Thatās it, problem solved!
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But no, they gotta have their big math problems solved, to be successfully mined into existence. And thereās a finite limit
But seriously, can you come up with a reason for why free SAFE data storage wouldnāt work?
My argument (well, guesswork) is that farmers will earn safecoins even when the data storage is free, so there will be enough incentive to keep the SAFE network going. And a proof of concept is Bitcoin, where miners earn bitcoins without the users having to pay for the service (except transaction fees that may increase as the bitcoin miner reward gets halved over time).
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Safecoin can become a better currency than bitcoin, and farming a better way of earning coins than mining. Thatās a huge potential for a very large number of people becoming farmers. And because of the small incentive for running large farms, the network will remain decentralized and sustained.
This will in turn enable massive resources in the form of data storage, communication and computing power. And making all those resources free for users will promote a fast expansion of the network. Safecoin will become popular because of very fast transaction times, anonymity and zero transaction fees, with the same level of security as the existing cryptocurrencies today.
And as I wrote in an earlier post, the incentive for grabbing a huge amount of data storage isnāt there, since when all the data storage is already free for users then all the business models building on that will fail. When people are given a choice between free data storage and pay-for data storage, all other things being equal, they will choose the free alternative. Even people who could afford to pay a lot would find the free alternative better since itās easier to use.
So why the need to pay for SAFE data storage? Is that just to make it easier for competitors to outcompete the network by offering a free decentralized network? /s Or is it a belief that there will not be enough data resources to go around? It seems to me that farming safecoins will be such a powerful concept that the SAFE network will have data resources in overabundance no matter how much load users (including spammers etc) will put on it.
Instead of as in Bitcoin where miners are rewarded bitcoins for performing transactions, farmers will earn safecoins by providing storage space etc. The value of bitcoin is in the service provided by the Bitcoin system, just as the value of safecoin will be in the services provided by the SAFE network.
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I disagree:
You are right, that IS guesswork and there is not much need to come up with a reason why free storage wouldnĀ“t work. Much rather YOU should provide a reason how it could work. Let me ask you:
- How do you exclude people from free storage? Answer: you donĀ“t want to.
- LetĀ“s say you provide people with 100MB free space, which is really not a lot: how do you make sure that this is not exploited by a bot? Answer: you canĀ“t.
- How will farmer earn safecoins if anyone has to pay? Answer: they can only earn if someone pays. However, as long as the system can be gamed easily, people wonĀ“t feel the need to act solidarily. The more free space is used, the less attractive it is to buy and earn Safecoin, while at the other hand provision of storage costs users real ressources.
- What will users do then? Answer: Obvious: they will a) shut down their storage because they either feel they are making a bad deal (commercial farmers) or exploited (altruist farmers) and b) use SAFE for free as long as it is possible (which is not long since people will shut down their farms the less interest there is in Safecoin.
The idea you have is that of a perpetuum mobile. Fork your version of SAFE and try to run it - choose your amount of BTC and we put it on escrow - IĀ“ll bet against you.
I have actually been thinking (as a fun thought experience) about doing an A/B test with A as a network where people have to pay for data storage and B as a network where all resources are free. Probably not something that would be doable in practice (too much conflicts between the networks) but anyway.
My idea with a free network is that the farmers will earn safecoins for providing resources. Money out of thin air! That might sound implausible except that Bitcoin has shown that the concept is possible and works in practice. Many people will start farming to earn safecoins. There will be more data resources available than the users will be able to use. And that will continue as the network grows. The scarce resource will be end user participation, not data resources. Making the resources free lessens that bottleneck in the system.
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uhā¦no? Bitcoin is NOT money out of thin air, never was since the 2nd miner joined the protocol. Bitcoin is money resulting from competition. Read your manuals.
Again, my offer is up. Prove the feasibility of your āexperienceā. You choose the amount of BTC, I bet against.
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The competition among miners is just a consequence of the Bitcoin protocol. The real value is that Bitcoin enables decentralized transactions without middlemen. Safecoin offers the same thing and in a superior way. So the ability to farm safecoins is all that is needed to make SAFE work. No need to put a cost on the data resources. Think about it like this: Will people farm safecoins even when all the resources are free for the users? Hell yes! The reason why there arenāt many bitcoin miners today is because you need a hideous amount of hashing power to compete. Farming safecoins can easily be done with an old PC.
You are wrong on so many levels that I feel discouraged to answer to all logical fallacies in your post. If you seriously believe competition among miners is ājust a consequence of the protocolā and has anything to do with Bitcoins value, you need to learn a lot more about currencies (which are at their core based on scarcity, not on some sort of estimated cultural value as you prefer to believe).
Again: the bet is up. Put your money where your mouth is.
