise. What are you trying to achieve here?

Your argument boils down to people will only want to rent, rather than buy. The market says otherwise in innumerable examples. The safe net approach is to facilitate people buying persistent storage - to give them full ownership of their data in perpetuity. There are plenty of other examples out there where people prefer to own instead of rent, so why do you keep presenting this argument?

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My argument is that, buying something that have recurring costs to others, while those costs are being paid by others buying the same thing that you’re buying, may have sustainability concerns.

I’m trying to get people looking at the bigger picture, ignoring the technical aspects of it, as no matter how technical it is and how the algorithm works at the moment, it boils down to the fact that new money(the very source, aka new money after tracing back all the way i mean) comes in are by people storing new data, and this money obviously supports the existing network, and this honestly, if you can just look at every other company, isn’t how it has worked since forever. Not saying it wouldn’t work, I’m simply saying it might not. Also, if a valid point raises some FUD then I don’t think I’m spreading smear or FUD intentionally per say, just discussing the potencial problems of the network. Would you say if someone discuss that Bitcoin could be susceptible to a 51% attack, that they’re just spreading FUD?

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Supply of coins for farming depends on user spending (among other things). Using an arrow notation ‘supply → spending’

Farmer income depends on the supply of coins for farming (among other things). In arrow notation, ‘income → supply’

The flaw is to think ‘income → supply → spending’ can be simplified to ‘income → spending’.

Even further flawed is to think sustainability → income. I’d agree income is a factor in sustainability, probably a significant factor, but it’s just one of many. To claim dependency is too big of a claim.

The reason has been explained at length in this thread. Please read it carefully. If you don’t understand definitely keep asking questions, but try to stop incorrectly stating ‘facts of dependency’ that are not facts.

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Well, you just said it yourself… it is a factor - that LITERALLY MEANS it is dependent!

Ok, maybe you’re understanding dependant a bit differently than the way I understand dependent, which explains why I was a little confused. I understood it from the word dependent in experiments, when you have dependent variables. Lets say I’m testing how old someone is vs how far they can throw a basketball, so I gather people of different ages(ages becomes an independent variable, but don’t confused “independent” with the “independent” used in this thread) then get them to throw and measure their distance(the distance is the dependent variable). Of course you can say, whether they are a girl/boy, how high they are, the wind direction, the weight of the basketball, their mood that day, are all factors affecting how far they threw the basketball, although those other factors I’m not testing yet still affect the dependent variable are called extraneous factors, and you try to reduce them as much as possible in experiments, nevertheless, if all extraneous factors are kept the same throughout, and you only getting the independent variable affecting the dependent variable and nothing else, and if there’s an effect, you then can say at least in your experiment(or strictly a correlation study), you’ve found a correlation between someone’s age and how far they can throw a basketball.

Now back to the safenetwork, if the sustainability of the network is being affect by new data, then I thought i was right to say it’s dependent on that, that is not to say that’s the there aren’t any other “extraneous factor” affecting the sustainability. As i’ve outlined, in fact, 2-3 more factors already, I mean… if bandwidth and electricity were free then of course then safenetwork will not have any sustainability issues, the amount of new data even, if its 1mb per month basically will probably not even matter.

But unfortunately, above three scenarios will have to happen once all the coins have been reached and amount of newly stored data decreases. Do you agree?

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I’ve learned 3 things reading these posts:

  1. I’m in my 60’s and would dearly love the energy @foreverjoyful has, well meaning in its direction we have to accept it as being. Frustrating maybe a touch but it’s still good to see in people…to a point,

But thanks for contributing to a in parts interesting discussion.

  1. Neo - Respect, nuff said :fist:

  2. Mav - nice to hear one of the really bright minds swing into gear

You guys won’t clearly agree on everything but thanks for putting the posts out there for us to dissect :slight_smile:

Time for a beer and some sleep (maybe for this topic too if there’s no more new questions :wink:)

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I am bowing out of these 2 topics.

Its now a case of repeating myself too many times and then being accused of not being able to subjectively look at the alternatives. It these 2 topics has not been looking and examining the ins and outs then I don’t what it has been.

Really I’ve tried to have the discussion and treat each of the suggestions and claims with due diligence and talk, examine and reason each of them. Just because an idea has merit does not make it a good idea to implement. Breeding programs have merit if you wish to improve the gene pool, maybe good for some animal species, but it is a bad idea for others and humans and has always been a bad idea for humans. Rental is an interesting idea, but has been found lacking. Bandwidth charging to the user browsing is an interesting idea but also has its flaws. Both are solutions where the cure will be worse than the supposed problem. Any who wish to draw me back into the discussion, I can only say read my hundred or whatever posts explaining, teaching, reasoning I have already done. I may not be as concise as @mav or to the point but I am pretty sure I’ve been on the money. And my hat off to @mav, I enjoy your posts.

