Suppose I make a messaging app for SAFE; every message sent is an upload that must be paid for in Safecoin. I know there are people that would be completely turned off by this, even if the price turns out to be 0.0005 USD or something extremely low like that
Some people simply don’t like the idea of paying for something, no matter how little it is. So would it be possible for the app itself to subsidize/pay for those uploads, so that its entirely free (gratis) to the end user?
This could also be used to offer promotional deals; i.e., “Use our app and send your first 100 messages free!” or something.
Yeah. It happens today, Gmail has server costs involved in sending messages, but they still offer it for free (although paid for with ads, selling your emails to companies, etc)
A SAFE version of this system could offer messaging for free, and earn farming rewards instead, or if MaidSafe decides against that then regardless, it will be very very easy for anyone with the means to donate SafeCoin micropayments to the app if they are finding it useful.
So yeah lots of ways this practice can continue on SAFE for free
Ah, so, I can purchase something like 1,000 PUTs (not sure what a reasonable number here would be) all at once, and then they’ll get automatically used when necessary as I use different apps? That’s pretty useful, if my understanding is correct.
Do you think it would be possible for the app to use it own PUTs when a user sends a message with it, so that they don’t have to? My intuition tells me no…
Yeah, I saw in the wiki that there’s a plan for App Builders to receive payments as their apps get used. Then, I’m thinking, that money could (if the developer wanted to) be used to subsidize their users upload costs for them. Kind of like how Gmail subsidizes message costs through advertising, as you mentioned, but on SAFE this model will not need advertising or data mining and thus can be more ethical
FYI: At the moment the purchase amount is to spend one SAFEcoin for a “PUT” balance.
The balance is decremented every time a “PUT” (send message say) by an amount determined by a factor of the “Farming Rate”
For instance today a “PUT” might reduce your balance by 0.0000000001 of a SAFEcoin and tomorrow it might reduce your balance by more or less. In the RFC the balance is stored in a 64 bit integer and reduced by a factor of the Farming Rate.
In effect you could get as low as 1 “PUT” per SAFEcoin (Extremely unlikely) to as high as around 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 PUTs per SAFEcoin. The amount each PUT reduces your “PUT” balance depends on the current state of the SAFEnetworks resource allocations which is expressed as a figure called as Farming Rate.
