Vault experience on live network

Beginners
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The experience for new users running vaults is important because when they start running a vault they want to see they’re contributing in a useful way.

To give some prior background to this topic; bitcoin mining at the start was as simple as running some software and waiting to see if you found a block. Over time mining gradually increased in complexity. Now it’s an industrial pursuit with a lot of research and calculations and optimizations. The experience of being a bitcoin node or miner has changed a lot over the years.

Considering the SAFE vault experience in the early days of the network, it seems that users will run the software and gradually receive and store chunks, serving data as it’s requested.

But a little down the track, when the network has grown, I think this experience will be very different.

When the network is larger, a ‘modest’ user would have their vault allocation immediately consumed due to the churn event their vault induces. So the very first experience of running a vault will be ‘download X GB’ (depending on your vault config). Maybe the number of chunks received will be throttled for new vaults? None-the-less, the main barrier to starting a vault seems to be the initial churn download.

After receiving the chunks the user will wait for some get requests to hopefully farm some safecoin.

They will also wait for their node rank to increase via the ageing mechanism.

Maybe some users will look to the routing messages as another indicator of being a useful ‘contributor’ to the network.

As the network grows, the chance of get requests for small vaults becomes greatly reduced but the initial download requirement will not. This reduces the incentive to become a small farmer.
 confirmation of this assumption still pending!

I don’t have any particular point to make here, but it does seem that the initial vault experience will change quite significantly as the network matures.

When I started bitcoin mining it was fun to track hash rate, power consumption, gpu temperatures, pool shares, etc… I’m wondering what will make the vault farming experience compelling, especially to new operators?

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Farming games for starters :slight_smile:

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I think one innovation that has already been slated for building is router-vaults.

Other innovations will be purpose built vaults. Small SBC + Drive

And as others have said they will run vaults using “cloud” servers.

So the concept of using one’s spare resources has already expanded to purpose built devices/systems before SAFE is even in beta. I would say this is paralleling the ASIC devices for bitcoin mining.

The major difference I see between the path BTC mining took and the path farming will take is one that doesn’t require higher and greater computing (energy) but one that will require higher and greater connection speeds.

For some this connection speed optimisation is easy since they already have Gbit/sec available at their home. But at this time not so easy/cheap for most.

Also the purpose built hardware is towards the smaller cheaper and less power consumption devices & plug-n-play which is in the realms of being bought by the ordinary 1st world person, whereas bitcoin miners require more expense (cost&power) and require a good deal of expertise.

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I’m not sure your scenario is accurate, but I agree with the overall point that we should consider the experience of different potential and new farmers and cater to help and interest them.

Primarily I think this should be by providing useful, accurate information about what they can expect, what is happening, and how they can improve things by altering what is in their control.

I think for any vault it will be feasible to provide:

  • status wrt age/ranking (a list of ‘achievements’, what they mean in terms of farming, and what is necessary to move from one to the next)
  • farm rate such as expected time to SafeCoin reward (I think it will be possible to use network related status information combined with vault status and paramaters such as vault size, CPU, bw etc. Information can be provided on what can improve or hurt rate, and perhaps even a suggestion that the limiting factor at this time is X).

Those could be the headlines, but many will want to delve deeper and see the underlying factors and watch them too [points at self]

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If we extend this to some form of farming game we could stretch the analogy to
Status - How many workers/tractors does your farm have – how efficient are your workers
Farm Rate - How much rain has fallen == How fast your crops grow

I think however the first app should be a little vault status widget for the Taskbar.

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