As to the claims stated as fact (I hope due to misunderstandings) are getting too many for my available time and frankly the lack of movement or willingness to learn is too much for me. My grandkids are coming over for visits in a day and that will be a better use of my time. I am still floored at that research paper relied on which is on a different subject altogether (sigh). I will not go into any more but there was a topic presented about 2 years ago by a fellow aussie that explains it I think. (Word to the wise)

Have fun fellows in this SAFE journey for these two topics. Never fear I will be helping out as normal elsewhere and just following this topic for moderation purposes now. This post is simply to let people understand why I stop relying in these two topics.

And please don’t respond to this, I am not looking for support or criticism. Really I am not and I feel tempted to delete any such replies. (but to do so would not be in line with the forum guidelines so no fear of me doing it)

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Your concerns appear unwarranted, considering payments are made to farmers, even if no new uploads are made. Moreover, the chance of no uploads being made is highly unlikely, due to historic precedence.

You may be trying to get people to see the bigger picture, but what you are achieving is demonstrating your own inability to see it.

The cost for a PUT and the reward for a GET are disconnected from new money entering the ecosystem - new money enters when Safecoin are purchased, not spent. This gives value to what farmers can sell GET rewards for. However, new value is added to the network whenever useful content is published (PUTs), which then encourages GETs from others in the future. So, the correlation is not direct on any of these fronts; the market price for Safecoin vs when Safecoin are spent (PUT) vs when farmers are awarded (GET) are only indirectly linked. In short, you can’t say “new money comes in by people storing new data”, as new data may have no correlation to the Safecoin price. Once again, using a flawed premise to then beat Safe Net with is a straw man argument (FUD).

You say there is no business model which is sustained by people selling new data? Nonsense. Artists, engineers, scientists, etc, all create new data which is valuable every day. Moreover, there are myriad people who indirectly make a living from this process, adding value as they do (project managers, company directors, producers, support staff, sales teams, etc). Moreover, this data is not temporal; it is persistent. Any of the data produced is likely to be savoured, saved, built upon, re-discovered, ultimately knitting the tapestry of our history.

To invert your question, why should a musician who creates a song once, then pay a rent to have it digitally saved somewhere? Why wouldn’t he record it once, store it once, just as a sculptor creates a statue and then stores it persistently in their garden? What is this obsession with refusing to acknowledge that people like to have ownership of something, rather than relinquishing ownership and having to pay rent on it? People wanted their own hard drives, disks, USB sticks, etc, long before cloud storage came along and I am sure many feel far more comfortable with this model too.

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That’s not how the network works…remember I’m talking about long term.

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Yes it is. Farmers are paid for retrieving data, not storing it. They are paid from a pool of Safecoin, which includes both newly minted Safecoin and recycled Safecoin (from previous PUTs from a previous period).

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Sigh…can you trace the money please? As YOU have just outlined yourself, the pool of money the farmers get paid from IS MADE UP of safecoins that came from people storing new data and new safecoins. And once new safecoins run out, farmers will only get paid from the pool of money that’s generated from people paying safecoins to store new data…

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Sigh all you like, but Safecoin are paid to farmers irrespective of whether anyone has uploaded anything. The (current draft) Safecoin distribution algorithm tends towards zero after many decades and even then it will be a small supply, not no supply… even if not a soul uploads one byte of data.

If you wish to discuss the long term minting, let’s have it out - perhaps minting should tend to zero over a millennia instead of decades, to avoid any concerns of farming payments?

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I’m not worried because it’s a non issue. Questions were answered yet not acknowledged I think @foreverjoyful is just seeking validation. No offense but that is the conclusion I come to at this juncture.

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Interesting thought… On the one hand you could say nature routinely deletes stuff (death); on the other hand energy can be transformed but never created or destroyed :slight_smile: So, I guess I don’t know that nature has a definitive POV on this one…

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How often does a person create a website and never update it? I could be off base here, but it seems like your picture of new data creation/uploading mirrors that of a static museum–all the exhibits are put in place once, and no one touches it again. Even this we know to be untrue. While many museums have exhibits that do not change, every museum brings in new, fresh, rotating exhibits to keep things interesting and (re)attract the audience.

