I think a high realistic long term goal is $20.00 per SAFE Coin. But since this is crypto and many successful projects generally get pumped to the moon I personally want to see $60.00 per SAFE Coin, and that is what the greedy investor in me wants (cause who doesn’t want financial freedom where money is no longer a stress). What the techy nerd side of me wants is to see this baby live in action helping millions around the world store and access data quickly and securely. With further version releases that can support crazy ideas like VMs running on SAFE for remote desktop or something of that nature.
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95% of current crypto projects that currently have a coin, if not more, will be expelled from existence in the next 3-6 years. We will be left with far fewer projects or those projects that do exist will hold no real value for anything other than individualized utility such as a gambling coin at an online block chain casino. If this succeeds it will hit $20 so fast your head will spin. That’s a 9 billion market cap give or take. Assuming success of the network this will blow through and hold $150 no problems no issues. We are also assuming a growth in all things crypto over the next 2 years which appears roughly where we are headed to launch. It’s also worth considering all those company market caps listed by @mav can all be accomplished or used in some way on the network.
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Total coin supply is about 4.5 Billion though its not in circulation yet. But as the network would go live the circulation is expected to be more than 2 Billion (after 1 years of launch) at any time that makes it a $40 Billion market cap for $20 price. This is highly doubtable in current setup, however the future is expected to change with mass adoption.
That doesn’t make sense. The supply at 20 years is not expected to be 4 billion or above. Why soon after live would it be 2 billion. That is like an extra 1.25 billion rise without even considering the spend (destroy) rate.
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Beat me to it. There will be likely less than the current 452 million in the first few months once we go live. Most hodlers won’t fully transition their coins until they absolutely have to (months/years later) Upward pressure will very possibly catch many off guard.
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I didn’t mean just after the launch but say after 1 year of launch.
And I was meaning upto say 5 years
Think about it… If the rate of increase over resource purchases is 1.25 billion per year then farmers are getting virtually nothing in the 4th year and beyond because all coins exist.
Year 0 - 15% → ~40% (670M → 1.75B)
Year 1 - ~40% → ~65% (1.75B → 3.0B)
Year 2 - ~65% → 90% (3.0B → 4.25B)
Year 3 - ~90% → 100% (4.25B → ALL)
So after year 3 the only coins given to farmers are the ones being spent. And at the rate you suggested then its no where near what the previous years were
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Is it so? As per my understanding the rate of conversion from current network to SAFE would be highest in the 1st year itself or as long as the complete data is not transferred. So the burning rate would be higher but due to many new users the generating rate is also expected to be higher. Now as there are only 10-15% coins would be in circulation when the network goes live I am expecting heavy compensation by the algorithm for adoption (or due to less circulation). Eventually there would be a stability after awhile. So the numbers in circulation would rapidly increase at the beginning and then it would increase at a decreasing rate till stability
Well I may be wrong but my limited understanding gives me this conclusion.
P.S: I never said the increase in circulation would be linear. After 3-4 years (or more depending on adoption), the rate of generating new coins and the rate of burn needs to be very close to each other for stability.
That has never been suggested and there has never been any suggestion that special rates according to the life stage of the network.
If anything it will be low rate at the start because there is not so much data to be retrieved. This means low issuance of coins due to farming. As the network gets more and more data then the issuance rate increases because more data is being retrieved since there is more data being stored.
And of course the coins are being destroyed as people store data. As the network grows in the first 6 - 12 months there is a lot more data being stored than being retrieved as the web pages are built and files are being stored (before anyone can retrieve the data - farming). The data has to exist first.
Doesn’t really matter the issuance rate will be lowest at the start of the network (see above) and only really start slowing again as the number of coins existing gets past say 50 to 75%
Year 1 will likely see a decrease in total coins existing since some or lots of the 15% will be used to store data and the data has to be stored before farmers can farm. And the amount of data stored (and available to farm) in the first year will be the smallest of any year after that due to lower numbers of people storing data
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Correct, its all my understanding or my point of view. Thus I said my understanding rather than from past information.
