Is farming viable?

It’s 2 years old, maybe a lot have changed since then.

As has been said already, multiplying the supply prior to launch will have no impact. For example, you can split a pie into halves and have a piece each or into quarters and have 2 pieces each - the pie remains the same size, as does your share of it.

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This topic has been hashed out many times on the forum already. You’ve got some reading to do… after that you’ll find most/all of your concerns have been considered, with multiple solutions. To much for me to summarize here… you might enjoy combing through the divisibility threads… Cheers!

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Here are some thoughts that others may have or not have mentioned before and you could know them as well and I mention them so that we understand each other.

Recycling means that there can be almost any number issued over time.

There will be some people who spend their coin they farmed for a PUT balance that might last them months or more for their pics uploads, forum replies, mail, etc

So not everyone needs to hold a coin for the network to be well and truly usable for them.

Then of course SAFE is updatable and division of safecoin will change everything in that regard.

OH The RFC is old and only a starting point. It is already in need of updating because of the way things have been implemented. Its a space to watch really.

That is crystal ball stuff. It depends on many variables, with the most unpredictable being people. The only thing predictable is that if the network works as intended then people will be uploading data, sending mail, responding in forums etc etc.

So the known part is that people will be uploading heaps.

The cost of PUTs is dynamic so the coins destroyed per period is unpredictable with any certainty. Then how many people are actually using SAFE. At this time there is estimated less than 1/2 the world is potentially using the internet at some time during the year. But how many are doing things that would require safecoin if done on the SAFE network.

That will NEVER be dealt with because safecoin is not a money making coin and to give a estimate is to make promises and that takes safecoin away from being a utility coin paying for resources and more into a security.

If truly a success then the current users of the internet will become users of the safe network because so much content and sites will be on SAFE

But if the question is about how many will do PUTs (upload data, mail, reply etc) then its probably less than 3/4 of the current users since at least 1/4 do no more than search the internet for info and surf.

When vaults can run on phones (while charging) and tablets in addition to laptops and home computers then countries like Africa where the tribe people’s children are using phones by the millions then I’d say that the numbers could be extremely high.

When school children learn they can earn safecoin by running a vault on their home computer and phone then expect a large portion of families with school kids to be running vaults.

It again will be hard to estimate the proportion of so called users to be running vaults.

A principle I don’t know

Again something that is inestimable at this time. Will vaults run on phones only while charging? are you talking of 24/7 vaults or vaults on for 14/7? Will people see value in safecoin?

So many variables, so little data to work off. All I can estimate (if safe works) is that it will be at least in the millions.

That depends on the factors above and in addition the size of their vault, are they on slower internet speeds? Do they run their vault 24/7? How much spare space is on the network (affects farming rate directly)

One vault might earn 1/5th of another vault because of the vault size, etc. Again this is difficult to answer.

What was your number of people doing "PUT"s? What was the overall time period?

Why did you not account for the fact that data has to be uploaded in order for people to use SAFE? The more coins out there the more coins that will be spent (human nature).

Terminology issue: Coins are NOT burned Burning implies that they still exist but are unusable. Coins are spent and then destroyed by the network and available to be recreated/reissued.

And these are just figures plucked out of someone else’s imagination or best guessing.

Market cap is not a good figure to try and use. Since you cannot know the number of coins existing at any one time. Its unlike crypto coins where the number of coins existing is only ever increasing (usually) to a fixed number of coins. So you can use marketcap to work out many things. SAFEcoin is variable, it can reduce from one day to the next or increase. The cost of PUTs can change from one hour to the next.

A good number of the people will only be looking at how many PUTs can their safecoin be used for and ignore the fiat value. In other words a lot of people will be more interested in how much resources will their safecoin they earned buy on the network and never even look at the fiat value.

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That was one of my first thoughts. 4 billion coins and they want the world to use safecoin? Not even one per person.

I agree that increasing the address space from 32 bits (4 billion) to like 34 bits (16 billion) or 35, or 36 bits would be a sensible thing to do.

And as @Traktion says if you give the same proportion then I cannot see this as a legal problem, just some insecure people might feel they are somehow been taken advantage of.

So if 34 bits then the swap is 4 safecoin per MAID

The counter point is that more coins available then the overall transaction rate increases due to needing more coins to pay for something. A point against going to any more than 34 or 35 bits.

Because the RFC is a very early draft of the principle and easier to start with whole coin. The RFC does the division by having a balance that is reduced by the PUT cost every PUT. The balance is created when the user spends a coin for it.

