Cryptocurrencies are really great, and safecoin can become the best so far. However, I want to examine it from a really large and long-term perspective. Then the following occurs to me: Money is the hallmark of a primitive society. In the future it’s information and user engagement that will be valuable, and money will basically become just an additional burden and overhead.
Already today, scientific studies have shown that when people are given money depending on how well they perform a task, then the performance overall will be better for simple tasks. But for more advanced tasks the opposite occurs! Instead of being an incentive for people to do better, the results become worse when money is used as a reward.
And simple and repetitive tasks, that’s what robotics and artificial intelligence soon will be much better at than humans. Money will quickly, historically speaking, become less and less important in society. And exponential progress in price/performance will ensure that this trend will continue.
Therefore, from a long-term perspective, it should be possible to use the SAFE network for ordinary use such as storing personal data and so on without the hassle of having to deal with safecoins.
No, you’ll always have to deal with Safecoins. You’ll just deal with a lot less for the same amount of data. Deflation is what you’re talking about, but money doesn’t go away unless value goes away.
Without money there is no way to express to the world how valuable something is to anyone else. So you need the Safecoins just to know how valuable content is, or data is.
But that value will likely be expressed in micropayments, and in fractions of a Safecoin instead of in whole Safecoins if the technology does deflate.
Anti-capitalism abundance at this point in time is mythology not science.
Oh noes! I think that it can be a large burden for many people even today (a practical burden even if it’s dirt cheap). We are used to use the Web today for free. Don’t get me wrong, it can be great fun to use cryptocurrencies, but to have a requirement that safecoins will always be needed for editing documents, uploading photos etc, that’s a major drawback imo.
I thought one of our principles is freedom? People are accustomed to being slaves, selling their freedom for the illusion of free services. Why the hell should SAFE Network duplicate that bullshit?
I suppose it should be up to the participants to decide but as a participant I would rather a world of micropayments where the costs are obvious than to have hidden costs and secret debts. I don’t want a mirror of the messed up culture of the current web to be imported into SAFE Network and if that happens I might not even use SAFE Network.
This isn’t to say that I don’t like the idea of deflation because it leads to the abundance we both want. I just don’t want to sacrifice freedom for cultural convenience.
Certain services are free (from monetary charge) today, such as consuming content and that will be the same in the SAFE Network. If you want to store data beyond a 5gb or so limit, for example, on the existing Internet, you need to pay. On the SAFE Network, rather than paying in cash, you are paying with safecoins that are automatically delivered into your wallet and seamlessly decremented when you use services, and topped up again when more of your vault is filled.
It is different from the status quo and that is why it is important that we educate people informing them of all the advantages of using SAFE (lets not forgot that those edited documents and photos will now be much more secure and private than before).
But also the choice of freedom from money would be good. Or at least a free quota. Google Docs for example is free to use up to a certain point. One good thing with the SAFE network as I understand it is that once a file is stored, that continued storage will be free forever. Another good thing with SAFE is that content can be viewed for free without horrible video ads forced onto the users. And anonymity and encryption by default. And no middlemen. A lot of good stuff like that. It’s just that it would be great if there was some kind of possibility to store a decent amount of personal data on SAFE without needing safecoins.
Yes and imagine the SAFE network having the same thing. That would really be great. Think of all the ordinary people running around with smartphones without being farmers. They could then upload a lot of photos at least. In practice that may be very difficult to solve I understand. People could abuse the free quota by registering lots of SAFE accounts.
And more than that, but I feel we have not yet evolved to a position where we can just yet. I personally feel money will become less of an issue like weapons (increasing numbers in civilisation do not need to carry weapons any more, for the better, arguably). Today we still value things including success in cash terms, which I feel we will evolve out of, but we need a minimum level of comfort to exist. When we all realise we do not need 15 bedroom mansions and 12 cars each then we will improve. At the moment unfortunately money is a great barter system, but who knows in the future when we are all doing what we love and contributing something then all that may change.
