I have never seen this forum so silent in conversation, I thought we was moments away from the testnet release, I thought there would be a lot talk about farming and people’s thoughts and designs of website’s people are making to test on the safe network.
With the banker’s pushing ethereum’s price up, I think people’s greed, has put the safe network thoughts on the side line.
Ethereum: I don’t follow it at all, so I can’t relate to that part of your musings.
SAFE: well, everyone is waiting for something to become available.
Price-wise there’s been some excitement.
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We are busy building our SAFE projects. Talking was when we didn’t have work to be done…but with things so close. Early bird gets the worm, or in this case…SafeCoin.
I have tried to love Ethereum on multiple occasions (running miners, terminal commands, reading all the white papers, listening to podcasts), but I could never get to a place where my gut had anything to say. Compared to the first moments of reading David’s white papers on the SAFE network…I have not stopped thinking about it since.
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I only follow Ethereum through the Ether review. Price? boring
In the long run, I think all these blockchain techs might switch over to the SAFE Network. Maybe the whole blockchain will be abandoned and it’s assets replaced 1:1 with structured data on the SAFE Network. Transactionwise (instant+free+anonymous), securitywise (no ddos, no centralisation, no tracking) and even when you think about scalability (and all the brainpower wasted, thinking about it in terms of the blockchain) the SAFE Network seems to be the logic place to be.
When your in the blockchain room, you can only think about solutions related to it. When your on the SAFE Network, you can really get spaced out and discover a universe expanding.
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I don’t consider ethereum economically viable in the long term.
The fuel Ether is designed for smart contracts, each time one is executed it costs a small amount. Those smart contracts will earn you money depending on what the smart contract is written to do.
Over the long term , competition will make people copy those same contracts , (they smart contracts , being a trusted entity doesn’t really matter) Each person under cutting the last , this competition drives down profit margins as each new entrant tries to steal from the competition , making the profits per Ether be smaller and smaller over time . it could get to a point were the profit isn’t even worth the amount of ether it costs.
In the semi long term i have no doubt that is exactly what will happen .
Right now not very many IOT devices plugged in, imagine what billions of dollars and 5-10 years of research will do, having 30-40 devices + in a single home all communicating and executing contracts all throughout the day . thousands of times a day. That’s gonna cost you multiple ether coins every single day. when it could easily be done for practically free instead on Safenetwork possibly or the one that i think IBM is attempting to make .
for ethereum to have any chance of competing they gonna have to lower the costs per contract, lowering the total profit potential of each coin used, making their coin worth even less
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I’m not sure I understand your point here. Ethers are perfectly scale-able… it needn’t cost several Eth per day, it could cost 0.00001 Eth as the relative value of each Eth increases?! Likewise profit per contract could decrease in eth, but if # of contracts and value per eth is going up then what’s the problem?
Am I being stupid and missing something obvious?
I am a much bigger fan of SAFE, but I am heavily invested in both (and BTC/Silver too). I think there is a place for Turing complete smart contracts on safenet.
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a random example with no real numbers being accurate .
i create a jerry rigged bitcoin exchange with smart contracts , each smart contract functions to trade crypto currency without the need of middleman with the smart contracts provided, each time that smart contract executes , it costs ether .
1000 executions = 1 ether
I have 200 different contract for all the different possible trade pairs, each one has to not only be executed when a trade happens, but to also check at what levels they are reporting in each respective address and if you wanted it to be more complex, communicate with each other .
lets say 20,000 executions happen a day = 20 ether
my exchange charges 0.1% of the trade of each coin, it could be 0.2% but many other exchanges are set at that rate and you need to be competitive .
80 dollars is the cost of functioning smart contracts for the day, I am making 0.1% of all trade value, so i need to make at least $80000 worth of trade to break even . anything over that is profit . Lets say i make 100,000 dollars worth of trade and make 100 dollars so 20 dollars profit
Someone see’s this and say "i can make the exact same contracts but make only 15 dollars a day profit " they then make it with a slightly less fee
then someone thinks “i can do that but i would be fine with only 10 dollars profit”
so on and so forth , the competitive nature of the smart contracts will drive down profits since someone else will always try to do it for cheaper.
