My ISP changes my IP address monthly. I was curious if this would effect my rank as a farmer.
Does the maidsafe network use IP address to identify a node, or can I have a farming node at one IP address, turn it off, and bring it up at another IP address with no loss of rank?
No it won’t The DHT is our addressing scheme so you will be fine.
In the same line, how long can a vault be offline before it gets penalized? How long can a vault be offline before it is considered gone and the vault is required to request a new ID and start from scratch?
If it holds data requested for it and is off line (it really will just not get a chance to earn safecoin, that’s the penalty). So it’s a question of what data it holds and when will somebody request it.
I thought there was a concept of “rank”. When do you lose rank and damage your future earning potential? Is it linearly with how long the node was offline? Is it exponential with how long the node was offline? Is there a thing called “rank”?
If I go offline, all the data in my vault will be duplicated on other people’s vaults within some small amount of time, so that 4 copies of that data are still available to the network. At that point, I assume I have some black mark against me after I come back up.
There is imagine
On line time
size of space
speed of cpu
speed of b/w up
These all come into play and form rank. This may simplify hugely in the next few days. I am doing some experiments. Just imagine new born vaults bash around and are not very helpful as they age they are better and are rewarded. We do not measure each individual part but how often it bases around so the result of all the above measurements will define how much value you get based on how much value you contribute. So this in essence is rank.
And at which point is a vault considered offline for good? In other words, what’s the condition to trigger the duplication process that makes sure there is always 32 copies of a chunk available?
The network knows how many copies there are in real time. Your copy may be moved immediately or not depending on how many copies are live at that time. This is for each chunk so slowly you loose them an this is dynamic.