Well, I stand corrected. I wouldn’t have thought it…
Thank you @dyamanaka, you’ve been very helpful!
I am a latecomer (a little over 2 weeks or so) and I’ve missed a lot of previous discussions and as read I always discovered that a lot of what I mentioned here has been mentioned there. Among those I don’t see on the forums I liked Chistophe Aquettaz’s comments.
Interesting (a typo, probably) quote from that page (citing @dirvine’s post):
d: In 2006 when I did the perpetual coin design, it was in itself deflationary, i.e. it went to zero value over time, this was to prevent hoarding and encourage spending. It’s too big a proposal for here, so I mention it as an adjunct.
I think he meant “inflationary”, but then it would have gone to the infinite value over time, so I’m not sure.
This also allows people in less developed countries who cannot afford the resources to mine or purchase safecoin the ability to connect, consume, create and add to the vast pool of human knowledge at no cost.
People in less developed countries have very little data and cannot make economical use of large amount of space.
The free market will come up with ways to reward every participant who can contribute. And because of a lower cost of living the same price and farming rewards will be much more lucrative for users in less developed countries, so they have certain advantages (and let’s not forget that it won’t be “Africans” (just an example) who benefits from freebies, but relatively better-off & educated Africans, because the truly poor ones don’t have digital cameras and computers).
@dyamanaka’s comment:
Putting a cap/restriction on free users didn’t work well with online games. After the free players hit their cap they left the game for another with full access.
Don’t forget, though, that this works only for (a) users who have a 2nd copy of their data on the SAFE network, or (b) uses who use MaidSafe to store useless data. To me neither seem good candidates for every paying a dime. Users who have data that’s valuable or unique will not be able to easily switch. The switching cost plays a role.
Also by @dyamanaka:
You will have a blitz of miners at the beginning, and then they will leave once all the “easy” safecoins are mined and reallocate their resources to another network.
I was thinking about that too. And you know another idea just came to my mind: we should fully expect farmers to run multiple instances of different storage networks and they can create “watch daemons” that automatically re-allocate disk space from “stingy” networks to those where they get a better return (it won’t pay for a very small difference, but they’ll figure it out, maybe the breakeven point will be different for different situations, disk sizes, etc.)
As I said before I’m not a big believer in forks of SAFE, but I think there will be competing networks.
D Irvine has been talking about having free storage access for everyone since long before the crowd sale, in interviews, etc. As far as I can tell, he considers it ideal, and I can see the point: Having more and more of the people connected and sharing data is an ideal product and goal in itself. Also it’s not inviting outright freeloading because everyone connected brings more value to the network just by being connected.
We’ve been hashing over the security angle for a while, as it’s an network attack opening, especially early on.
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This might be a concern to some degree, but I think not so much, for a couple reasons. Unlike Bitcoin I don’t think anybody is going to get rich from farming safecoin. If someone bought a bunch in the crowdsale, I expect they’ll see a handsome increase in value so that its a fabulous investment, but that’s a bit of a different matter.
Farming is very granular–i.e., the safecoin awards are spread out very evenly across the network, depending upon useful contribution. Spending thousands on a fancy rig is not likely to be a great ROI compared to all the regular, not-so-costly nodes nodes on the network, which should be worth running, but not super-profitable.
Farming should be better early on, which is great because that’s what’s needed to get the network really up an running. Best incentive at the start, when safecoin is still just a twinkle is David Irviine’s eye (and a lot of others as well 
). As the network grows, hopefully it will still be worthwhile to keep nodes running, even if only marginally rewarding, because it keeps generating safecoin (which should continue to be more valuable), and because a lot of people will want to have access to the network that running a vault gives.
But even if people drop off who piled on heavy near the start (to take advantage of the better rates) the network should churn until it balances.
I think that it will work something like this.
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Lots of interesting discussion and collection of information which I’m following but I’m not really getting a picture of how these choices will affect take-up of the network.
What’s missing for me is who will join and why. SAFE needs to attract both farmers and users on a large scale or it will not get near its full potential.
Maybe if we think about different groups of users/farmers, their motives, how we’ll reach them and why they will go to the trouble of becoming a user or a farmer. Then we may find that issues like free space and farming rewards answer themselves.
Who are the farmers? @dyamanaka characterised them as pro and incidental (can’t remember the phrase). There will be more kinds than this, but if we add commercial farmers that gives a range.
I’m going to spin this into a Wiki topic so anyone can edit the OP and see if we can come up with some categories for farmers and particularly users, and then try to understand how they will view SAFE and what might encourage them to sign up and use it.
