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Most things become centralised for a few reasons. Like food farming because its easier to work and pay the farmer to produce the crops. Also people live in apartments cannot have home farms.

Also centralisations occur because the rich have the ability where the poorer do not. SAFE is being designed specifically so all the poorer (home guy) will be able to farm and get something for it. The papers state that the larger vaults will not earn as much as the average size vaults.

The network itself randomises the distribution though its algorithms and XOR space so the rich cannot corral the data to their vaults. They can only have more of them thus more data but same averages per vault-size. So yes they potentially can earn more than average joe, but like any business they will have very significant overheads to the home user. The 10000 vault owner may only earn as much as the 1000 joes because of their running costs.

Bitcoin centralised because of the need to process faster and faster and this took it away from average joe. SAFE is the opposite if anything in that processing is not so important and the average vault size requirement is what matters.

Remember the days when people had to go to a printing shop to photocopy (xerox) documents. or had to buy a book to read from the shop/printers. But now home guy just sends the document to his $40 printer or scans & prints those things he/she used to have to go to the local print shop? And he/she can read that book on their phone, tablet, kindle or PC No need of a centralised printing press to produce enough copies for everyone.

Or when everyone had to go to the movie theaters to see a movie, then average joe could watch movies/shows at home. And then could buy the DVD to watch at home and a lot even bittorrent movies and not pay. I can bet you a lot of the bit torrenters will be running vaults.

So no, history is not your friend in this case.

Even for home farming the micro-farming products are increasing the home guyā€™s ability to grow expensive herbs at home rather than pay the billionaire supermarkets for them. And its seems that will be increasing too.

So not history does not support your view, but rather shows that as technology advances the average joe is capable of doing more things at home.

EDIT: There is a whole topic on this very subject. You might find some good reading in it and maybe even find pointers to improve your argument for centralised farming. So Iā€™ll leave it to that topic. I have to get onto other things now.

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Can you realize that is an argument against something I didnā€™t say?

You do realize that if all small guys on Earth will have their little Safe Vaults and earn money from it, most production can still come from a few very big fishes, right?

You do realize itā€™s not about larger vaults but more vaults? If they run 1,000,000 vaults, 1,000,000 times the data will be corralled to them. By the XOR space.

Can you realize how ridiculously incorrect this is? Any well-run business is more efficient than doing the same thing in small. I can optimize things you canā€™t even dream of.

Can you realize the comparative cost of printing a page by your $40 desk printer is many times higher than printing it in a printing press? Thatā€™s why, when thereā€™s enough demand, you go to the big fish to print your book: They can do it a lot cheaper, a lot faster, in a much larger quantity.

(So you do realize. Then why did you write a whole paragraph about it?)

You do realize my connection will be better, my uptime will be better, so my vaults will be rated above the small guy?

Can you realize if farming can make money, it would still be profitable to centralize it even if itā€™s not as ā€œfreeā€ as running the small guyā€™s one vault?

I hope you can realize I can run maybe dozens of vaults on custom hardware for the cost of running one PC, making the ā€œvirtually zeroā€ overhead cost of the small guy still higher than mine.

Can you realize your examples illustrate: Whenever the average Joe becomes capable of producing (in the physical sense) the same things as the big fish, itā€™s at a much higher cost and a much smaller volume. That does support my view.

Because it works both ways: When the big fish sees something the average Joe is making money with, it will do it bigger, faster, cheaper if it can be done in bulk. Safe Farming can.

Can you realize that millions of people can run a Vault free because they have already paid for the computer and the Internet connection?

Can the big fish run their Vaults free? No.

Your internet connection is better? Maybe, but sometimes my IP is closer to the final client so I can win you. And if I can`t win other small farmer will.

imagen

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Iā€™m all for the Safe Network, but thinking that farming can be more efficient for home users than for somebody building a business around it isā€¦ cute? This network will be great either way, and if this is what you guys need to sustain the enthusiasm, so be it.

For a singular person than no you are right. The business can do better than an average joe.

But by leveling the playing field by removing the vault size advantage and the speed to be first advantage and by burdening the business with their overheads and the average joe being capable of running vault sizes that are average (and the more the business adds the lower the average size) then collectively the average joes and janes of the world (100ā€™s of millions to billion) can do very well indeed compared to the giants who cannot save on costs.

@digipl is very right that sheer numbers means that for businesses to take over the farming business 80% to homes 20% (i think you implied elsewhere) is going to be very difficult. There will be limits to how many vaults a datacentre can load up a machine with. There are limits to the number of vaults they can use on any large network connection.

Oh and I noticed elsewhere you jumped on board with mavā€™s estimation that having multiple vaults at one location will save on external connections, well that is also going to be very limited since any chunk will travel through multiple nodes in XOR space so if one datacentre has 1% of nodes then the average of internal routing of packets is going to be something like 0.5% max of the traffic. But its doubtful any one datacentre would have 1% of vaults in your business world. All the dataentres would jump on the bandwagon and since there are 10000ā€™s of them then its more like 0.05% max for any one datacentre so the savings on bandwidth becomes insignificant in the global environment, but still a tiny savings for the datacentre.

