Cloudstorage & safenetwork

Hi all,

I was having one of those showerthoughts. Not sure how it would work. But one of the big benefits of the safenetwork is that its decentralised. But given that a lot of people have cloudstorage. What would stop them from using that storage to add it to the network?

If that happens, you are basically back in the situation wjere you are depending on large datacentres with all the risks involved.

Robably my line of thinking is wrong but I don’t know how its prevented. What am I missing?

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You couldn’t just add cloud storage to the network as you need compute power to run a node too, but there would be nothing to stop anyone renting a cloud virtual machine plus some storage and running a vault there. Indeed, the previous test nets have been based on a core of cloud-based VMs.

It then becomes an equation as to whether the cost of renting the VM is more or less than the earnings from doing so. So long as not everyone is using the same cloud service / region then it’s not a huge problem and indeed has some advantages for network stability since cloud services rarely go down, but a degree of centralisation could occur if one cloud provider offers much cheaper prices than the alternatives so that everyone starts to use them.

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If you takenthe economical impact of this, it meams storage on safenetwork will always be more expensive then on cloud. That makes transition from old to new less interesting to consumers given that price has an impact on that decision

I don’t see why that should be. Existing decentralised storage systems like Storj and Sia are cheaper than AWS for example, although that obviously depends on the current price of their coins. As a consumer of Safe storage (rather than a farmer) the same will probably apply - unless I’m missing something?

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This was discussed a bit on the tangential topic of “super nodes” in general. Can’t remember what exactly was said (Personally, I haven’t re-read it yet), but the thread is below for anybody curious.

Farming Pools and InfiniteGB Nodes - Safe Network Forum

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It follows that if using cloud storage for Safe costs more than setting up your own storage, you’ll set up your own storage.

Then there’s the fact that anyone who has a spare computer they want to leave on all the time can use it to earn, using cheap existing storage that’s already paid for. If a lot of people do that it puts downward pressure on the costs (the amount the network has to pay to obtain enough resources).

We can’t know, but Safe storage could well be cheaper than the cloud. It is also priced differently (pay once, stored forever) and has other advantages so they aren’t directly comparable.

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Still getting up to speed on SAFENET. Is QOS a factor in the system (like more reward for me having a better link from x to y) ?

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Welcome to the community!

As far as QoS goes, tentatively, yes it’s going to be a factor in the network algorithm. That said, as of right now (somebody correct me if I’m wrong), I don’t believe this has been implemented yet. What this feature will eventually look like is still a little unclear.

In general though, it certainly would help with the number of successful farm attempts, so it would translate to increased rewards in that way. Like I mentioned earlier though, the exact calculation has yet to be worked out, afaik, so this is just sort of a rule-of-thumb correlation.

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