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Bitcoin uses a proof of work algorithm, with miners competing to find a proof for each block in the blockchain. Some other cryptocurrencies use proof of stake to achieve the same functionality. And safecoin uses proof of resource to generate coins.
The scarcity in bitcoins is determined by a fixed formula. The scarcity for safecoins is the data resources provided by the farmers. And here is the trick: farmers, I estimate, will generate more data resources than the users will be able to use. So the actual determining scarcity for the SAFE network is user engagement. And therefore the SAFE data resources can, and should, be made free for users to prevent an increased bottleneck.
Then what about inflation? As the SAFE network grows there will be more and more safecoins generated, which is an inflation of the money supply. This inflation is however counterbalanced by the increased usage of the system. And since the most scarce resource is user engagement, the generation of new safecoins will automatically be restrained by how much people use the system.
The actual value of safecoin will be determined by exchange markets. The beneficial attributes (see below) of safecoin compared to other cryptocurrencies will ensure that the market value of safecoin remains high enough (given that safecoin will remain competitive in the future).
Some of the benefits of safecoin compared to bitcoin:
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Secure wallet. With bitcoin people need to store their bitcoins in paper wallets or use other complicated solutions to keep their bitcoins safe.
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Anonymous payments. Bitcoin payments are only psudanonomous and special ad hoc solutions are needed in order to try to achieve true anonymity.
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Fast transactions. Bitcoin takes around 10 minutes to make one confirmation, and 6 confirmations are recommended for really secure transactions.
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Millions of transactions per second. Bitcoin at the moment only allows around 7 transactions per second.
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Zero transaction fees. Bitcoin transactions usually need to have a fee added in order to be processed reasonably fast. Complicated estimations are needed to optimize the transaction fees.
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Instead of trying to teach others what they already know you should better teach yourself about how Safecoin is supposed to work:
a) āThe scarcity in bitcoins is determined by a fixed formula. The scarcity for safecoins is the data resources provided by the farmersā
yes, scacity in bitcoins is determined by a fixed formula and SO IT IS with safecoin
b) "And here is the trick: farmers, I estimate, will generate more data resources than the users will be able to use. So the actual determining scarcity for the SAFE network is user engagement. "
The actual determining scarcity is determined by the code, user engagement regulates VALUE. Also your ātrickā or āestimationā is pure guesswork. If users have free access to space, 1 person can write bot to fill it up with garbage. You failed to address this case (for good reasons).
c) āThen what about inflation? As the SAFE network grows there will be more and more safecoins generated, which is an inflation of the money supply.ā
Safecoin as it is designed right now is essentially deflationary. There is a limited number of Safcoin. Look it up. What you write is plainly wrong.
Really, get your records straight. You donĀ“t know about what youĀ“re talking - and the fact that you reject to challenge me shows that you donĀ“t believe in what youĀ“re writing eitherā¦
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Thatās easy to change. Simply generate safecoins by how much the farmers produce.
A so-called storage flood attack. Well, I just made up that term. If there is vast overcapacity in the system, then the farmers could easily swallow such attacks. So the incentive for such attacks would be eliminated. EDIT: And also, even with a 100 Mbit/s upload speed it would take 24 hours to upload a single 1 TB file.
much talk with not much substantial behind imhoā¦
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Iām shooting from the hip to test possibilities. I find that useful as a way to learn more about how SAFE works. Itās easier for me to āgrokā it when I try to come up with my own solutions, even if they turn out to be unsustainable. So I wouldnāt bet on my proposal (because there are likely some key things I have missed).
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I think @Anders has made an excellent and clear case that neither you nor @janitor have been able to answer. And heās remained patient and very polite despite you both being rude to him, a violation of forum guidelines BTW
Moderator Comment
I wonder if you became rude because you either havenāt understood his reasoning, or have understood but donāt have an answer. Whatever the reason, please keep to facts and avoid rudeness.
Returning to the debateā¦
To summarise, bitcoin would appear to be very similar to @Andersā modified SAFEnetwork. The criticisms Iāve seen of his idea are also ones that could be made of bitcoin.
For example, the flood attack is akin to transaction spam. With bitcoin it is discouraged because, while cheap, it still incurs a cost. The same applies to a data flood attack. So long as the network can handle it the attacker has little to gain and real money to lose. To win, the attacker must completely destroy the network - a temporary outage wonāt do this, so they must stain an attack for long enough to cause a unrecoverable collapse in usage and/or farming - AND the attacker must get enough value from this to justify a potentially enormous expenditure. The more I think about this the less likely it seems, and as I pointed out, bitcoin has the same kind of vulnerability.
They are not identical systems obviously, but before bitcoin was working, I imagine the same kinds of doubt were raised. Yet so far, it works, even despite some very significant shortcomings that wonāt apply to Safecoin.
