Geographically demand-based dynamic incentives should be implemented to promote geographically decentralised distribution of data!

Development
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Ok, so I’m going to get right to the point, i don’t know if the development team already designed Safenetwork this way but, if not, the development should seriously think about doing this or other ways to avoid geographical data centralisation.

To put it simply, right now they are designing the network to store data in a geographically decentralised manner, as to prevent continental shut downs, that’s great! However, they can’t control the geographical location of their users, or more specifically, farmers. We all know China for example, is responsible for 70% of Bitcoins mining power. So, if lets say, China also starts to produce or buy massive amounts of hard disks for farm safecoin, and so then contributes 90% of the total network available storage space, then if users continue to store content, after users fill up some of China’s 90% of and all of the rest of the worlds’, which only make up 10%, all the newly stored data after the 10% gets filled up will have no choice but to ALL BE IN CHINA!

So, this produces great concerns for if Chinese government decides to shut down it’s internet access to the outside world, for example, or finds a way to impede the safenetwork traffic connection by say, blocking all encrypted traffic, then potentially, MOST of the valuable data that’s stored on the network can be permanently lost.

To counter this, the team EITHER can have an algorithm that monitors data distribution in all areas, and stops accepting new data if the network is full other parts of the world, hence leaving most of the Chinese hard disks empty, and increasing the farming reward which encourages more farming in general from everyone, including the chinese, OR(and i think this is better) have the reward be dynamic based on how many people are farming in a specific region/continent, if more people is farming on a particular continent or region, the less reward they get, and the regions where not many people are farming, the more incentive they get per unit of resource they provide to the network.

This will also help accelerate worldwide adoption of the network i believe, as people in the region where it’s less adopted may have a really high reward and gets people really talking about it - imagine if you hear that you can leave your computer on and make $10/hour doing nothing, if you were to live in a very resource scarce region, that would increase the probability that people in that region who don’t farm too much to find out what it’s about. and people in a region where farming is more popular would already have more people talking about the safenetwork anyway. And it also resolves the difference in currency value worldwide, since, for example, $1USD is about $6.8 Chinese yuan, which provides great incentive for people in China to farm safecoin just like they’re mining bitcoin right now even if it’s not too worth it for the american people to do the same thing, so with the currency difference, even after implementing the first method it may not stop china from simply still getting more hard disks farming more, but the second way would. As they’ll get less safecoins as the total farmers in China increase, so it’ll make geographically even data distribution come to an equilibrium, and it’ll eventually make the geographic adoption of safecoin come to an equilibrium too as per reasons mentioned above.

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I feel like the combinations of XOR address space, 8 copies of each chunk being spread evenly over that address space, and opportunistic caching help remedy this as well as there is clear incentive for everyone to farm. The more farmers the better, but just judging by the members on this forum, we are spread far and wide so I’m not so concerned with centralization. We are spread across many continents and each copy of a chunk will be spread evenly across the address space AFAIK that means highly likely to be multiple continents if even just the lurkers here on this forum have vaults. We’re not even close to the adoption or excitement that will be present once Safecoin is introduced.

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With Bitcoin mining this happened due to very cheap hardware production and low energy costs compared to other parts of the world. The highly specialised nature of the hardware also lended its self to economies of scale for the few who could make it pay and reinvest.

The situation for hard drives is very different. They are general purpose equipment that is very widely used, and there won’t be any specialised hard drives that are particularly good for SAFE farming, as bandwidth is likely to be the limitation.

In China, bandwidth linking to the rest of the internet outside of China is not great, which I guess could make farming from China less worthwhile.

I don’t see a reason to worry about centralisation of hardware in specific geographies because there are not any conditions to incentivise it as there is with Bitcoin.

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This kind of centralisation is very unlikely IMO. Firstly, the economics are against centralisation (ie bulk farming), and secondly there is a built in bias towards farming being more lucrative where data is closer to demand (ie first vault to deliver wins and second place earns nothing), which actively inhibits geographical centralisation.

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I think it is a good thing that the network does not depend on geographic information also. The network must be autonomous and agnostic - tinkering with what nodes can do based on IP addresses is the antithesis of this.

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Not likely, I agree, but it’s possible, hence it’s possible the fact that after the shut down of one continent or even just one country, some data on the network will be permanently LOST! If i stored private yet important personal data that’s not popular hence doesn’t get replicated many times, and if all 8 happens to randomly be in one country, if something happens to that country then all my data is potentially at risk. So I’m suggesting they design it in such a way, that prevents this from happening, prevents it from being POSSIBLE regardless of how likely, because i don’t think i even want a 0.0001% probability of losing my data when it’s stored on the network.

Regarding anonymous IP addresses, that should not be a problem if you get a software to have a list of IP addresses and each person sends their encrypted IP to that software and only it can decrypt it, and all it does it sort which country that IP address belongs to then give an output of country, their IP stays anonymous and only their country is revealed.

But in the end, I guess you really have to just calculate what’s the possibility of 8 randomly happens to be in the same country. If, one country owns 50% of the network’s storage space, and with completely random distribution, then there’s a 0.5^8 = .00390625 = 0.39%, so of 0.39% of all stored data, all 8 pieces will be in that country, so IF for ANY reason that country decides to block safenetwork, 0.39% of all stored data on the network will be lost, that’s not exactly a small figure. 39 out of 1000 data…

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Well, possible, but not feasible. The way the groups of nodes looking after each bit of your data are random across the globe. We use Secure Hash (SHA3 actually) to ensure randomised addresses and the secure part of such hashes really means random, but evenly distributed across the address range (length of hash). So a single continent going down would not lose your data. Data chains also helps by allowing less than quorum of nodes to supply the data again.

If the network suffers such a partition, the rest of the group make new copies to bring the copies back up to minimum safe amount.