Actually its not quite as bad as it might seem at first. Each coin is handled by a section. So sending a million coins would perhaps involve a few thousand sections. So a little parallelism occurs here whereas in BTC it would not.

Thus a million coins being sent might only involve a few hundred of those transactions being handled by any one section.

And you never know safecoin could be implemented purely as a balance system when finally done. One MD per wallet and the balance kept there only updatable by the network. Its all to be worked out still and these issues are known to the developers.

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Safecoin are recycled with use. In order to put data on the SAFE Network, the user must pay in Safecoin, which the network then “burns”, allowing for the creation of new Safecoin to be allocated as farming reward.

Safecoin are divisible. My sense is that price per PUT will fluctuate in response to data storage supply (i.e., resource costs and capacity) and demand (i.e., willingness to pay and resource need). Theoretically, 1 Safecoin could buy exponentially more data in year 10 then it could have in year 1.

In light of the points made above (along with other factors), it will likely take decades (if ever) before the max supply of 4.3B Safecoin exist. As has been mentioned, many community members have explored and discussed this topic. For example, I have hypothesized that.

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I really like the idea of farming safecoins. But I still want to have free SAFE storage. Because from an end user perspective people are used to have free storage of their data on Facebook and even on Google Drive up to a limit. Similarly, if it’s possible to implement, it would be great to have a free SAFE storage quota of say 1 GB per user to start with and the limit can be increased automatically by the network over the years to adjust for technological progress.

And the registration of new SAFE accounts probably needs to be controlled for some time still, even in the beta version of the network, to prevent bots from registering loads of free accounts.

And to get back to the topic, yes farming is viable I think, even small farming by ordinary users, at least in the beginning because of the safecoin potential. Even if people can’t turn farming into a business model it will still be attractive for users to earn safecoins.

And even big tech companies like Microsoft and Google might set up lots of farms for the SAFE network, not to make profit, but to ensure a robust platform for their IoT businesses and so on.

Nothing is free. With Facebook or Google you pay with your data and personal information. Everything you upload is analyzed and used for advertising or anything that makes them money.

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Agree. Really cheap is likely to be better for the network and users in the long run. If there are lots of farmers able to contribute easily, this will be more achievable.

To add numbers, spending £1 per month would scarcely be noticeable by most people. A cheap loaf of bread, a short bus journey, less than I pay for 1gb of 4g data, etc. If you just send a few emails, messages, posts, I doubt it would even be a fraction of that; the effort by the network would just be so small to justify more (economically speaking).

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I know there would be some system to make farming viable on small devices with low capacity and to prevent centralization of farming in large datacenters. Do we know the algorythm how this will work?

Imagine I have huge server and want edge over home users. I already have advantage in capacity/latency/cpu power:
No more coins for vaults larger than X?
OK, I will run more vault instances
Only one instance per PC allowed?
No problem, I will use virtual machines.
Only one vault per IP address?
Can be problem for me on IPv4, but it will alco cut off massive amount of users behind NAT.
On IPv6 i can have bilions of addresses, no problem.

Am I missing something in my thoughts?

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But you are also competing with people with little or no infrastructure set up or running costs. They are likely using unmetered broadband, with hardware bought to do something else, sipping at the electricity supply.

Data centres will almost certainly provide the highest performance, but that doesn’t mean home vaults aren’t useful. They will take the slack when needed and will keep the whole network honest.

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Thats my point, big machine in datacenter provides best performance and because (if I understand it corectly) the farming reward is based on latency, how do we make sure there is something left for the smaller slower home vaults?

10% of internet users: about 400 million (end of 2017)

20% of the vaults owned by home users: 20% of the users (whales) own 80% of the storage space (Pareto principle) so 20% of the storage is owned by 80% of users (regular users)

1% of the coins recycled a day: 2^32 * 0.01 / 86400, so abut 500 Safecoins redistributed each second

If there are 400 million home users who own 1 vault, there will be about 5 times as many vaults, so about 2 billion. If each stores 1TB and the cost of 1TB is $25 then the total storage is about $50 billion.

As rent is always connected to real estate value, renting that storage shouldn’t cost much more than how much the storage cost, so the market cap can’t be much higher than $50 billion ($12.50/coin) when the network is an everyday thing, after the hype cycles are done.

This calculation isn’t affected by cheaper storage because we always use as much as we can pay for. If the Safe Network happened today, this is the approximate maximum storage a vault would provide.

