App "Builders" don't get paid once their App gets "cached?"

No. Like I have said many times before, Open source Peer to peer platforms have been functioning rather healthily without payment for quite some time.

The payments ought to make it healthier than other protocols, but they are a bonus, not the main point. The point of the network is Security, privacy and freedom. The money is just a bonus.

Generating cache misses has the same difficulty as any other game in the MaidSAFE network. You don’t get to pick the hill to fight from. You don’t know which cache hold your data. You don’t know what vault holds your data. You don’t know what vaults have your data. You dont’ know which of those vaults is going to respond fastest. You don’t get to pick your own address to request from.

Gaming is very hard because you don’t get to have enough information to play strategically. And like I was saying before you only improve your chances a bit when you win – you don’t actually win when you win and there is a limit to how much you can win.

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Can’t I just upload a very huge file, and do a GET every 10.1 minutes until the end of time?

Go for it.

It will likely take you a long time before you recover your cost to upload it. And 10 minutes is a hard coded timeframe at the moment for test, but unlikely to be that on release. Remember that its 1/10 of what the farmer gets and the farmers only receives a reward once every so many gets

I guess the best way would be to upload really large files when the cost for uploads is at its minimum and game it when they are high (farming get rewards will be higher too)

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Maybe. But you are one person on on X/OR path. Pretty useless.

If you up your stat a hair and get it cached along that path – you get a slightly larger chance to win a portion of whatever is being given away – It’s gotta be worth your time to be worth doing at all.

The bigger the network the more insignificant your chances – and the more people that try, the bigger the network gets, thus reducing the odds. And these are odds to change the odds, not odds to win outright.

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For a while now, I figured that app devs would use safenet as a free backend while their respective app grew a sizable user base, and then make a fork more conducive to their goals and push their user base on the fork through an update. The safenet forks themselves would be similar enough to the original safenet so that, along other reasons, Maidsafe’s updates to the core program would be applicable to the forks. Maidsafe would then end up in a similar situation to the linux foundation, where start-ups would use the network for a free backend, and more established companies would throw money and code at maidsafe so that they don’t have mess with the network code themselves.

Now that it is confirmed that app devs won’t get money from cached data access, I’d say that this contingency is all but inevitable.

I think you are reading more into that than anything that was said by David.

I think the more accurate portrayal would be Apps will be paid by the network in proportion to their popularity up to a proportional limit.

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Which means that the app dev that makes the next facebook/google and hosts it on safenet, they won’t make facebook/google amounts of safecoin. I grant on it’s own this isn’t a big deal, as obviously the current internet doesn’t give rewards and costs money, and people still host their webapps on that. However, the safe network has other sticking points that app devs won’t like at all and I see this in combination with the other sticking points being what will make app devs use the safenet (if not a competitor) as a temporary backend only.

Yes, but if the next facebook takes all of the rewards the next RUST gets nothing. The way it is, it gets spread around a bit.

I suspect the “Walled Garden” aspect of SAFE is going to be a much bigger issue than any revenue model. The revenue is a plus only.

What do you mean by this? Isn’t 10% of all rewards for each GET coin award success given to the developer?
Won’t the dev of the popular app then spend coin or sell coin, which will be recycled into SAFE for further distribution in further successful GET awards? How will one app ‘dominate’ in this way?

Am I missing something? If the APP reward coins were finite, I could understand this viewpoint. Will there come a time when App devs receive zero reward for their apps?

Yes. They are unlimited.

Some folks are upset because only GETs count towards payments and Cached requests don’t get entries…

The way it is currently set up there is only so much one app can earn before it is continually cached and maxes out. If you write the next facebook, chances are you are going to be cached nearly continuously, and will only get the GETS that it takes to maintain the Cache. Effectively this caps your proportion of the rewards. You won’t be able to get 80 or 90% of the rewards being given out – All of the continuously cached apps will all wind up hitting the limit. But this limit isn’t a $$$ amount it’s a proportional limit. If the network grows large enough that the next facebook is hosted on it there will be tons of money to support both the author, and other app builders as well – The rising tide lifts all boats. But it cannot as it’s currently programmed raise a single boat beyond a certain limit.