There are glimmers of hope that we will evolve past greed, but we are not there yet. It’s one thing bitcoin and others have shown for sure, that greed and money before morals is still prevalent, especially when there are several degrees of separation between the attacker and victim.
For now if we can at least make it fair and as well distributed as possible in a way that it is closer to a measure of productivity and not man in the middle siphoning then we are on the right track.
With a unique human ID I guess a free quota could be implemented in SAFE safely. Unfortunately that’s a really tricky problem to solve it seems. Maybe possible in the future! And a free storage quota can automatically and dynamically be calculated by the system. Data storage follows a similar trend as Moore’s law (I believe there even is some separate name for that law).
Anders Law, well it is now seriously, same with bandwidth and disk space and now with new disk interface techniques (multi-thread ssd etc.) then also with disk transfer rates (which for years was limited to 30-40 Mb/s). So we have near exponential growth in almost all areas we need to consider now, this is why we must design for tomorrow and not today. Makes backwards compatibility increasingly painful and possibly useless in many cases.
Not yet perhaps. But the exponential progress of technology must be taken into account. And today open source software is usually free. That will according to Ray Kurzweil soon also apply to physical products. Extrapolating the past history linearly is becoming more and more misleading. “An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense “intuitive linear” view. So we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century — it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate).” – http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns
That is no different from removing labels from food. Of course it benefits big corporations to remove labels from food so they can stuff people with shit, but it’s not good for consumers if the consumers don’t have information about the product.
Price signals are important. The whole freemium model is an illusion to trick people into giving up their real property in exchange for some centralized services. In decentralized space it is ridiculous to use freemium over micropayment when your only advantage over Google is you can have micropayments instead of freemium.
The reason to use SAFE Network is, people can use it without selling themselves into digital slavery, without whoring their attention for services, without confusing legalese terms of services which no one can read or make sense of.
SAFE Network provides mathematical certainty and that is a feature. It provides micropayments so that money can be used for what it was intended instead of just abused. Money is intended to be a form of communication, and because everything has some value there is nothing which is truly free.
Everything done on a computer costs resources. Everything done by a human costs resources. Both cost energy, and just as the human must eat, the computer must be fed electricity. The idea that somehow we should have human sacrifices who work for free, or that we should have physically impossible perpetual motion machines which somehow have unlimited energy so there is unlimited abundance, it is part of the problem because it denies physics and it eventually results in human enslavement.
A “free web” where no one makes money, which means there is no one to buy products and services, which means ultimately you’ll have everyone volunteering, working for free, and a very limited amount of rich people in rich countries can afford to do that. In poor countries people will be worked for nearly free just to try to keep up with the illusion of freemium, or people will be enslaved.
When you give your attention to advertisements you’re losing the most precious asset you have in your life. You’re losing conscious time. Google makes it’s money by taking your attention and auctioning it to advertisers in exchange for products and services. It’s not free and we need to stop perpetuating the idea that these services are free. It’s actually a form of barter only it is beneficial for large corporations because they own your digital life, they keep all the data, the content you generate legally belongs to them so that they can monetize it in other places in other ways.
Instead of doing that why not just let people know that to click on a certain link is going to cost a certain amount in Safecoin, and then let the money flow like blood through the veins of SAFE Network without any middlemen advertisers, without any “digital soul stealing”. Harvesting of “digital souls” should be the last resort unless we want “digital serfdom” as the first resort.
"I want to tell you about an experiment using the candle problem, done by a scientist named Sam Glucksberg, who is now at Princeton University, US, This shows the power of incentives.
He gathered his participants and said: “I’m going to time you, how quickly you can solve this problem.” To one group he said, “I’m going to time you to establish norms, averages for how long it typically takes someone to solve this sort of problem.”
To the second group he offered rewards. He said, “If you’re in the top 25% of the fastest times, you get five dollars. If you’re the fastest of everyone we’re testing here today, you get 20 dollars.” Now this is several years ago, adjusted for inflation, it’s a decent sum of money for a few minutes of work. It’s a nice motivator.