Yes totally agreed. But I am thinking, all the vaults would be empty as there is no data so the cost to store data would be much less, wouldn’t it? Yes the reward from farming would also be lower due to less data to retrieve but I am expecting the number of coins in circulation would increase, again totally my view.
In real life this happens almost always, say, I am drawing my conclusion from bitcoin mining, the rewards were much higher at the beginning. Yes, I know the concept, working strategy and everything for SAFE Network and SAFE Coin is totally different from Bitcoin but I am just giving a real life example.
But nowhere near as many as later on so they fill fast and the price reaches some average for storing relatively quickly. So I doubt this will help early uploaders past a few days.
Wild guess. But i expect usd2-3 on beta
I love reading your posts Mav. And I’m sure everyone else on the forum does too. However, this post is in my opinion, one of your best. As an investor, you need be completely aware of all the different variables that can affect a company. I, myself had about 90% of the variables you mentioned in this post but compared this project to other crypto companies like Ether, EOS, NEO. Probably should’ve compared Maidsafe to the major bluechip companies you mention in your post. For me two things stand out. First, I’m pretty concerned about one of your variables from Confidence/Risk. The variable is ‘regulatory environment is unclear’. Living in the US, I’m pretty concerned that Safe Network may be blocked or even shut down but I’m keeping my fingers crossed. But then second is your entire paragraph of Timing. I feel the same way. Too many unknowns so just follow the timeline of 25 years. But why only 5% chance? When a brilliant mind like yourself throws out a conservative number of 5%, it becomes a little bit concerning. Based off everything I’ve read in this post and other posts on the forum, I think this percentage should be much higher. Maybe 30-40% chance of capturing 30-40% market share. I think your analysis doesn’t need adjusting and I think ‘mildy’ successful companies should be in the 10-20B range. Assuming that the crypto market will continue to grow at exponential rates in the next 5-10 years. As far as timeline, I absolutely think the 12 years count towards the timeline of 25 years it takes for a company to become wildly successful. R&D is a huge part of a companies success. So I see exponential growth of the network once released. I think the Maidsafe team has a strong game plan to attract developers and users to the Network.
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Sooner or later, some govenment will try it, thats for sure. Network has to be “too big to fail” by that time. Same as they cannot ban cars becouse some people use them in criminal activity.
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If you believe in the fat protocol thesis, then the market cap of network could potentially be higher than those blue chip companies. (I’m sure most are aware but here is the link just in case Fat Protocols | Union Square Ventures), but who really knows.
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The only way they could stop an invisible decentralized network like the Safe Net is to pass legislation, but they would never be able to enforce it. They would lack the resources. A google attack would also be useless. I think the government will complain about it, sure, blame dark web type activity, but in the end they will join the Safe network to protect their own secrets. Hopefully a decentralized Internet will create a Decentralized economy, which will eventually make Geo-politics a thing of the past.
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Nah, won’t happen. Torrents have proven this is essentially impossible. To me (from a purely price perspective) the only regulatory risk is the exchanges being shut out. This is not a statement about the capacities or abilities of regulators, this is about the concrete technological aspects of the network.
I’m still completely confident the network will be delivered. So why only 5% chance of wild success? Probably that’s a bit too low, but 5% would mean going 100x current market cap. If I picked a bigger number, like 80%, we’d need to consider 2000x current market cap (or more). I’m not able to accept such extreme disparity between an imagined reality of 200,000% change and the ‘real’ reality which we have (mainly due to information asymmetry). So 5% it is. 5% is me conceding that maybe the market knows better than the speculators; I’m not so certain that I can simply ignore the crowd.
