Simple question to a complicated subject, how will the Safe Network price the cost of bandwidth or deal with user generated content?
Some sites require constant updates, like discussion forums or torrent sites, How will they work with the Safe Network pricing strategy?
Pay once and host forever, but what about the sites above that require constant updates like forums and torrent sites that get added content daily.
These also generate
a ton of traffic, who pays for user “Puts” to add to discussions or add a new torrent to a site?
What about sites with large amounts of traffic? Is that also only a pay once incentive?
Some farmers might not like hosting sites that have a large influx of users if they have to maintain bandwidth services, but only receive an initial payment for hosting.
What is the solution for such sites, any thoughts? How would a site like Facebook exist on Safe? How would bandwidth/cost be provided to such an enormous project?
The general idea is that people own their data. So if you want to make a post on a forum you will pay for the PUT of your own post and then give the forum access to read the post. It would be technically possible for someone else to pay for PUTting your data, but then they decide permissions etc.
As for who pays for the traffic, my understanding is that it has to be paid for by everyone who PUTs. I don’t know enough about economics to know exactly what the chain of “events” that causes the prices of PUTs to increase when a ton of people want to download stuff from the network. But I do know that payment for PUTs is the only “source of income” for the network, so it’s the PUTters who will inevitably pay for running the network.
Yeah you only pay once, but as long as some people keep PUTting stuff, farmers are compensated for the cost of heavy traffic for instance by an increased PUT price, at least when measured in fiat.
Nodes will not be hosting “sites”. A node might be hosting a part of an image of a site, or the text of a page on a site for instance. When something is uploaded to the network it’s spread out across it, so no single node will be hosting “a site”, the network as a whole hosts it, but no individual node does. This distributes stress across the network, so there won’t be some nodes that have to deal with much more work than others.
There have been many changes to how the network works over the years, so the following might not apply to how it’s working now, maybe someone who knows more can clarify if that’s the case:
A planned feature that will help when some specific content is requested a lot is caching. This feature will make it so as chunks hop across nodes on the network they are cached by the nodes that transmit it, if a request for a chunk arrives at a node that has that chunk in its cache, it will send its copy instead of asking the “original holders”. So chunks that are popular will put less strain on the network per request the more popular they are.
The reason I think this might not apply to the most recent version of the network is that I think the network structure was flattened recently. So each section can communicate directly with every other section. So when a request comes in it could send that request on directly to where it needs to go, and then that section can respond directly to the client who asks for it? Not sure how this works now.
It might then be difficult to get forums or torrent sites going. Imagine having to pay on this site every time you post something. It would be a ghost town…
Same for torrent sites or discussion platforms, if the person generating the torrent has to pay, then you can imagine nobody will ever post anything , some types of sites would be ghost towns.
It might work for posting your dicertation or warn the world about global warming etc. User generated content sites will not fly if its not free to post for those people.
Having the site creator pay for all user puts would also be an issue. You could have bots generating trash just to mess with the site owners and cause a large bill.
There has to be a better way to deal with this problem…
Maybe you’re right. I personally think it depends on how much it costs.
Text is very lightweight, especially when compressed. So it will hopefully be very, very cheap to PUT a text message to a board. I’m hoping it’ll be cents or less.
Images can also be lightweight, especially small ones, so that would likely be cheap as well.
As for PUTting like a 10GB file, yeah, that’s probably going to cost enough that you would need to be kinda wealthy or motivated to consider it worth it.
There are other solutions for this issue though, like torrents for instance, which you mention. A torrent file is very light and would be cheap to put on the network. The torrent file could then be used in a torrent client to download the 10GB file outside of the Safe Network so no one has to pay to upload it.
I’m not sure there is a better way to deal with paying for storage and traffic. Someone has to pay for it, and in my opinion it’s a really good deal that it’s the uploader, because downloading from the network is then free. So by putting data on the network you are setting it free.
I think you have to remember that posting on social media on the existing web isn’t free. You are just paying for it in a different way: by having your privacy invaded, being tracked everywhere, and by having your data sold to advertisers and 3rd parties.
I also don’t think you should assume people wouldn’t be prepared to pay up front. For example, people pay good money in subscriptions for services that have no advertising. For example, it’s £15.99 per month just to get YouTube without adverts (even though, of course, you are still being tracked and advertised to off-youtube using the same data).
