So there is no fixed cap like with bitcoin? As people store more data more coins are payed out to farmers? Someone said there was 4.3 billion coins - is this just for launch?
The cap is 4.3 billion as stated. The network charges for storage, so this replenishes section wallets.
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I think that would be great. Iām going to agree with @bittog9 that one of the features of blockchain that many analysts find attractive to boast about it being better monetary policy is for one the novelty of understanding how it works, but most importantly the audit-ability and being able to use on chain metrics to track use/behavior. On the last part about use/behavior I also think this is a manipulative tool to drive prices higher. There are clear accumulation phases and when that cycle is done and corresponding about with the halving of block rewards then coins move off exchanges and then donāt move, that is tracked and then analysts say āhey see look how bullish this is? The big players arenāt sellingā
So Iām not advocating for this so that itās all about the money and profit but there is an element there that since this network works for us, it shouldnāt know anything about us but we should know as much about it as possible to really trust it. What people do beyond that may be profit seeking but at least it could drive adoption for the benefit of all.
Iād also add the caveat that weāre an entirely different network that will have a completely different narrative. Bitcoin is clearly āstore of value, digital goldā itās meant to park money but also do settlement. Safe Network will be mainly about utility, general internet and app usage, and making money move, though the security could be a great way to store say BTC keys or other forms of wealth. So a different beast.
One popular metric that could be useful is active addresses. That has been being used by the likes of Raoul Pal and others as a way of measuring adoption and Metcalfeās Law.
I have always liked the idea of receipts personally but only if optional. People will have to keep that in mind from an OpSec POV, unless there was a shield feature when sending from a publicly known account? But receipts or proof of purchase are important in many cases.
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Whether wasteful or not, Bitcoin will continue if it serves its purpose better than other alternatives. Governments and big corps have the major tool of being able to squeeze at the conversion points, exchanges, commerce points, etc.
The advantage that SAFE will have is when it exerts its power of truly decentralized Secure Access For Everyone, with privacy, security and freedom, allowing more and more people to directly participate in ways that the ābig playersā canāt influence at a fundamental level.
Does that mean the SNT will replace Bitcoin? Perhaps, but I donāt see SNT standing in as an unlimited store of value in the way BTC is arcing. Could be wrong, but its direct tie to the commodity of information security and exchange, requiring it to be spent, will likely prevent hedging against other currencies in the same way. It will certainly go WAY up in value, but it serves a different purpose than BTC.
All the hopes riding on top of the gold-substitute value of BTC (secure records/auditible transactions/. . . all the aspects on top of gold equivilants) should be better and more efficiently covered by SAFE, eventually.
Iām thinking that other tokens on top of the Safe Network will start to shine and take over those monetary functions. Perhaps even BTC will eventually be burned to transfer its value to a more efficient platform as mining becomes noncompetitive as an expensive security measure, creating a SAFE BTC store of value out of its historic investment with tons of energy previously poured into its creation.
Other tokens on SAFE will have to prove their value by whatever metric gives people confidence, group appeal or unique function: SAFE Ether, SAFE Doge?
The looking glass gets very foggy, but I think these factors are relevant.
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I still think the āWhat Bitcoin did for money, Safe Network does for data.ā Is such a short and sweet message to open people up.
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Very well put @Nigel could not agree more.
This is what I was trying to articulate (poorly) Both systems will have a role in the new decentralised world. But yes I could see SAFE taking over in the long run. But we wont be around to witness that.
Sorry @happybeing Iām still confused. Iām getting mixed messages. When I asked @dirvine what happens when the 4.3 billion runs out he said as new requests are made new SNT is minted. So if its minted out of the 4.3 billion at some point this will run out. Or is there no real cap and new SNT are minted past the 4.3 billion as needed? It might be 100 years from now when all the SNT are minted or 500. Surely we are wanting this network to last foreverā¦
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The only reason the Safe Network token (SNX) wouldnāt displace BTC as both serious money and store of value is if Safe fails to adopt the same simple, clear, perceived fair, and predictable economic approach as BTC. Right now, Safe still has some complexity on that front. One example of that complexity is with PtD. When Elon Musk eventually sets up a meme app on Safe and unleashes his twitter army to use it, he would exploit PtD to farm SNX at will and effortlessly. Such a development would spell a number of consequences for the network including security and value perception.
