In this RFC we have this:
It is assumed clients will pay at least one safecoin to create an
account. This payment will be converted immediately to Mb of storage
space and the client can query this figure at any time.
In my opinion this is a very big mistake.
WHY?
Most people will want to open the first account in the SAFE network to gain some Safecoin in farming. If we forced to have a safecoin (how?) or spend the first won Safecoin to acquire space, the feeling is that the safe network takes away the profits of your work. In fact, psychologically is worse: “The safe network stole my money”. This can be devastating for the network.
Of course, sooner or later, everyone will need to spend safecoin to use the network for things like send messages but we cannot force to do that from the beginning. This must be a natural and free process.
So I think is better allow the creation of accounts and farming without obligation to spend Safecoin.
In this case we have the problem of the account creation attack. To deal with that we can force, in the creation process, the new node perform some calculation, a kind of simple POW. (ej. sign some random data from the group). The idea, as always, is “easy for the network, harder for the possible attacker”.