And when we are thinking about the costs of these things, it will cost you very little for thousands of tweets worth of data. So maybe you’d charge up with a little data each month, and that would pay for all of those needs. In fact, you could offset this cost by offering your spare local storage space to the Network, and that could cover it, so you might not even notice month to month.
Yeah, that’s not the way it works. It’s the person uploading, to PUTiung the data that pays once, upfront, regardless of where the content ends up. The ‘site owner’ doesn’t pay for the comments on a blog post, say, it’s the people commenting that would.
I would hope the costs there are almost imperceivable. So something like a 10,000 or 100,000 texts (tweets, small blogs) per cent or something of that level.
This brought my mind another point: What is the smallest change / update one can do? A bit? Is the SNT division granular enough to pay little enough even for the smallest possible data changes?
True, the problem is the general public do not see it in that light. I think the only solution is to have the site originator pay for all puts on message boards, put payment would be the new bandwidth cost.
You can be certain that very little people would post anything if they have to link a payment method, it’s just not how human beings are wired.
You won’t have to link a payment method as the cost of PUTs are paid using Safe Network Tokens, which live on the network. When you create your account you will pay a few tokens, and you want to make sure you have some more tokens there as well so you can PUT stuff on the network.
If the cost of PUTting text on the network ends up around this number I don’t think people will have any issue. If you are able to make ten thousand forum posts for one cent (USD) worth of tokens, then you’ll be able to make one million posts for the cost of one dollar worth of tokens. I don’t think anyone would have an issue with this, but we will have to see where the cost ends up.
You write that the only solution is to have the site originator pay for all puts on message boards. This system already exists in the shape of the regular Internet. Like this message board for example, where someone is paying for the hosting, big thanks to them! This also means though that it’s up to them what happens with what we post on this forum. They can just remove all of it suddenly if they want.
It would be the same on the safe network, they would have ultimate control over who has access to that data on the network for instance if they paid for the PUTs.
The Safe Network turns this on its head by giving the ownership and power of people’s data to the individuals. This means that the cost of each person’s data needs to be paid by each individual. It’s technically possible to pay for others’ PUTs, so you can build software that does that on the network if that’s what you want to do. That’s not the point of the network though.
Many mobile phones are billed at a small rate per sms, per megabyte, per 30s of talk, per month. People have no problems there because it’s not a burden, the management of it is very simple.
Similar situation with many internet plans and landline telephones. We also pay every time we use an atm, or do a card payment at a shop. There are frequent small fees all over the place.
I don’t see why safe network will be limited by it, especially if the user experience is done well.
Some people may see it as a negative, that’s fine, but many people will see pay-to-store as a positive since it means they know who’s getting what (which can’t be said for most free services on the internet which are very opaque about their flow of value).
Someone has to say it - and maybe, just maybe, people will think a little bit harder before publishing that picture of the blueberry smoothie they had for brunch
Another thing to consider is how Brave browser works.
You get a small balance from getting ads, and you can tip websites when you want to. It’s a very easy user experience.
With the Safe network, you’ll be able to earn SNT by farming very easily, plus likely also through third party ad services similar to brave.
If a small balance were required to post / upload, but it’s very easy to earn, buy, or receive SNT, and seemless to spend it, then I really don’t think it’ll it be a problem for many people.
I think someone will develop a bounty system for desired media. All the data exists already, duplicated all over the world. It just needs to be uploaded to the network. Once the system is proven and the torrent folks realize they can 1. upload their stash without fear of it getting taken down 2. Get paid to upload popular content if they are first to the bounty and 3. Use all that idle space they currently have to farm, I think you’ll quickly see a wave of people from this community come on board. These guys are already paying for downloads from Usenet services, hard drives to store stuff, and all those fancy must-have tracker sites. That all goes away and everything becomes so much easier.
TL;DR I don’t think people will pay to upload popular media. I think a market will develop organically to pay for the upload costs.
Perhaps you are already aware, but if not, this has been subject to one of the most long-running and extensive discussions on the forum. Brace yourself!
On the face of it relatively straightforward to implement, but the implications could be significant in any number of ways. Anyway… off down the rabbit hole you go!
I expect the bounty system being suggested here is much more likely something with human guidance / governance rater than an automated network function.
I like the concept of automated ptp, but can’t yet see a way it could work without being easily gamable.