The value of the Safe token in fiat only matters initially to attract participants, most of whom wonāt be interested unless they see ānumber go upā. Past this point, the value of the Safe token in fiat (whether astronomical or not) wonāt matter because the idea would be for most things to be directly priced in SNX, meaning that there will be token movement regardless of people using it as a store of value (think back to the days when gold was used as both store of value and value transfer).
As @MaidSafe hired a CRDT expert, they should hire an economic expert to simplify and solidify the Safe token economics. Itās the only remaining serious weakness I see for the network, and unfortunately, it might be where lots of newcomers will be looking first.
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I may not be clear. As folk pay for services those payments are paid to resource providers etc,
So mint or re-mint is not new money. A mint in dbc is reallocating existing money. As folk pay the network, then network takes that to pay resource providers.
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The hard cap is 4.3B but as far as how long it takes for those to be minted has not been decided yet AFAIK.
Best way to think of Safe Networks resource based economy is as the token supply being recycled. Maidsafe (I believe) coined the term farming because of their analogy of having to do work (provide resources) PoR to earn tokens. At the same time though, clients that are paying for storage or other future network resources, pay those to the network that buries or burns these coins to be farmed again. At least that was the original concept.
@dirvine correct me if Iām wrong but I think recently there was talk of having clients pay directly to farmers?
But regardless I believe the genesis token supply can be as low as it needs to be for the original Investorās, crowdsale tokens, PtD rewards, B2TF funding round match, to exist and then as the network grows naturally and sections split them the supply can grow proportionally towards that 4.3B supply. Hopefully over a long period of time since we have so much divisibility which should make early investors and app creators happy.
So again I think it harkens back to being able to as predictably as possible know as much about the monetary and economic part of the network.
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This is something that is certainly being considered as a means to remove the abilty for sections to have no authority in rewards. Itās a bit of a long shot right now but feels like the kind of left field and simple idea that may be useful. In any case your post is correct. I feel that there is a chance we make it that the initial reward held in sections can be limited right up to 2^256 sections, which really means they are never fully paid out. Lots of these ideas can now be tested and focussed on, well not immediately, but in a few weeks. The key to me is simplicity and likely it will mean something so weird sounding at first then it should be completely obvious when we think about it. (bitcoin was the same)
This is where we can show the economics of it all acting as I believe it should, simple and obviously secure.
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The store of value inside BTC is not clear for me
But the value inside SNT is clear for me.
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Opinions about proof-of-waste/consumption are getting stronger, and this is the sort of opinions weāll be having to contend with when Safe Network launches. The quotes below are just from the top level comments on hacker news about chia, thereās so much negativity, and when you go deeper into the comments it generally gets even more negative. I wonder when these same people see Safe Network doing useful work, what will they think? (Not trying to judge the validity of the claims, Iām trying to point out the negative sentiment)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27009843
the waste ā¦ but instead of blowing up the market for GPUs itāll be SSDs
kind of wish someone would build a proof-of-bandwidth crypto
Is there a better system than proof of stake, in terms of just not being absurdly wasteful in terms of energy or storage capacity?
If only someone could invent a cryptocurrency that incentivises something good instead of something harmful.
another item [ssds] that will be impossible to buy soon
First we had proof of work, now we have proof of space. Both are rather wasteful.
When do we stop this madness.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27008295
I declare war on hegemonizing proof-of-waste swarms. Burn the coins. I want that disk space back.
So now we are out of chips, CPUs, GPUs and hard drives.
If HDDs/SSDs end up as obtainable as GPUs, we are going to experience some serious troubles
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27001848
First crypto took marginal GPU and energy capacity. Now it is taking SSDs. It has so far produced nothing except higher values measured in fiat.
