How is Farming Centralization Disincentivized?

[GabrielDVine]

I really appreciate your response.

Yes, the data centers have huge capacities, but even they won’t be able
to amass the numbers of nodes necessary to monopolize or control the
network

Upon what evidence do you base this prediction? Economies of scale are the main factor incentivizing centralization in this context. So for a massive datacenter – say, owned by an authoritarian nation-state with exabytes or yottabytes of storage, putting aside a few hundred petabytes would be trivial, and in the early stages of Maidsafe could be multiples of the size of the Safe network. This makes the attack vector of “farm for a while, then pull the rug out, likely destroying a lot of data whose only 4 nodes are all in our datacenter” easy as pie.

For them it would be relatively expensive compared to what they get out
of it. That many nodes running on the network would actually give it
pretty good stability and fast functioning. Yeah, they’d be getting a
pretty big portion of safecoin, but what’s unfair about that? Look at
the amount of resource they’d be contributing!

Large actors threatened by a new system are willing to pay to attack it – their incentive would perforce lie outside Maidsafe.

@fergish

Others will be using the network just because of its features–as it builds out, anyway. Everybody would be getting safecoin, too, despite data centers getting a large portion of it.

Another attack vector: dominate the network, getting most of the safecoin, then crash its exchange value by selling all at once. Rinse and repeat.

@fergish

Also, all that resource will drive down the farm rate, making their contribution even more expensive to them, while everybody else will have little if any increased overhead.

Can you explain that more? Why would the datacenter (which, remember, just looks to the Safe network like a lot of average-sized farmers) have higher overhead than small farmers? The cost per resource in the big operation would be a lot lower, and their reward would be identical to the small farmers’, right?

The point is that even with them putting all that resource into the
network, they don’t actually get central control, just a larger part of
participation, which means more resources for network functioning.

I think the “pull the rug and destroy the data” attack vector described above could be defined as “central control” (fatally compromising network reliability), right?

@fergish

Centralization is about control. The network doesn’t actually disincentivize centralization.

Then what’s the point of the sigmoid curve?

Hopefully it makes it impossible.

Now you’ve lost me. If a malicious actor can shunt on 500% of the farmer resource instantly, the farming is 83% centralized, no?