Each ether has the ability to be fuel for contracts to function , If you cannot make more money than the ether cost then there would be no point using it as fuel , why pay 10 dollars for a coin that only nets you 9 dollars worth of profit in running smart contracts.
then you have the problem of in the future , your whole house more than likely using smart contract, like your fridge communicating and updating every single time you remove an item from it, checking which products you need and then ordering them, objects within your house all communicating with each other thousands of times a day.
yes you can lower the cost so you might be able to get 10,000 contracts out of 1 ether , but that’s still costing you money for a task that can be done for nothing in the case of a future home setting , were the potential for 10’s of thousands of execution of code could potentially happen
but for the competitive nature of smart contracts there will still be a constant battle for profit margins and getting the most competitive price while still giving you profit which would always remain slightly more than you paid for it, if higher there would be no point of using it
You could make it even vastly more infinite , lets say they make it so 1 million contracts can be done with 1 coin,
Now no one needs to buy coins for years , i could easily sustain my exchange on 1 coin for 1-3 years depending on how intensive it is . But then either the mining rate would take over the use rate , or the coin would explode in value because of the rarity and “mass” use of the product , anyone wanting to run an exchange needs 30,000 dollars to purchase a single ether , its ok cos its 3 full years of smart contract fulfillment, but wait, there are several other different smart contract systems to choose from and some of them don’t even charge you any money,
By that time , the amount of data on the blockchain would be monumental, the cost would either explode into unaffordable levels with other programs that can achieve the same results without needing to buy 0.0001 ether to run 1000 contract executions . causing it to crash or be replaced, or it wouldn’t even make it that far and would just remain at a price closely related to the profit it can achieve which will be a few cents to a dollar more than the coin itself
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A random point:
- Ethereum has pathetic hashing power and it costs money to use
- So, why bother? You may be able to choose cheaper (especially for trivial stuff like auto-ordering the fixed amount of toilet paper) or better (for stuff you want to be secure) or something in between.
Blockchains have one great thing in common. It’s called visibility. You can create whatever system on top of Bitcoin (like Counterparty or Omni) and scan the whole blockchain for all transactions ever. That’s really a great thing, and so far it’s something that SAFE lacks to be honest. On the blockchain you can’t change previous blocks, so it gives some sort of certainty. Something happened, it’s visible, can be scanned, has time stamps etc. So for a number of things, blockchains can do something SAFE won’t in the beginning. Although I think we’ll catch up quite fast.
When it comes to Ethereum, I think it’s great. To me it’s Bitcoin 2.0. I really like the idea of contracts. They’re still in developer mode without a nice GUI. But when they release Mist I think a lot of users will jump on the system. Some great thing that you can do, like blockchain voting, crowdfunding, have a lottery to support some welfare project etc.
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Thanks for sharing your thoughts 
Having so many different block chain systems around , MAID does not need to go the same way , and
in fact , for the scalability of the SAFE network , that is , for performing fast enough at big usage load ,
MAID managed to develop a different & innovative way , re-inventing the best digital equivalent of cash : safecoin
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Ok sorry I don’t know much about ethereum so this might be a stupid question …
what I heard of ethereum it sounded to me it is a blockchain which calculates smart stuff additionally; so with ethereum you can have distributed computing … but everybody calculates everything. If that wasn’t the case the blockchain wouldn’t be the same everywhere in the ethereum-network …? right or wrong …?
If my perception of etherum indeed was right I’d say ethereum is perfect for cases where you want to be 100% sure you get the right result (voting, lottery …?) but if everybody wanted to use it for private/corporate decentralized computing … it would have a little bit a scalability problem …?
So far it’s just one blockchain. And there are indeed calculations done on it. By the miners that is. So when you have 3 friends that share a contract to split cash, 1 person sends 3 ETH to that contract, and it’s calculated (the rules of the contract) that it will be split over the 2 other friends as well. All nodes calculate the result next to the miners AFAIK. So the network runs a slow virtual computer where everybody agrees about the outcome. Indeed just one blockchain.
You mean SAFE lacks at the App level right? This feature at the core level would defeat the whole purpose of anonymity right?
I don’t think this is the case. It’s true that MaidSafe don’t plan to build a transaction ledger into the core, but there’s nothing to stop someone implementing this on to of the SAFEnetwork platform surely.
