I was looking around the forum but I couldn’t figure out the currently valid views on these.
As I understand, sections are the atomic units for decision making. If that is correct, how does the network as a whole form a globally consistent idea about the current PUT price? Does such a thing exist even, or is the price decided section-by-section, expecting it to be only more or less consistent?
Moreover, how does the network know how much free space there is? There used to be a thing about sacrificial copies, is that still a thing? If not, what else has been thought up to get at least a good guess? Again, I expect this would be decided on the section level, so it would be interesting to know how much noise we should expect from section to section for this guess or estimation.
I’m busy with work at the moment but I have a few ideas about Safecoins (well, mostly an amalgamation of things already mentioned on the forum, nothing really new) that I would want to try out when I have time but it’s hard to start without something up-to-date about the above two areas.
Yes it will be but we also have additional mechanisms now, An RFC for secure message relay is coming and that can expand to complete network knowledge of some things such as total safecoin, space, farmed etc.
Thanks! So, for the purposes of potential Safecoin ideas, and concerning the ratio of available space, can I just assume there will be a simple API call that returns a value that’s valid across the entire network?
EDIT As the PUT price would probably depend on nothing else than the above ratio, this would also make the PUT price global, right?
Just to be clear here, “can expand” means it can, it has not yet. It does not even exist yet, never mind exactly how it works or what it covers. I am only saying there is something coming that can be used for much more than it would seem, it is coming, it’s not here and it’s capabilities are not fully realised in anyone’s mind or code, so for single API call for a feature not debated out or detailed etc. then we cannot know at this stage.
Edit " available space," we cannot know, there is nothing we can do to make a vault tell us honestly and nothing we can do to force it to not fill space with any other program etc. We can do some small things like sacrificial chunks etc. But again, till launch some of this will just be “stuff we can do!”, nothing more than that.
Yes, I meant it in a way that we could get an answer that is somewhere close to the real value and does not vary too significantly section to section and minute to minute.
As I understand it the sections will set the prices automatically based on supply and demand on the network?
But as many here expect, Safecoin will be very popular in the future as another asset and people will still trade it for $ on exchanges.
I guess the network will not know about this.
Can it happen, that the price for storing data on the network will be disproportionately high (or low) for the hype-driven value of Safecoin that traders agree on?
Thank you for the answer. It makes sense.
So basically it’s possible that storing one mb of data will cost hudreds of dollars, but just for a very short time.
Not for a very short time, but rather for a not known time. It will depend how users will react and reflect price increase. Similar to Bitcoin fees, were some pay 1000times more than others.
Yes, but there will be secondary effects as people adapt to the opportuny and cost created by these disparities.
So you may buy extra PUTs to use or even sell if the price goes up, but in doing so you risk the price falling!
For most I think it will make sense to keep enough PUTs to ride any spikes, but in my experience people don’t generally do this because it is work. So some will create software to do that work. Some will catch on and use that, but most won’t. And so I expect there will be various secondary effects, mitigations, and always people caught out and complaining rather than mitigating. Like going on holiday abroad and finding your currency has dropped.
In time though I expect the volatility to fall substantially because increased data and service use will dominate speculation. As usage grows any currency becomes more stable.
over the long run the cost per Mb should actually drop. It is expected that, within the confines of supply and demand, the network will always be getting bigger especially over the long long term as technology increases and adding resources gets cheaper. To some degree a bigger network just means safecoin costs more and the dollar cost is stable. Its really all about supply and demand. As it gets cheaper to add more supply people will feel the benefits in the dollar cost per unit of storage.