Wrong word, sorry. Recycled. I used it as such in the calculations.

Which is a legitimate method.

It’s important to place these numbers in a rough ballpark to see if Safecoin and farming can work when the network gains worldwide adoption.

If my node sends millions of transactions, that’s spamming the network. Isn’t already something in place to prevent that?

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Yes. However, as the network fills up with data, more and more coins are already allocated and a less and less number of the coins can be farmed. It’s a dynamic balance.

Your own doubts about things will make this principle not applicable to SAFE.

The extra costs for running data centre vaults over home near zero cost, will work against the 80%/20% since the data centre vaults will not be as profitable as home vaults.

Home vaults will be ever so easy to run, the economics of scale doesn’t work here, unlike what the principle is based upon.

The storage will be greater than what people want to store. Since we do not have anything like SAFE on the current internet then you cannot estimate total storage that way. I expect that as soon as people can store securely their private data then they will be uploading a lot more than has been seen ever.

Even if there is a high %age of vaults as datacentre vaults then storage for them is a lot higher than for home users. So 25$ per TB for data centre permanent storage isn’t realistic at the moment, since datacentre costs has to include VM instance rental, data storage rental etc.

Of course trying to work out a market cap for a utility coin that has recycling is a lot more complex then total storage multiplied by a $/TB The coin will have a lot of utility for people paying others for goods etc. So there is also value in the coin itself.

But still the figures are just a guess. This was my point

If they are valid then no its not spam. Spam will be trying to transact one coin address to multiple IDs In any case the wallet can mitigate that by various methods.

As it fills then people are encouraged to add more storage by the dynamic farming rate

But you are forgetting that the data has to be uploaded in order to fill up the network. Also the cost to PUT will be much more the reward for GETs.

Obviously the algorithm has to be tuned otherwise you can easily get the situation where too many coins are farmed for the coins recycled.

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Yes, I know: “this time it’s different”.

The figures are close to the theoretically possible values. The results may be 10x less or 10x more, but not 1000000x less or 1000000x more. Therefore, it’s a useful estimate.

At any given moment in time, the number of coins burnt (paid) and reallocated will be very close to each other. That’s the only thing I needed for the calculation. If 2 billion vaults compete for 500 farmed coins/second (if 1% of all coins are recycled each day, which is a high estimate!), then it takes a long time before any one vault can farm a coin. And that is a problem.

Again, it can’t be very far from the storage value. It can be 2x as much, maybe even 10x as much. It can’t be 10000x as much.

This coin is not very useful for everyday spending. I can send arbitrary amounts with Bitcoin and friends but Safecoin comes in one size only. I saw your suggestion about smaller coins. Great, small values are solved. But sending a million coins for large transactions? Do you seriously believe that’s how it should work? I looked through a few of the division threads as @jlpell suggested and saw a few different versions of coin denominations. Those seem more realistic.

I think some free SAFE quota will be needed to get enough users. And for sufficient network growth. I’m thinking about the majority of users, not the early adopters. Not even farming will be viable if there is insufficient end user interest, because then too few GETs are generated to make the network grow and to reward farmers with safecoins.

Why?

Coins are only paid out as GETs occur. You assume that the number of rewards for GETs match coins paid & destroyed. That is not an assumption that can be made. One simple reason is that the algorithm will need to be tuned by necessity to mitigate such a scenario occurring.

Your calculations seem to be based on farmers being paid for amount of storage supplied. Whereas it is based upon the successful GETs they supply. And the number of GETs in a period is very variable.

And that is why coin division is discussed elsewhere a lot, and is going to be introduced.

But they aren’t really since the transaction load increases a lot. As you pointed out transacting large numbers of coins is not good.

It has been suggested that this may happen. Most likely the release candidate betas will have a PUT balance allowance to get over the chicken & egg problem. But as soon as you give free PUTs in any system then storage spamming will destroy the system by filling it up as we have already seen in a previous test network.

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Because anything else means the network is not functioning correctly.

There are 4 billion coins. A fraction of those are free to farm and the rest belong to wallets. While some coins will be used to buy PUTs and others will be farmed for GETs the ratio of those two fractions needs to remain relatively stable over short periods such as days or weeks or else the network would be highly unstable.

You sure don’t expect that one day 45% of the coins are farmed, the next 87%, and then 31% the 3rd day, right?

What do you mean? If there are larger than 1 value coins then the transaction load would decrease not increase. I could pay 10,000 Safecoins by sending a single 10,000 coin instead of 10,000 x 1 coin.