Well that’s better.
There are still a lot of unfounded assertions though. The jumps to the conclusions are really far. I do not have time to reply to it now.
But, generally, it is a really good thing that you are looking to find problems. It’s just, this important piece of filtering (it needs judgement), and concentrating on the things with higher probability, would really be a lot better.
Because not only is it waste of time to go too deep into the unrealistic scenarios, it is also bordering to spread misinformation about potentiality of problems.
So there’s the whole thing of safecoin inflation here that will pay for much of this and I’m not sure how much will be paid by that versus PUTs, but inflation plus the PUT cost is supposed to include the cost of downloading the file for all eternity. If, at some point, farmers have to start paying for bandwidth because ISPs get tired of a large number of people farming and sending lots of data and lots of people are downloading large amounts of data without paying anything, then couldn’t PUT costs potentially increase unfairly for some users as they would need to subsidize downloads?
It wouldn’t have to track anything other than the number of GET requests you do would it? It could be something like a counter for GET requests connected to your profile that the network would update unless it was just pay per GET which would just grab some safecoins from a specified wallet every time you send a GET request. I don’t see why paying for a GET request would necessarily imply any more tracking than paying for a PUT request would.
Yes, but consider the average Joe and soccer mom users. First they need to get hold of safecoins, and even if they get some for free when signing up for an account, there’s a big hurdle and hassle for ordinary users to have to deal with safecoins even when the storage is dirt cheap.
Also consider how cheap it is to store photos on the cloud today which means that many storage providers will likely in a near future offer lots of free storage, enough for most cases of storing all personal data.
It’s really difficult to make people change their habits, and especially if they have to switch from a free service to another service where they have to pay for the storage.
Seems like a good time to line some ducks up in a row rather than run in circles chasing a single goose (ie chasing the idea that farming income and thus network growth is limited by new data and only new data).
What factors will farmers look at when deciding to join / stay / leave the network?
Safecoin Supply
The current supply of safecoin, as well as the change in supply over time will be a significant factor. This is affected by
PUTs of new data requires users to spend their safecoin, increasing the supply of available safecoins.
GETs and Farming Rate determines the rate at which coins are claimed by farmers, decreasing the supply of available safecoins.
Exchange Rate
The ability of the safecoin reward for farming to be exchanged for the costs depends on
the exchange rate of safecoin as measured in the currency of the bills
exchange infrastructure being accessible and not censored etc.
Less safecoin is needed to pay for costs if the exchange rate is high. But the reward may not cover the fees if the exchange rate is low and farming becomes unviable. The only option farmes have is to lower their costs. This may possibly be as extreme as stopping farming altogether, but improving inefficiency in existing farming operations might be adequate.
Initial Costs
The cost of equipment to get started with farming, such as a computer, internet connection, storage space, etc. This may be upfront (eg owning a computer) or ongoing (eg renting a virtual machine in the cloud).
There’s also the initial cost of learning how to do farming. This is not trivial! Even though the action to download and start the vault software to begin farming is simple enough, actually going from not-knowing-farming-exists to being-a-farmer takes a lot of reading and effort before farming income even begins.
Ongoing Costs
The cost of electricity and internet connection is an ongoing cost.
If computer equipment is rented (eg cloud vm), this is another ongoing cost.
Expanding storage space may be another, ie growth of the farming operation.
Ongoing time commitment to upgrading, continued learning, making informed decisions, improving efficiency, etc.
Inconvenience may be another ongoing cost. For example if your vault experiences heavy churn while you’re trying to stream a video on the youtube, this could cause a lot of buffering or lowering of resolution etc, which is a cost (but not directly economical).
Externalities
Farmers will make the decision to farm (or not) based on how useful they find the network, both to themselves and to others. Factors in this judgement include
the performance of the network (does downloading a picture take too long?)
the durability of the network (do files ever go missing?)
the political situation of competing networks and data storage, eg privacy
the ecosystem built on top of the safe network
the number of other people they can collaborate with using the network, ie the network effect. The simplicity of the user experience is a major factor in the growth of this variable.
The non-economic value of the network is a major contributor to farmer participation, but can be extremely variable between individual farmers and as time progresses.
These factors will be different for every farmer. Sustainability of farming is not an absolute. Sometimes it will be sustainable for one farmer but not another. It’s great to try to maximise the sustainability, but this can’t be done without a decent understanding of how the system incentives interact with each other. Focusing on a single incentive is the opposite of sustainable design.
@foreverjoyful, I think the onus is on you to demonstrate why these other factors would not act in the reverse direction and increase the sustainability of the network to the point where it can sustain itself.
Of the listed variables, I would say there are two that strongly argue against a rental model: performance of the network, and the simplicity of the user experience (ie the number of other people using the network). But this is merely conjecture (as is the original argument) so can’t be proven or disproven.