It’s something that I think lots of people will want, and should be easy to do (though I have not thought that through to design as of yet!), and with more flexibility - using either Immutable Data or Structured Data, or a combination.
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That’s my whole point. I think it can be done as well. Probably with a system where a number of nodes agree on creating a “block” as immutable data and then use the hash of that data to create the next block etc. @dallyshalla is already doing a great job with an exchange. But the key components, like a timestamp, a blockchain we can all scan and a secure way of all nodes that join the system (or App) to verify blocks and transactions/calculations that’s something that won’t be there on day one. And for a good reason. I think it’s great these are in different projects. Now you have different Dev-teams solving different problems. And when they’re both live, we’'ll probably see bridges from one to the other or (D)Apps running on both systems. Providing both technologies to both platforms.
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Yes, I think we’ll see Apps coming that provide these features. No need to build it on the core level of SAFE.
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I don’t believe you need a separate consensus model, or a timestamp to do this. I have already sketched out some ideas privately on how it would work (I forgot when I posted because I’m very distracted ATM).
I won’t go into my ideas in detail, but you don’t need consensus in the way bitcoin does it, or the way SAFEnetwork does it - except for the underlying platform (of Immutable Data & Structured Data as currently envisaged ).
You can build a chain of transactions confirmed only by the participants. Each participant pays for their own list of immutable - mutually verified - transactions to be stored in the network, and these are available to anyone who is considering transacting with them.
There is the possibility of spoofing, but I suspect that this can be kept to an acceptable level for many kinds of use (eBay style trading for example), and higher levels of validation applied (and paid for) where they are needed (real estate for example).
My notes on this are too rough and ready to publish and I don’t have time to work on them ATM, but I hope I’ve said enough to explain the approach.
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I been following ethereum since initial IPO start up but have not invest into it. I still can’t see myself investing into it even though I would made a lot of money from it but there is something there that just doesn’t click right for me. They claim ether is not money but it is! They claim it is a “gas,” well that is a commodity which is consider money. It is only consider money when a commodity has division, and has high trade volume. During American revolution war, tobacco was considered “money”. Then they go off, supporting taxes. “Voluntary taxes”. Well stop saying it is taxes if it is voluntary. Taxes implies threats and violence. They throw hogwash terminologies but it is quite opposite of the meaning. You have to pay ether to create contracts which is dumb. I could create contracts for free on blackhalo/bithalo. Lastly, the blockchain will get more bloated than bitcoin within matter of months. take a look at dogecoin, they already reach to 20gb blockchain within a year and half. They have highest trade volume by far. With ethereum and dapps, oh boy, enjoy that 1000000000gb blockchain in several years.
Yeah, they did everything wrong. Just my .2btc
Bitcoin(blockchain) is analog system, safe is digital system.
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Reposted from ETH - Ethereum - #5 by DavidMc0 - Safex Discussion Forum | The Ecommerce Platform on the Blockchain
“The two reasons eth is being driven up. 1)new crowd and 2)presale eth on lock down. The new crowd are the people who are just now dipping their toes into the cryptocurrencies waters and were brought here by the excitement generated by Microsoft and IBM interest in Ethereum. Then there is the presale eth on lock down. Those who purchased eth in the presale want to wait until the platform is rock solid or at least a wallet is created that is highly trusted before they unlock their eth and start playing with it. Once the presale eth is released onto the market the value of eth will be cut significantly unless there is a massive amount of new interest in the platform. Slock.it built on Ethereum is going to have a sale of tokens which will be used by their meat space locks. Slock.it claims that the holders of slock tokens will be given voting rights and may vote on the sharing of dividends created by Slock.it lock users. Partnering with Shapeshift: support for Bitcoin and Altcoins | by Stephan Tual | slock.it Blog”
Ethereum will be moving from POW to a new POS being coded by Vlad Zamfir and Greg Meredith (also coding Synereo) this new Proof of Stake algorithm Casper will be the most advanced algorithm of its kind. I spoke to Greg Meredith who agrees that we will all go further if we all work together. There is no us and them in this space. The useful code being developed there will advance projects here and vise versa.
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