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Valid point which diminishes one of the benefits of centralized farming.

Still. Iā€™m considering launching a major operation once weā€™re in business. Itā€™s just too big a temptation.

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There are so many ways to make money. Average Joes that donā€™t know about this project know something about another project in the world that we know nothing about. Information is not equally distributed. I love philosophy and fall into ideological traps regularly, but ignoring repeating patterns of flow in nature and history would be intellectual suicide. A very narrow notion of equality is a moot point.

17 posts were split to a new topic: Discussions if SAFEnetwork is itself as a whole centralised

I think it could go either way depending on several factors.

If loads of people were happy to run nodes using spare resources & this was sufficient to meet the demands of the network, itā€™d be hard for big commercial operations to make any profit getting involved. Given the scale of file sharing software usagenat some points in the past (and perhaps currently), plus the incentivisation Safe will offer, I wouldnā€™t imagine thatā€™s impossible.

If however demand for the networkā€™s resources was multiples of what resources were made available by those offering spare capacity, then it would make sense for commercial operations to get involved.

If the second scenario played out, it wouldnā€™t make it pointless to farm at home like ASICs make home Bitcoin mining unprofitable, so many people would still be able to get involved with their spare capacity. But home users wouldnā€™t be likely to make profit expanding capacity greatly if they competed against big operations who buy hard drives & energy for a lot less than home users do.

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Yes, very much so

I am trying to consider ways that the resources would be greater. As the network grows so does the storage requirements as more people are storing data.

My thought at this time is that as the network grows with people storing so will the number of people be supplying vaults.

I guess the real issue here is how vaults are marketed.

If we as a community say datacentres will prevail then there is a huge disincentive for new people to adopt vaults since they will see that its ā€œuselessā€ for earning. (even though as you say later its still worth while even if)

Assuming the dev team follow through with it being more profitable to farm with spare resources we then need to market the fact that home farming is not only feasible but better than centralised farming in datacentres. And that the home farmer will be earning (for similar vault size) around the same as the datacentre vault without the expense.

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I think that will be the case.

Youā€™re right about the marketing of running a Vault. If normal non techy people can be persuaded to contribute their spare resources, home farmers will supply a big part of the networkā€™s resources.

If the average person uploaded 10gb of data to the Safe network per year, and contributed 100gb to the network per year (going up as hard drives get bigger), then it should all balance out without big operations getting involved.

If the average home user wants to upload hundreds of gigabytes of photos & videos every year, but only contribute 100gb to the network, home farming alone wonā€™t cut it.

Itā€™ll be interesting to see whether itā€™s possible to disadvantage data centres in a way thats not viable to work around.

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One is to ensure we do not over pay for "GET"s

If we were paying 10x times the cost of running a vault in a datacentre then datacentre vaults would be numerous indeed. But if pay around the cost for a data centre then we only get home users and no great incentive for archive vaults.

This is the important part beta testing will help with. And Iā€™d say some tweaks once its live (or beta live) for a few months.

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Guess I am worse than an average joe, I do not know of another project that anyone does not know. The projects that I know are projects other people know :sob:

Just to somewhat try to bring this thread back on to the original track (Itā€™s great to see the community growing, news faces, lots of projects, etc) I just wanted to say how happy I am after a month and finally getting my memberā€™s badge to be a part of this community. Youā€™re such a great bunch and I truly believe that fantastic, world-changing things are going to come out of this project.

Itā€™s exciting to see people posting about the projects theyā€™re working on every few days, JAMS being released, the community updates and all of the marketing outreach being done by the Maidsafe team.

I canā€™t wait to meet some of you in person at the DevCon (if I donā€™t get lucky enough to get one of the paid-for spots, Iā€™ll save up and pay for it myself, Iā€™m going either way! :slight_smile: )

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I so agree with you :slight_smile:
Fantastic bunch of people and everything that is happening in this community now is so exciting.

Hear hear! I have never been to Scotland, and was looking at maps yesterday. Hadnā€™t realised Ayr and Troon is by the sea. Lovely!

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Doesnā€™t seem to be buzzing much these days. People getting fed up of crypto in general?

I think people have their noses to the grindstone again. These are actually the moments when I sense there is so much going on that people are too busy to do their typical browsing and discourse here. Iā€™m still active here but that because JAMS development is on a weekend schedule for the moment, although that should pick up in other areas for JAMS soon. Shane and Andy are always chipping away, Mark (happybeing) is continually making progress on his work with Solid and SAFE. The Maidsafe team is constantly filling new positions, expanding into new regions, and even busier than we can imagine. Iā€™ve also heard through the grapevine of other possible up and comers in our app ecosystem but I wonā€™t spoil anything. :wink:

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