Sorry I was only thinking of network costs and not $$$.
But AU ISPs have already been through the P2P bandwidth issue and learnt to live with extremely high P2P usage upto 75% in some cases and are again increasingly offering unlimited quota AGAIN.
Thats a lot in and of itself. But Microsoft tried the subscribe to the internet thing (MSN) in the mid 90’s and it failed and failed badly. Paying to browse (the “web”) has not worked and I doubt it could ever.
Actually, it may well act in the reverse direction. But again that’s not the point I’m trying to make. I have outlined in my previous post, that the safenetwork with current design needs these factors to ALWAYS act in the reverse direction, boosting its sustainability for it to not have problems. If those factors act in the other direction once in a lifetime, then the network will potentially have problems.
Maybe but you can design it in a smart way. It’s up to how good you choose rather than the thing itself. You can say the current network even with 8 times redundancy is very complex to code and affects performance.
Really, I think it won’t be very difficult, also happens to be the same with every single other service out there. So people are kind of used to it anyway. If you design the GUI and payment back end better it can be just as simple for the user.
So instead of saying they’re potential problems, you could also at the same time think of potential solutions
To me these read for the Farmer who is more professional about it and running separate equipment for it.
For the casual farmer (the ones the model is targeted for) the install will be simple and only a “wallet address” is needed and if the user wants to change the amount of disk space allocated if different from suggested.
So one click, then enter wallet address and adjust space allocated.
The learning for farming is minimal above the learning to create account and setup wallet. No extra initial costs for equipment (zero equipment costs)
For the motivates/professional farmer then they will be trying to maximise things. Thus buying the SBCs etc and electricity costs and best ratio of Vaults ↔ bandwidth available will be important.
For ongoing costs then also the casual farmer has almost zero extra costs. The costs of electricity for the extra disk accesses is extremely low. For a drive drawing 7 watts the extra head activity might be in terms of 200mW for the time the head is moving. Even if its a drive that powers down to 4 watts after 20 minutes might see an extra 4 to 8 hours operation in 24 hours of use. So an extra 12-24 watt hours use. If they leave it on 24 hours a day then its (12 to 24) * 90 WHr for the billing period which is 1 to 2 KWHr or 24 to 50 cents in AU. Or $1 to $2 a year in extra electricity. If they leave their computer on for 8 hours then 1/3
Your ongoing costs show that you are considering the case outside of the targeted group and really for the “professional” or “serious” farmer. The target group is the group using their spare resources and this should still make up the bulk of individuals running vaults
And it’s due to the fact that the fundamental structure of the network and economical model is set up in a way such that it DEPEND on NEW data to survive. So the whole network depends on a future unknown, and all of the current data that exist on it, existing users of the network who just want their stored data safe, has no real way to contribute to the network, besides farm, of course. And during times of uncertainty they may as well just store their data on their own hard drives, this current model is unsettling enough for me, especially at turbulent times. Maybe rental model won’t be the solution but another potential solution really need to be thought of.
That’s somewhat reassuring at least. Farming is like bittorent where you earn more money the more it’s running though, with torrent people have little reason not to turn it off once they’ve finished downloading whatever they were downloading.
My cell phone subscription is basically pay to browse. I have a certain amount of gigabytes available each month, but if I don’t use them, they’ll be added to the next month. Basically I’m forced to pay for minimum amount of data each month and amount of data is something like maybe double of what an average user would use, if I were to use up my quota I have to buy an additional data package of 10GB. Models like these are quite common. It’s set up so that you usually just pay a fixed price per month, but it’s actually kinda pay to use, just you usually pay for more than you use.
I think it’s not ideal, but it does work to some extent. If SAFE was using a similar model I imagine the cost would be very low, so that very few would actually hit their monthly cap for a cheap subscription, even if streaming lots of video every day.
What if for example someone who controlled a botnet with a hundred million computers wanted to attack the SAFE network, and set all the computers to continually download as much data as possible to make it slower and more costly for everyone else. Some kind of subscription of GET costs could render such attacks economically unfeasible, although other ways might also be devised.
See, right now, PUT requests add to the network while GET requests drain the network. So why don’t we do this, leave PUT request as is, but make GET request sustain the network instead of drain it.
So basically, people will pay for viewing, the exact amount of gets that farmers get paid for delivering the GETS. It’ll be Very minimal amounts of course. And as people use the safenetwork more and more there’s more content on the network and more people get on board. There will be websites where you do surveys and get like free safecoins to view the network for ages.
People nowadays already pay for internet anyway. Make them pay $1-5 extra per month for all the bandwidth they’ll need for the safenetwork that month isn’t bad. Also, the websites themselves or any data people upload, can have an option for the uploader to instead pay for their viewers(they already do now anyway), they can maybe have an option to choose a 50/50 share too whichever. So they will get more views than otherwise. All they need to do is leave safecoins in their wallet it’ll get automatically taken. Very simple for them.