On a global scale, we are increasingly creating excess data storage capacity with every passing moment, so running out of storage space isn’t a concern. It’s more a question of distribution and allocation. Now, I could be reading too much in between the lines, but one could say your concern is less about the sustainability and more about profitability. That is to say, will farming SAFE prove as profitable to farmers as mining Bitcoin, for example, is to miners.

On that note A) I think the SAFE developers are more concerned with viability than profitability. If equilibria for the network leaves a razor thin margin (or 0% margin), well then, one might say supply and demand are in perfect balance with no consumer/producer surplus or deadweight loss. However, to the extent that an old microeconomics professor of mine is correct in stating that “economics is about learning how to exploit people for private gain” then “price is never based on worth but rather willingness to pay.” One of the things that intrigues me most about Bitcoin is that it shows how decentralization (and anarchy) are (as of yet) unsustainable because the supplier’s (or in this case, miner’s) drive to leverage economics as a tool of exploitation will lead to increasing centralization. One could say that another name for Smith’s invisible hand is “greed,” and consumers fall for it every time, which brings me to…

B) I think the network is (being) designed to function in such a way that farmers will not farm if they do not find it profitable (enough) to do so, nor will users participate if they do not perceive they are receiving enough value to justify the expense. In light of that assertion, I think the network (and external exchanges) will modify the price such that farmers are willing to farm and users are willing to participate (even if that results in price > marginal cost or a state of consumer surplus). On that note, the current let’s-turn-everything-into-a-subscription pricing model is a perfect example of economics as willfully applied and willingly accepted exploitation. From software (e.g., adobe) to cars (ride-sharing), we are seeing ownership devolve into renting. Why? Not because price skims so close to marginal cost that suppliers must do so in orders to stay afloat, but rather because it is an easy way to guarantee that profitability moves up and to the right (and why we think that an already highly profitable business must always be increasing in profitability is something I’ve never been able to understand except for to chalk it up to some shade of greed. For example, what’s wrong with maintaining a 30% margin in-perpetuity?). The thought that we must continually pay for data storage (rather than pay once; store forever) is to fall prey to the notion that the subscription model is both natural and structurally necessary.

TL;DR-I think the network will be dynamic enough to keep price at such a level that farming remains sustainable so long as users feel that there is inherent value in (and therefore use) SAFE. Subscription pricing models are not definitively natural or structurally necessary, so pay once/store forever is not inherently unviable.

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Do you understand that’s not the point? I am not saying that absolutely zero safe coins will be paid. But I’m saying the amount of new uploads will affect HOW MUCH farmers get paid, hence if no one uploads, each farmer will get paid so little that no one will want to farm, hence it limits the expandability and if people quit it’ll reduce the networks redundancy hence limit the sustainability. Hence the amount of NEW data uploaded directly affects the network’s expandability and sustainability(or indirectly, whatever you call it). This is the main point I was trying to make. Just like if bitcoin network gets so difficult that it only pays 0.00001 per block. Either people work out more efficient ways to mine, or bitcoin value increases or some will mine at a loss and quit mining. Just like the three things I listed. Do you understand now? There will be some, very little coins paying the farmers for days but do you think that’ll attract many farmers? If there are more farmers each will only get paid less from the available pool. Hence the number of farmers WILL BE LIMITED to the amount of new safe coins and amount of new data being stored on the network. And I’m saying MAYBE it should be limited by how many existing people use the network to store their data. Which makes more sense.

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It is hard to understand what your point is. One minute you are making false assertions, the next minute you are telling me they don’t matter anyway.

Any model has its limits. The disconnect between storage fee and farming reward helps to smooth out fallow periods. If no one is using the network to store data due to it being ineconomical, renting isn’t going to solve this - the underlying cost is the same.

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Let me put it in short straightforward terms.

1.New data uploaded is a significant factor directly or indirectly contributes to farmers total combined income. In a way such that more new data uploaded = more farmers can make. No new data uploaded = no farmer income eventually.
2. Total Farmers income directly affects the maximum amount of farmers that will be farming, as more farmers farm, each farmer will be paid less, to the point where no new farmers will come on board, or they’ll come on board as fast as existing farmers quit. And total number of farmers is directly proportional to the networks total storage space. Hence the total farmers income affects/limits the total network capacity.
3. The total network capacity is the same thing as how big the network is, which basically means that how big the network will be, is affected by the total farmers income which is affected by how much new data gets uploaded.

My proposal again is introducing new significant factors that would help the network expand and acquire more farmers than simply having new data uploads being a significant factor.

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If the last bitcoin is mined and nobody makes transactions, miners quit, Bitcoin dies.same theory same possibility. So Do you also think we should pay taxes to miners for every coin we hold? That is what all banks do.