Fair point.
First, I support SAFE for many different reasons. The current internet is abominable, with security leaks and spying and data loss everywhere. SAFE will ostensibly solve these issues. Ideologically, I’m a libertarian/anarchist, and so I find breaches of my (and everybody else’s) privacy disgusting. So I’m not the type to remove my support based on one aspect. But whether I design a game on the network, potentially costing millions of dollars, rests upon whether I will go broke doing so.
Yes, and upon my introduction to the network via the crowdsale (which I participated in) and the maidsafe.net website, one of the branches of this intent was that popular apps would be rewarded based on their popularity. So the potential I saw here, was that finally I could release open source games, but still not have to ‘give them away for free’. People could review the code to ensure I wasn’t making a backdoor in their machine (and all of the other benefits of OSS), but I would still get the benefits of actually marketing my game.
The benefits to society of this, if it were to become reality, would be enormous, not just for me as a developer, but for people in general. It would be like a bridge between the current paradigm of OSS, and proprietary software (at least to some extent). While people wouldn’t make obscene amounts of money, they would make (hopefully) a good earn, while users would be able to feel secure in the knowledge that their software was reviewable.
I’m not knocking the network in general. Not at all. I was just pointing out that if caching results in lowered income, then the lowered income will result in the fundamental economics changing, and this will change what is released on the network. And that would be a shame.
However, I’ve just read a comment @dirvine made on Can I exploit content rewards by accessing my public content repeatedly: - #28 by Warren.
Namely,
And reading this (although it was posted in August), it seems that caching happens along a particular line of communication between nodes, rather than a network-wide caching. This would seem to indicate that these fears may be unfounded, as users would be in many different directions on the node pathway, while each node of a botnet will be requesting data from the same nodes. Hopefully this would mean that a) ‘wide’ caching only happens when a botnet is repeatedly requesting the same chunks, and b) unusually ‘wide’ caching would only affect the botnet itself, and other users requesting from that node.
If this approach makes botnets unprofitable, they won’t take place, while individual users accessing my content will be lighting up many different node pathways, and so many different caches would have to be activated for loss of income to occur in a significant way (hopefully). Stated differently, it seems to me that the content would have to be enormously popular, to cause ‘cache income loss’, if I have understood @dirvine correctly.