Then its the double paying people reject. But really for me mobile data+phone is all inclusive. But everyone pays to connect to the internet but its the browsing the internet and you have to pay twice for this? That is one reason they reject it.
But the Microsoft experiement in the mid ninties showed it for the failure it is. And in the mid nineties you paid by the KByte downloaded from the ISP in most cases and 100’s Megabye (NOT GB but MB) quotas were rare. So the MSN subscription was a very small amount compared to what people paid the ISP, yet it failed and failed entirely.
I think the average was approaching 40% over most ISPs aggregate and they were using techniques to throttle the P2P as well. Then we saw a drop off of unlimited. Optus in 2000 was unlimited on their cable then they started enforcing kick offs of people who used 10x average, then introduced 60-200GB/month then higher and higher till they offered unlimited on their 100Mb/s cable plans. TPG is the 3rd largest ISP with unimited on the NBN and Telstra the largest just doubled their plans and increased their unlimited offerings
Europe I believe is also increasing their high speed plans with larger quotas or unlimited.
There is a few hundred posts discussing this elsewhere. Botnets cost the runner to run, they don’t rent them out for free. And caching would be reducing that to some extent. Large botnets are like 10,000 and expensive just for that. 2-5 days usually is all most attackers can afford.
I think there are several reasons it failed and that the subscription cost is not the main one, but that’s debatable though.
Obviously a botnet of 10 000 computers couldn’t do any kind of damage, that’s a relatively small one. Large botnets are millions or tens of millions of computers. Newer botnets infect millions of unsecured IoT devices and as the number of IoT devices grow, these could become more numerous. As for who could afford such attacks? Someone with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin who wanted to protect their Bitcoins against potential competitors for example.
Hahahaha what i just read this… MSN failed cos of subscription fees? That’s my first time hearing anyone say that is the reason for its failure.
It failed mostly because of its user interface not upgrading overall very hard to use and not many features etc. If you compared to the Chinese version of it which copied but improved on MSN, namingly QQ, it’s extremely successful. It’s not compulsory to charge subscription but people voluntarily pay for QQ ruby or emerald memberships for their added features that goes beyong just a computer messenger. Used to be more crazy than it is now, now the entire Chinese population moved to Wechat(and foreigners are coming on board too), also owned by the same company that made QQ. But that’s another story.
Important point to take away though, is that instead of saying something just won’t work, you can only say you cannot think of a good way to make it work. I personally think pay-to-view if designed right can work very very well. You can have websites on safenetwork offering to pay people like 0.001 safecoins so they can access the network for free for one day to see what it’s like upon a sign up where all they need to do is put in their name and email etc(they’ll obviously do this on their www website), there’s going to be a myraid of other ways you may not even have ever thought of if you close your mind to the possibility of it being doable in the first place. (Kinda a similar thing you’re doing with a proposed recurring fee model too)
Remember though node age, so young nodes that switch off will find it hard to age. So botnets etc. need to have uptime, traditional computer infested botnets probably won’t work so well. Botnets of IOT is interesting though, it could be an attack if they can hold enough data etc. Even so though the botnet has to live a long time to get to where its vote would be valid. So it would need to be a botnet of pretty beefy IOT devices (not prohibitive though) but undiscovered for a long time as well.
Anyway. We don’t know yet exactly what attacks SAFE will experience or what imagined or not imagined issues will turn out to be a problem or not. Bitcoin has been attacked time and again and every time it has emerged stronger and more secure and so will SAFE.
SAFE is an antifragile system. Its code can be changed, it has the capacity to evolve. That doesn’t necessarily mean there won’t be anything that replaces it at some point and it doesn’t say anything about what market position and market share it will take, but it does mean that attacks and problems in general will make it stronger over time, rather than weaker and as it grows stronger, its potential use cases will increase even if at some point there could be temporary setbacks and loss of confidence as a result if attacks or unforseen issues.
It failed because there was a way to see the whole internet for free viewing (excluding ISP costs) and Netscape browser blew MSN subscription out of the water. If we charge for browsing SAFE then the traditional internet will blow us out of the water. People RESENT having to pay twice to read things.
Good try though.
And someone will just fork your rental and bandwidth paying to have what Maidsafe’s model and take all the people from your EXPENSIVE web to a non greedy one. Increased costs is not going to attract more people
Um… What? No one has really heard of Netscape. Internet Explorer was much better marketed as it came with every Windows computer and became mainstream then Chrome took over cos its GUI and performance as well as features was much better
Again, no. Because there will be ways around it. You certainly won’t think of any though if you keep on thinking there isn’t any.
And regarding forking, yeah sure they can do that, first not many farmers will join which would mean storage cost will be high, and it can’t handle waves of interest and disinterest(which forks often often, if not always, experience)