Question: How much faster did this group solve the problem?
Answer: It took them, on average, three and a half minutes longer. 3.5 min longer. This makes no sense, right? I mean, I’m an American. I believe in free markets. That’s not how it’s supposed to work, right?
If you want people to perform better, you reward them. Right? Bonuses, commissions, their own reality show. Incentivize them. That’s how business works. But that’s not happening here. You’ve got an incentive designed to sharpen thinking and accelerate creativity, and it does just the opposite. It dulls thinking and blocks creativity.
What’s interesting about this experiment is that it’s not an aberration. This has been replicated over and over again for nearly 40 years. These contingent motivators – if you do this, then you get that – work in some circumstances. But for a lot of tasks, they actually either don’t work or, often, they do harm. This is one of the most robust findings in social science, and also one of the most ignored." – Dan Pink: The puzzle of motivation | TED Talk
A look at Russian history can reveal what a serf was:
In digital serfdom often the lords will tell the peasants, you don’t have to own anything anymore, rent everything, it’s the sharing economy. Of course they own the land, they own their homes while you rent, they own their car while you rent, they own property while you’re sharing and renting. They might even own the stock in the companies like AirBnB, Uber, and all of those other sharing economy corporations.
Facebook is similar in that in order to use it you have to pay Facebook the company. Facebook owners then own whatever you provide to Facebook in terms of content, which they monetize as much as possible. In essence you are selling yourself and how much you are worth to Facebook is something like $100-120 a year and rising every year as technology improves. You’re giving them more than they are giving you or they would not be profitable, but they are giving you “psychic credit” while you’re giving them your “digital life” and “digital sovereignty”.
SAFE Network allows the SAFE participants to own the land. The land is owned through Safecoin, and the land is the computation resources which make everything possible, such as storage, bandwidth, computation, so in essence SAFE Network can be digitally sovereign.
The concept of Dead Souls:
Digital souls in this context are more similar to the context that lords use it.
A soul in this context is similar to a “consumer” in the current context, and a lord in the current context is similar to a corporation which owns souls. It owns in specific the data of consumers who due to lack of micropayments had to auction away their digital sovereignty, sacrifice their digital freedom, in exchange for services some of which they already had, like Email, or Word Processing.
There is a crossroad approaching. Do we want digital sovereignty, liberty, choice, real property ownership? Or do we want to rent everything, own nothing?
Do you want to be an owner or a renter? Should there be some balance in between? There are a lot of people who promote abundance but who think everything should be rented, your house, your car, etc. I can understand sometimes there re benefits to renting when it’s something immovable like a house. Digital data on the other hand is something which we need to give a lot more thought on. Digital self is either sovereign in which case you own it, or it’s not.
My post was really about the long-term scenario. But even today, the free quotas on Gmail and Google Drive are great imo. Think of what such free quota would do for the SAFE network. And believe me, it will be YUGE! That I can tell you. :Trump voice: More seriously though, a free quota will unfortunately likely be tricky to implement on SAFE. But as I wrote in another post, a genuine human ID would solve that. So in the future a free SAFE storage quota may be possible.
Yuck, sounds like the Zeitgeist movement. They are correct in that automation will make it possible to basically remove the need for money, but their centralized solution with sharing is horrible and unnecessary. Who would want to share their smartphone or even their car? Horrible. No, just 3D print the smartphone when you need it a la Star Trek style, and let it dematerialize by itself when not needed. (Of course, a smartphone in the year 2045 will be like a landline phone today in comparison.)
seriously, same with bandwidth and disk space and now with new disk interface techniques (multi-thread ssd etc.) then also with disk transfer rates (which for years was limited to 30-40 Mb/s). So we have near exponential growth in almost all areas we need to consider now, this is why we must design for tomorrow and not today. Makes backwards compatibility increasingly painful and possibly useless in many cases.