Uselessly filling storage devices incurs a needless and wasteful environmental cost, just the same as computing hashes does
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26975734
Proof-of-space may be the closest thing we have to a viable proof-of-work replacement but this instantiation of it feels like a get rich quick scheme for its founders.
While itās true that proof space is less energy intensive to āfarmā, wouldnāt economics dictate that the resource consumption is equal to proof of workās resource consumption? All youāre doing is shifting opex (electricity consumption) to capex (hardware costs).
Here I am thinking thereās finally a working file storage coin for truly decentralized and anonymous file hosting and noā¦ itās another proof-of-waste thing.
It IS factually correct to say proof-of-capacity is far less resource intensive than proof-of-work crypto as even the least efficient hard drive will consume orders of magnitude less energy than a mining rig, but itās still based on tying up a resource, this time itās just a majority of hardware and a minority of electricity instead of the other way around.
Looking forward to not being able to afford storage anymore.
it doesnāt seem that 1EB is being used for any actual useful storage purpose.
So ā¦ is this like FileCoin, where people provide storage services and are rewarded, or is it a proof-of-waste scheme?
HDD prices in my country tripled now.
And now storage devices have shot up in cost. Once again proving that crypto currencies seem to ruin everything they touch.
How much of it is currently utilized?
hard drive prices have doubled & thatās if you can find stock. all for some new unproven technoreligion that promises riches.
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The good thing about the crypto world is that people are waking up to the manipulation of fiat currencies and seeking alternatives. Now all they have to do is work out the thieves and scammers in the crypto world. We are only in the infancy stages in the crypto world
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Bitcoin is for hoarding, SNT is for using. 2 totally different uses with their own benefits
Why people hold BTC? Because their is usability, the usability of BTC is transfer. The blockchain can decentralize tiny amount of data. So, BTC network can use only for money net.
But If SAFE can truly decentralize data, the usability of SNT is infinite. It means, the value and price will increase until the data is useful
AND Gold mining is for only big companies, BTC mining is for more people but centralized, SNT farming is for almost every people and never centralized. It means the user based is fundamentally different.
P.S. So I think āSAFE launchingā and āThe speed of networkā are everything. If we get these two things, then BTC? That is toy, old toy.
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I agree with your PS
Do we think it would be so hard to argue though? First off itās def not proof of space which is a race to the bottom of sorts and a general PC with a decent internet connection and spare disk space ought to be good enough, though obviously that will morph into people buying all the Piās up but most importantly Safe Network has the most utility and solves the most problems.
Stops tracking, secures the worlds data, further democratized data and its history with free access to perpetual data, preserves privacy rights, limits data theft, could potentially prevent nation state cyber warfare, the list goes on and on.
With all the servers farms in the world and all the spare computing resources on everyday computers I just donāt see the same kind of problem like mining difficulties getting astronomically high (requiring ASICs or next gen powerful GPUās) or some proof of space race (with insanely high specs).
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^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ We need to push this narrative ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
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Itās interesting to hear various opinions.
With regard to Bitcoin people often focus on the energy issues, but I think several attacks, such as Sybil Attack, should be paid attention in building anonymous P2P network.
At least the most secure network that is resistant to those attacks is Bitcoin, and as long as there is āindustry consensusā that it is mining using the worldās surplus power, Bitcoin would be unique.
The direction people discuss might change depending on whether alternatives acquire attack tolerance and also massive decentralization, or human beings gain almost infinite energy.
Neither of them are currently in definitive conclusions, so āindustry consensusā is prioritized in terms of process of elimination, and energy issues come primarily from the outfield.
Itās a silly idea, but if there hadnāt a complete alternatives acquiring attack tolerance by the time that the value of Bitcoin swells more and more abnormally, mining in space would start because peripheral technologies will become commoditized in decadesā¦ lol
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The idea that the world is currently has an energy surplus that is somehow being unlocked by BTC, seems to be the nub of the greenwashing. The fact that it is being so easily swallowed makes be want to tear my hair out.
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