As I said, this is the first time I’ve put numbers to it, so I could have picked any number. Price speculation is not like the technology, where latency is a fact of physics and growth follows a relatively physics based trajectory. Speculation is not for me. I remember at the first bitcoin meetup I attended people were saying $1000 is a wildly and unimaginably successful future. That was 100x the price at the time, and bitcoin has obviously far surpassed that (peaking at 2000x that early price point). So 2000x is not unheard of.
As a related aside, my current economic interests are mostly to do with non-convexities (especially how they apply to externalities).
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And even then, there’s decentralized exchanges that don’t have this risk, as well as p2p in-person matching websites, etc.
So no need to worry about this.
Just needs to launch 
That’s all
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I agree with this way of looking at it. The linked post was good to read again too!
The technology and the team have always impressed me, right since before the crowd funding. A determination to deliver quality, well thought out, highly technical software is self evident.
The question remains about the ultimate use cases for the network. It could do everything from appeal to the Tor/torrent crowd only, it could appeal to the cryptocurrency private coiners, it could appeal for corporate data storage, it could appeal to home users fed up of security breaches. It could appeal to all of the aforementioned and many more. Each of these will impact on price and even tacit acceptance could cause 10x or 100x price increases, so it is really hard to call IMO. If it becomes defacto, then the price change will be more shocking than Bitcoin, imo.
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Really nice post and link to mav’s earlier really nice post. There is a hell of a lot of blue sky here, but even the simplest deliverables make this network undervalued.
Going back to the ‘what will they deliver on’? and what does it mean for current pricing?
A slower, far more secure Dropbox. > 90%. Core tech proven with the exception of farming economics. Note that dropbox’ market cap is 10B give or take, so even if one assumes that the stock market is overvalued, there is at least a 10x multiple on current price, fully diluted if the network can get that market cap. It is however, not the same use case (large amounts of security non-sensitive syncing storage that gets updated often), so this must affect any pricing estimate. If safe is reasonably cheap, then storing unchanging data for security, like family photos is a massive upside. Data storage should be the pricing basis however as it is the only high confidence, well understood aspect of the network. It is however already enough for me to justify regular buy ins now.
We could continue…
Uncensorable email network. Same confidence as above, very difficult to say what this is worth. Part of the valuation of things like gmail is that they can be datamined, so this may not be monetizeable. However expected value >>0 for sure.
A ‘blockchained data validation solution’. Depends on consensus too so lower than the above confidence by whatever your confidence in parsec is. Although the network does not include timestamps, if the timestamps are in the document themselves it can be almost the same thing. Could possibly compete with factom type cryptos etc, but also with simply hashing your document and inserting into bitcoin transactions. I think the demand for this type of thing could be significant, but it will take time to figure out how to use it. So % of this market that safe is good for is another factor. Timestamping/notarizing is currently not priced in as a seriously valuable service for any crypto, but I believe it will grow. Still marginal value add x a few more risk factors.
Uncensorable media source that can replace some uses of torrents, some bits of youtube, facebook etc. Far more speculative, again with the caveat that the data service is not nearly as easy to monetize as the data mining. The ultimate impact on price here may be more equivalent to the price of network data service rather than the ‘media’ price tag on it.
… etc, etc. etc. In the end, for current value, most of the pie in the sky use cases suffer from the double factor of lower confidence, multiplied by the fact that even if safe can steal the market, it can’t necessarily steal more capitalization than the bulk data pricing because privacy prevents the same sort of monetizing. BUT, if it can deliver on many of the promises, the use of SAFEcoin as a currency in and of it’s own right becomes a low probability but potentially ‘more shocking’ than bitcoin.
Right now, the market seems to be saying, “x10 = $1B cap fully diluted”, implying high confidence that data storage will work but only steal a small fraction of a dropbox like service. I don’t think the market has considered storage aspects like family photos or videos that exceed even paid dropbox limits (currently mostly served by external HDs one drop away from disaster), and it certainly is not pricing in any chance of success on any of the more radical use cases. I think this is a deep and almost certain underestimation of the possibility of the network, hence still buying.
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