Maybe this is why @dirvineās original plan was similar to this, but with a cap on total Safecoin, as is the case with bitcoin. Perhaps he had in mind introducing something like a transaction free, rather than @Andersā suggestion of āSafecoin QEā.
I wonder if @dyamanaka can add anything to this discussion with one of his analyses!?
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tellāem @happybeing !
this rudeness and condescending tone (with no justification; itās not like he actually knows more!!) has gotta stop
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Because growing a whole other physical network is hugely important. How can SAFE be safe even over the short term when its physical network is in large part sublet through hostile and even malicious ISPs and governments. I have a strong feeling that storage is not scarce, almost every other resource is more so. SAFE interests me because its a beginning of a rejection of the idiotic greed equals legitimate power model which is killing the planet putting everyone at grave risk, not to mention ruining quality of life. What comes after the market, the state and the and the corporation? Its the global search network that is stable, not constrained on resources or speed with strong privacy and security and crucially its one by its very design will always be owned and controlled completely by its end users. Its very much a model of the organizations we need.
The core of the network ought to be the nodes in our pockets because that is as hardened and as decentralized as it will get. SAFE has to take on a complete hardware incarnation quickly. Maybe it becomes a handset maker. Maybe you can fab your own to SAFE spec.
ok @happybeing enlight meā¦ what was that obviously excellent point that I missed?
Actually I think you missed the point reading your ānon-moderatorā part. Do you remember that this debate is and was essentially about using SAFE for free? ThatĀ“s why the comparison to transaction spam doesnĀ“t work out: as you point out yourself transaction spam COSTS and if carried out by a bot, sooner or later the bot runs out of funds. With free storage on SAFE as proposed by @Anders you can spam the system FOR FREE. @Anders argument or - as he states - ātrickā is: he estimates that there are more ressources than users are able to use. Mere guessing and empirically unlikely, because if there was free storage and if it could be used by a bot then it WILL be gamed by a bot. Of course you can go ahead and argue that āfew people would bother abusing the systemāā¦ but, yes, thatĀ“s pretty naive imho. You donĀ“t even need few people. You just need 1 bot - thatĀ“s it.
The only solution would be some sort of unique key per user, but as we know this is (for good reasons) impossible in a decentralized system. Instead (as has been argued in this thread) you could create an App such as Google Drive that provides users with free space, but this as well will need some sort of regulation because it will be gamed. For the same reason the initial idea to have free public and paid private content wonĀ“t work out - and if anyone would have liked to prove this point on a running network it could have been done by writing the spamming script in my own. Fees are needed to prevent spammers - they donĀ“t need to be high, but yes, without them itĀ“s just a matter of time until solidarity is weakened by exploits (or the mere belief that an exploit takes place)ā¦
Then, the reference to Bitcoin: itĀ“s not working, because it is ill-informed: From the moment when there was a second miner (to be strict: from the very first usage of the protocol) Bitcoin could NOT be created out of thin air, as @Anders believes. That is actually something that people SAID about Bitcoin but was never true. There was always a threshold that costed real money if miners wanted to own Bitcoin and thatĀ“s where scarcity evolved slowly. ItĀ“s the same as arguing that in the future ādata storage and bandwidth will become essentially freeāā¦ that is never going to happen - not only because MooreĀ“s law also concerns usage, but also because infrastructures need to be sustained. There is always an (at least tiny) amount that you have to pay even for your bits.
In the proposed scenario there is no need to buy Safecoin to store data because if you wanted, you could do it for free. Once the system gets spammed with āfree spaceā, farmers earn less because their chances to receive a pay out drop massively.
IĀ“d also like to point out that several arguments were based on wrong information, such as the model of distribution: The scarcity of Safecoin is not related to the space provided, but to an algorithm and it is not inflationary.
So to summarise from my perspective: I donĀ“t see the āexcellent clear caseā and you really made me curious. DonĀ“t mix up critical commenting with rudeness. If I read something and think that itĀ“s hogwash, I wonĀ“t tell the opposite.
PS: My offer to bet against a freebie-model goes for you as well.
Ohā¦and I find it bit ironic that you claim a violation of the guidelines and then ālikeā a post that is obviously a violation of the guidelinesā¦
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Is spam a good enough reason to stop thinking about it?
There seems to be a chicken and egg problem for some users. If you have a PC youāll never have to pay for storage as long as you have a sufficient amount of storage to contribute right? But on mobile you might have to pay because its a leaner proposition? People having to pay upfront wonāt be a model that drives the system on the consumer level or in the developing world. Also at some point, probably when the distributed computing is offered there will have to be a deep consideration of the value offered in SAFE coins for the specifics of the storage and the quality of access and coins for processing etc.