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OK, so your comment meant that if one app got enough GET requests, then it could potentially exhaust all (EDIT: or 90%) ‘available-at-the-time’ SAFEcoin held by the network for payouts, and that is a good reason for the effective cap?

Like I said above – The network is about serving files – If you bury it in accounting and payment tasks you wind up devoting more resources than is needed watching the network rather than delivering content… If the network doesn’t get delivering content right, nobody will bother with the network.

GETS is a good enough measurement to determine if something is worthy of reward… It’s a lottery ticket anyway…

So Facebook Twitter dropbox become continuously cached – They get 100 lottery tickets each and cannot earn anymore unless the network grows. Because it takes 100 GETS an hour to keep the caches moderately up to date. Other apps may get 20, may get 5 may get 50 etc. But Even if facebook has a million billion users the caches will only fill as big as the network is – the result is that facebook twitter etc would cap out and everyone who didn’t would have a shot at rewards too – Which is a good thing – they probably need the money worse… SAFE is building the datacenters after all…

(Numbers are totally hypothetical and for demonstration purposes only.)

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So my understanding is correct (my last question)?

If so, it makes a lot of sense.

Also, from this (and @dirvine 's comments in another thread) :

As the network grows, the number of pathways between the original data chunks and the end-user increases, and so does the income via increased GET requests (but not as a percentage, as all apps will, in theory, benefit from an expanded network), because each individual pathway has to cache the chunk to hit the cap.

Yes, it makes sense now. I forget we are not dealing with a free-market in data storage, because there is no market in GETting from the users viewpoint. Because the payment to the farmers and devs is completely unhinged from the demands of the consumer (meaning price-wise), we can’t look at SAFE in the same way as the wider economy (in a truly free market). Otherwise my reply would be “Perhaps they deserve that income, and it doesn’t stop anyone else from competing with them.” But this is not so with SAFE, due to the way that it is structured. Also, this is probably (atm) the only way to do SAFE practically. Nobody wants to pay for Facebook on the current internet anyway, so having a market in paid GET’s would not be smart.

Now the remaining thing is this only needs to make sense for the app developers.

I believe the analogy from early on was “Rewards fall like rain” And that is pretty accurate… You plant the seeds the rain falls and the harvest is collected… It isn’t a seed for seed raindrop for raindrop thing – If you plant a million more seeds on the same acre of ground you don’t get more wheat…

The farmer gets more direct rain – and a lot more of it – but the developers get splashed too… And it is all good.

It’s important to remember that nobody is owed the rain. It’s all for the good… And it only comes if the network is compelling enough to draw the users to seed the clouds.

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Well, if I cook food for you and you want to eat it, I can choose to give it to you. But if I do that 18 hours a day (like I do with dev work), then I’m likely to want to be paid in exchange. I do occasionally give away meals, because it makes me feel good. So do you ‘owe’ me the money for the food? No. But neither do I ‘owe’ you the food. Or the apps.

The crux of all this is that if SAFE proves to be not profitable whatsoever for devs who wish (and need!) to be paid (to live), then app development will come slowly, and apps may not have the same quality as they could have.

Me, I’ll work on a couple and see how it goes. But if it doesn’t pay me back, then I’ll be forced to do other work in lieu of SAFE apps.

Exactly.

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Remember that APPs can ask for payment if the system rewards are not enough. Whether one wants to charge is up to the developer and that the APP will be used if charged for. No good charging for an APP that no one would pay for :smile:

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Also apps will generate payments as users GET data with them. So not only when downloading the app.

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Good point. Expanding on that, a dev can perhaps start off a basic version (1.0) of their app, and only receive the network rewards (+data GETs, as per @dirvine below), to test the idea. While it wouldn’t test whether people would pay for it, it would test how much people liked it, indicating whether selling it would be a viable option.

I didn’t know about this. So a portion of the GETs the app makes is paid out to the dev. Is this as per the same 10% formula as with downloading?

Yes it is. …

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