We’ll know soon enough.
It will approach market price. The network will balance it all. Upload costs will approximate the average costs a farmer makes.
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At present it costs around £0.07 ($0.10 EUR 0.10) per transaction on Counterparty. We can forget any notion of implementing micro-payment initiatives on that platform, secure though it may be.
I’m hoping that MaidSafe transaction costs will be 2-4 orders of magnitude less, Are my hopes any where near realistic?
I’m assuming a transaction size of around 1kb.
You bring up a good point. I’ve always thought safecoin transactions would be free (as has been talked about) but its still modifying data on the network and would have a cost? Or no? Is this a special case type of transaction?
The cost will be zero and all always be. AFAIK this is the only way to make a fully inclusive system. So all payments will be for resource creation (data mainly) and safecoin creation is part of farming (no cost). The key is transferring safecoin will be free. Micro paments will also be free, at the moment storage is done via micro payments, but the ClientManagers hold a safecoin worth of storage (the safecoin is deleted/recyucled) and you get to store up to that amount. So we do not necessarily need micro currency for micro-payments.
Hope that helps a bit, I am rushing between meetings and may have missed the point.
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Sorry I should have made this clearer. Im talking about the use of SAFEcoin in the same manner as Bitcoin and also the possibility of running other alt-coins on the SAFE network.
An excellent reply and thank you for taking the time to make it. I, and Im sure many others, really appreciate the attentiveness and patience with which you deal with our queries, especially when you are so busy.
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Concerning transaction costs, it might be worth mentioning that due to SAFE’s distributed consensus mechanism transactions are many orders of magnitude less work than in a blockchain. The amount of nodes in involved in a SafeCoin transaction is fixed, while in a blockchain transaction every node is involved. This is also why SafeCoin transactions are fully scalable. As the network grows bigger it’s transaction capacity grows accordingly.
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There’s no way to know, if we would know we would exactly know when people start to turn of their computer because they don’t make any profit on leaving their machines on, helping the network. But even that, we don’t know, maybe some people will supply a huge amount of storage without making money on it, just because they like the network. It happens in Bittorrent as well, people download a Linux-distro (boy what a legal example ;-)) and keep their computer up and running for free because they see 5 other people are getting data from them. But let’s throw in some numbers.
- $50 per month for the ISP
- $8,33 per month for the hardware (assuming buying new hardware every 5 year for $500)
- $20 electricity bill
That’s $78,33 per month to have a system up and running providing 10TB of data (some ISP’s limit data). Every Chunk will be stored 4 times, but don’t forget, when 2000 people upload the same file, it’s also stored 4 times. So, let’s say we have some caching, people uploading the same files… Google wants you to pay $9.99 for 1 TB of data. In my example SAFE will be cheaper ($7.83 a month). But people already have computer, should we really use $500 every 5 years for new hardware? I don’t think so. The hardware they already have is there anyway. So I think SAFE will be way cheaper than Google and Amazon etc. Just think about people who run their own little company, 12 employees, some fast servers with free space and unlimited fiber. Would they try to Farm Safecoin? You bet! Another point to make is that the reward goes down when a lot of people provide resources. So when (just like with bitcoin mining) a lot of folks jump on the train to make money, great things will happen to price.
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Can you explain what you mean with the transaction? I am looking to find an estimate for storing (uploading) 1 gigabye of data on the safe network.
For instance storing 1TB of data on dropbox would cost $9.99 month. That is ~$0,01 per GB per month. Thats very little and it includes bw costs, now I know in their business model they have calculated avarage usage of course.
But can MaidSafe approach similar pricing?
I make the assumption that one is not sharing their own disk thus has to pay for storing data.
Also, once data is stored, let’s say there is a one time fee, how long will that data live on the network. If you’d like to use the network to archive data, it’s important to know as the data might not be accessed frequently or not at all.
Thanks for the response everyone!
I am exploring the possibility of running a niche alt-coin on top of the SAFE network. It is the transaction costs for that with which I am mostly concerned right now.
In time, I hope and expect SAFEcoin to occupy the space taken by Bitcoin right now and to gradually displace the other alt-coins. However that is a long way off and I see opportunities in the short and medium term for this (and other) alt-coins running on top of SAFE. It may even be a significant factor in bringing forward mass adoption of the SAFE network to the non-tech, non-privacy-concerned populace.
Forever. What SAFE provides in terms of storage is similar to other cloud services, but it is also rather different. A direct price/value comparison isn’t that useful.
Will be zero as well. The network won’t charge you for updating the info in a StructuredData object.
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Data field as well? What if I create SData with “hello world” in data field and then update it to all volumes of Encyclopaedia Britannica? 
I know that anything above 100kB will be chunked and the data field will contain the data map so there will be costs involed updating that kind of data, right? 
If the volumes of Encyclopaedia Britannica are already uploaded on SAFE then you can simply put their datamaps in the data field and it won’t cost you a thing. But yeah, uploading new data outside that 100 KB field will cost you.
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But it still significantly reduces the cost of a spam attack. By creating 1kB SData and then bumping it up to the 100kB limit for free obvious way to mitigate it is charging 100kB regardless of actual size of SData. But I guess it’s a non issue and this type of spam achieves nothing besides thinning attackers pocket 
It will be charged at 1Mb Much more expensive than static data.
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This also encourages recycling of stale data. Replacing it with something more useful is a good thing!
So Structured Data costs about 10x as much to store as immutable data, but nothing to update?
I have been wondering about this, thanks.
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So far this is the only calculation I have seen, thanks for that.
I just though there would be more calculaton like this done by the MaidSafe leadership team as it’s pretty fundamental for the success or failure of the whole project.
Anyone else can comment on ~$7.83/TB per month?
I think that, knowing the principles of how the network will behave, they are confident that it will be a competitive. It’s also just very hard to put a number on it right now.
You don’t pay per month on SAFE. 
Upload costs will be determined by how little farmers are willing to farm for. If it’s dominated by people who don’t have a profit motive the costs will be well below market price because free space will be abundant. It’s all determined by real world supply and demand.
A VPN costs 5-10 month and is a 80 billion dollar business, this alone will be a big pull factor on the network from people wanting data access privately. My understanding there will be incentive to put data on the network for payment as much as farming. A constant data being streamed from your address give access to the 10% share of the 4.5 billion . where to farm that piece of the same data maybe more difficult.
My point is to be devil advocate a torrent data uploaded to the network could be a constant stream of income? and then the people using VPN’s may want to switch to maidsafe because it is cheap.