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If as you say sub-saharans etc can afford $20 for a smart phone, then they should also be able to buy 10-20 gig storage space for $1 too…shouldn’t they? If the main drive to provide free storage is access to it by third world people with smartphones, would it not be an idea to research how many of these people currently use free/paid storage? I just think that if anybody in the third world was going to come up with a cure for Cancer and the like and has a Smartphone, they’d be resourceful enough to overcome this issue - maybe use a local communal/school computer or similar.
I also think the Foundation as a charity could manage an Education fund of sorts and distribute Safecoin/storage directly to third world communities/schools by collaborating with other (Secular) charities on the ground.
As the other reason for free storage is network adoption, then I think maybe we could attract users by what we do as a charity/network. Furthering education in third world countries along with the scientific research aspect maybe would attract a lot of people I think. What does Bitcoin foundation do for example…not much and we can do better - and Doge gained popularity by similar charity reputation means
Also any free amount of storage space would have to be small enough, so that the financial reward to create x amount of free accounts per hour is less than anybody would work for even in the third world - otherwise the very people you are trying to help could end up being exploited.
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I hope the “ants” won’t comprise more than 1/3 of the network capacity because it could be bad for the network.
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3 continents, 4 copies: if you are in Europe and it’s 1am and you want to watch some of those videos you stored on SAFE, your nearest copy may be on a notebook that’s off. The next 2 copies (India, Japan) are also off. You better hope the 4th copy is on a professional farmer’s disk or you may not be able to access your data. Of course it won’t be that bad, but if it happens just once to 1% of all users, reviews won’t be good.
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If it goes as you say, then storage will be relatively expensive because the bulk of capacity will come from very inefficient farmers (multi-purpose notebooks/desktops), which should reward specialization
I have some additional arguments, but I can’t know whether they’ll come true. I am trying to emphasize that we (collectively) don’t know much, which is the best reason not to tinker with the system.
One of the questions that keep coming up is who will use the network. I don’t think we need to worry about that. Farmers and application vendors will worry about that. I can put 200 TB of useful public data on the network myself, and with a little activism I could attract 800 TB more, and if I didn’t have a day job I could create apps that would put several PB’s of data on the network (once I’m sure it’s reliable).
But many compare SAFE with compulsory government schemes like immunization or (somewhere) voting. It’s very simple: if its’ any good, people will use it. (Note: that’s very different from “build it and they will come” - if it’s crap, they won’t).
P.S. Another funny aspect of these efforts to “motivate everyone” is that it reminds me of the combined government and central bank actions where they try to manipulate the both sides (increase investment/spending + increase money supply), just so that the system can “work” although in its current form it is obviously completely unsustainable.
Just talking to myself…lol…
But just to add, If this idea has any merit, I would suggest having some things in place prior to launch and use it for promotional purposes to help network adoption. This would involve contacting relevant charities, organizations etc, such as ones involved in Education and distributing free computers to rural communities.
This could be started now and free storage given at launch (publicised). Once the ball is rolling, the Foundation can take over the running of it. I think this is where the voting system would come into play in regard to foundation board members. I have noted that both the Bitcoin and Mastercoin foundations have suffered a lot of bad press; the communities being unhappy with certain board members, the methods of election and various other issues which could be addressed by a correct implementation of the Maidsafe voting system.
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I agree, but I thought some % is already allocated for such purpose.
If there is already funding then all freebies should be given from that fund so that platform creators can focus purely on making the “core” system work well.
I’m not saying that the network isn’t incentivized to encourage enterprise participation. While “mining for profit” might be a marginal activity, having computing and communications resources pay for themselves by participating in the network, rather than having heavy infrastructure costs, might well encourage the industrial players to participate wholeheartedly. That should see to a lot of what you’re talking about. We’re looking at a real paradigm shift, though , so it’s hard to see all the ramifications.
Also, I don’t view you putting tremendous amounts of useful data on the network as freeloading, nor do I look at someone using the network to store all their personal stuff as freeloading. Every person participating and getting value from the network is also adding value to the network, just by participating, whether they’re directly adding to infrastructure resource or not.
ADD: Also, even enterprise actors will still be operating as ants, just with better connectivity, faster data buses, faster cpu’s, etc. I don’t mind if such make a better portion of the safecoin, as long as everybody else can make some. But that’s as the network matures.
I don’t think I agree with you on this. If you’re dropping lots of data onto the network (and don’t pay for it), aren’t you literally freeloading? Like textbook definition freeloading.
If you can use storage without any payment (either in Safecoin or in barter from sharing your space), where does the value come from in the network? The information that’s uploaded has value, but that’s unrelated to the the value exchange for the physical storage space.