I hope that helps.

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And when archive nodes are implemented this could even be less possible.

I would be more worried by a massive global style EMP or solar activity than to have China in charge of 90% of the vaults.

Using BTC as the model is like using the petrol motor as a template for cooking. They use completely different economic models but the heat from the motor could cook food. BTC is difficult to mine, requires specialised hardware, cheap electricity and small amounts of bandwidth.

SAFE is the opposite. Abundant hardware, lots of bandwidth, little power, favors the little farmer over a datacentre farm. China has around 1 billion people, India has about the same and for both it is still less than a third of the world. Its more likely China might realistically amass 25% worse case rather than 90%. Even if the Chinese government went all out I doubt they would get 40%, because if they did, so would other nations after the “control”. Its really a untenable situation and highly unlikely to occur.

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Archive nodes would also be more likely to be outside of China, no? I think Chinese nodes should generally be a bit slow because of the great firewall and stuff.

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@foreverjoyful If you feel it is reasonable, could you remove the ALL CAPS very important message from the title. I think it throws off people and is a bit shouty :wink: We can fall into boy who cried wolf and when there is something very important it will be missed if too many posts have a title like that.

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Waited for two hours but didn’t see it being changed so I now removed the ALL CAPS.

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But it’s the idea of it being possible though, it doesn’t help safe network’s vision of establishing a truly un-shutdownable and redundant data network. I still think if the rewards and geographically dynamic and if the safenetwork has an algorithm of maintaining equilibrium, say giving each country 3% of total capacity before addition capacity is rewarded less and other countries who have less than 3% of total network capacity, for them their data contribution will be rewarded more etc. (and i used 3% to promote the adoption of safenetwork in at least 33+ countries.

So, while it’s OKAY i guess, not having this, I can only think of this making the network better and in no way worse by having the fees being geographically dynamic. So why not?

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I was asleep sorry about that!

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The distribution will mean that it’s as geographically separated as possible, without us trying to goelocate any node. .We do a lot to ensure geography is not known, as a security feature.

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Yes, but so much worse stuff is possible too. I think a global EMF is more likely by far, but still unlikely

Or SAFE fails and only China really uses it is far more likely, bit still unlikely

The sky falling because of nuclear fallout (WWIII) is more likely, but still unlikely

The chance of China wanting too or even capable of having 90% of farming requires a massive leap of negative faith. Reasons are varied and given by many. IF SAFE is a success then NO its impossible for China to have 90% of farming. If they did then all countries apart from China would have a MASIVE hard drive shortage. Guess what companies would flat out refuse to supply the Chinese market with over 95% of the hard drive produced. It’d take 95% or more of the harddrives to achieve 90% dominance.

Actually even 50% of harddrives requested by China would see them refused. China is only 1/7 of the world’s population and still only a limited number having any computer apart from a phone.

tl;dr
So no world economics would not allow them the capacity to have even 40% of vaults. Nice thought experiment but in the end just unnecessary fear of China taking over the word, uncertainity of the world’s ability to resist such an attempt, and doubt SAFE’s security & anonymity can work.

If SAFE can control geographical locations then the security & anonymity of SAFE is compromised. One of the great benefits of SAFE is its ability to have its nodes anonymous

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Not a problem, just wanted to give you some time to edit it yourself.

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If nodes are not geographically clustered, then it will experience inevitable performance slowdown? XOR distance seems genius idea but I’m wondering how performance would be when compare to current web.

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You should get the fastest bit of the data, it may be geo closest, or just on high bandwidth pipe. The key is you get many bits form many locations all the same way. Bittorrent does not try to be close or geo distributed and seems pretty fast, due to getting bits in parallel.

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Those arguments isn’t what I’m discussing though, as they’re comparing things that would affect the current internet as well as the safe network, if any of those happen, BOTH the internet AND the safenetwork would be damaged badly. I am discussing things that would affect the safenetwork but NOT the current internet.

But your assumptions about China are valid, i too, don’t think they will have 90% of the storage space either, in fact and i only used China as an example, it can be USA, North Korea, Russia, whatever, so no need to bring up the actual world fractional population of China, I am definately not fearing China taking over the world, I am simply saying it’s in theory possible for one country to have control over 50% of the network’s storage at some point, and it’s best if we can avoid that by changing incentives based on geo-location in a dynamic way. But I guess you can storage multiple of the same files onto the network if you want to make sure it has an overwhelming probability that it’ll be retained regardless of if 50% of the network would go down at once. So in the end if i have important private data i guess i’ll just do that.

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And I contend, just like China any country would be unable. USA government simply cannot channel that much money into it, nor any other western world. It requires a dictatorship or communist government to drain money from elsewhere to put into such a project and if China cannot then no other country could come close.

Losing a measure of network security to implement geolocation of nodes is not worth it. And what of the next idea, do we reduce security again? What would be better is to do is make datacentre style farms less profitable.

When you compare one country against the world then they will not win. No one country is capable of owning most of the hard drive resources or bandwidth. USA might be the closest, but there are many factors that would stop that too, and in any case they would not get 50% of world’s storage even if they went dictator and controlled everyone’s hard drive and put it to overthrow SAFE.

My comparisons above were there to illustrate the level of threat that the thought experiment is in comparison. No good trying to stop a 0.00001% threat when there are plenty more likely threats.

A country getting 50% of vault storage (need a lot more though) is not possible in the current economic, political and population distribution of the world. I doubt any country could get 25% by being single minded to overthrow SAFE by amassing vaults.

Unless a plausible method can be enumerated that overcomes the economic, political and population barriers then there is no need in my view to reduce the security & anonymity of SAFE. Once you can control geolocation then it can be used against SAFE to achieve the very thing you are trying to stop.

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