How does the network scale?

Hello,
My name is Doug. Im a truck driver in the US, no college, tech enthusiast. I own a bit of maidsafecoin and have been following since the crowd sale. I have a few questions.

I would like to be able to explain to someone else how the more popular a file, website or app becomes the faster it becomes. (Scalability) As I understand it each file will be encrypted then broken into shards. 4 Copies of each shard will be made and then scattered across the network into many vaults. Also, as i understand it, if the exact same file is stored on the network by several users only one file will be stored. If there are always only 4 copies how does it scale? Does something like a swarm in a torrent happen and if so who gets paid for the gets that aren’t necessarily coming from a vault.

Thanks in advance for your patience.

Cheers from the highways and byways of the US.

-Doug

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This is right there are 4 live copies at any time (well this is the target number so any less than that starts a copy). There are up to 16 off line copies (machines switched off but may still be useful).

The cache / speed up happens because data is cached in first in first out queues in each node along the route. So like a swarm that returns to normal after a period. This happens because a node has it in its interest to just pass data back rather than pass a message along (and then maybe also the data on return route). So a selfish node wants to cache. Certainly does not want to drop data as the network will penalise it.

This means that data reaches along the path of the requester of that data and appears to bellow out form the source. Nobody gets paid for cache data as its a network fundamental principle (save, yourself, save data, save network - the golden rules). This saves many attacks as well as being efficient.

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Making possible opportunity for innovation that’s unprecedented. Among so many other game changers maidsafe is bringing to the world. Thanks

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