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Not sure, but as the foundation is a charity it could accept donations too. I was thinking that this would (if thought of as a way forward) be community driven until such a point as the Foundation is launched - it wouldn’t be added work for core devs I don’t think.but we’d have to agree as a community first - and as we are launching in a few month, maybe we really need to decide this kind of stuff sooner rather than later.
If the plan was to give freebies, then this just targets where they go better from the freebie pool (wherever that was planned to be coming from originally, topped up with donations).
A further idea may be to add “donate” buttons to all apps that didn’t mind with an overview of the charity’s work. Maybe these apps could be rewarded in some way such as publicising top donating apps. I can see this being tied in with Maidsafe “kitemarked” apps that have had code checked for cleanliness etc.
Lol….just realised waffling on, off topic and going off at tangents….just how my mind works, sorry.
The idea could be taken to extreme, I guess, but the point is that a network without active participants is of no value at all. Being connected, participating, adding content and one’s opinions, etc., and yes, even consuming the content of others, all are part of individuals adding value to the network.
I’m not militating for “Bread and circuses for everyone! Wee!” I’m saying that a certain (even generous) amount of facility given away in exchange for people’s participation is not inviting “freeloading”, it’s a key part of the economics.
Okay, let’s try again: I thought the idea - at least initially - was that farmers earn Safecoins, while users buy significantly cheaper storage space.
It’s not like there’s some uncertain “feel good” schema which may or may not work (like, take fish oil pills), so that people have to be lured into the SAFE network like it’s a cult.
If benefits for all non-freeloading participants aren’t certain, we’re screwed regardless of our brainstorming and “awareness campaigns”.
If problem is suspected to lie in “bootstrapping” (getting enough users (or farmers) in the very beginning), then it has to be framed that way.
It’s “soft” economics, if I may call that. They’re adding some value, but by its nature freeloading is creating the “Wee” situation. You give away 1K accounts. 900 people open accounts and never do anything with them because they’re too lazy to remember their password or find the software too complicated compared to Dropbox. 50 upload their porn collection. 25 upload some personal content which isn’t shared, etc. Obviously you can achieve the same thing - for less money and resources - by letting enterprises and charities to redirect part of their existing IT budget and/or programs to the SAFE network.
By giving freebies to a charity, there’s an element of competition among charities and each has independent oversight. Giving freebies through marketing campaigns is similar, but problematic for several reasons (no competition, and so on).
It would be useful if MaidSafe.net folks at some point posted versioned copies of their plans. I noticed a lot of stuff we discuss here was discussed in previous months on the Google group, and even in multiple topics on this site (hell, I started one such topic myself), but apart from hopefully useful feedback to MaidSafe.net, to us it creates just more info to get lost in… I think I’ve read about 500 comments about how rewards, resources and exchange rates are going to work and I’m still clueless.
Does anyone know if freeloaders also participate in the forwarding of SAFE content (data chunks)?
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I’ve seen some discussion of “the chicken or the egg” dilemma coming up (other threads, not in this one). I honestly don’t think there’s a catch-22 happening. The people providing the space need to come long before people providing/using the space. Speaking realistically about how the system would start, some folks need to “donate” time/effort/storage to kick it off. Farmers can donate to the network at first to get it started.
I also still think sybil attacks are going to be a thing, and I’m still not convinced that I can’t I won’t be able to generate millions of accounts to flood the network with data. I think preventing that is more important than using free space to entice new users. Giving more than a couple MBs is going to be dangerous.
I definitely think it would draw a lot of users, I just don’t think the risk is worth it. Everything needs balance. The fulcrum here should be hard drive space.
That’s a good question. +1 to that. I’ve been assuming that someone who opens an account and gets 1gb free contributes nothing to the network (not talking about content contribution).
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Go for it in Testnet 3. That’s what the testing is for, and we’ll see.
Oddly, I was listening to this track when you posted that, which made the stakes feel higher.
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It’s not about basing it on generosity alone, it’s about creating incentive for generosity much like how safecoin provides incentive for sharing resources.
Reputation systems that users opt into can solve this.
Are you suggesting the SAFE network should try to play politics and endorse charities and enterpries over the average user?
Good question Blindsite2k. I am not suggesting that and I’ve repeatedly stated that I’m against freebies.
Since I don’t decide much around here I have been arguing that significant freebies are pointless and that 10K (for bookmarks) ought to be enough for anyone (who’s freeloading).
What I was arguing for above that any freebies should be confined to what’s already been setup (see links below) and that the network itself should not work based on non-economic considerations.