Poll: Should MaidSafe implement PtP (Pay the Provider)?

You’re joking, right? If it works with a handful of nodes then it works. “It” being an implementation of XOR space.

In response to the question implied by “I don’t know” - by looking at similar examples, most notable being Bitcoin, which grew out of a geek toy with cypherpunks doing as much destructive testing as they could until its robustness was established after 8 months or so. For its first year it was almost worthless, until someone paid for a pizza with some thousands of it, as a lark, and it was off to the races.

This is a good point - I don’t either.

I’m not saying testing is the answer, or the only thing (@Artiscience) that we should do here. Of course, there may be other useful things to say, so don’t take my challenge to people as saying only testing now. I agree I sounded like that, so to clarify, I’m saying let’s stop just bandying about opinions if we can’t have proper reasoned discussions. I’m quite happy for people to try and demonstrate that this system will be gamed, but until they do, I don’t see those against PtP have anything to add to the debate. That is not to say there isn’t anything worth debating… I’m just not seeing anything meaningful other than educating those new to the discussion at this point. Those against make assumptions. I’m not for PtP, but for trying PtP, because I think creating something that works better than the status quo (which already suffers from all the things levelled against PtP as far as I can tell). The questions are therefore 1) Does it work (ie not break the network), and 2) Does it offer a sufficiently useful alternative to make it worthwhile including. Right now it looks to me as if this can only be established through testing or a reasoned discussion based on some actual proposals - not endless PtP good v PtP bad opinion repetition. So by all means continue useful discussion and education, but I don’t see the value in trying to judge the issue at this point.

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Here’s the thing I see: SAFE network can exist without Safecoin, just as the Tor network exists with mostly volunteers’ hosts. So at minimum SAFE can be a kind of Tor, with a similar scale of usage. And indeed, it probably will be something like that for the first few months or years. But it can do so much more, potentially, than Tor, that some form of currency seems inevitable.

No. I am not really talking about the XOR space – I am talking about the economic model. If you pay once to upload and the farmers (And perhaps unloaders) are expected to be paid for delievering those files for eternity, there is a big difference between having 500 users and 2 billion doing the GETS. The strains on the network are exponentially different, and the reimbursement needs to be able to keep up. After the initial put, There is no source of additional income but massively disproportional expenses being accrued…

Perhaps this is trivial extra bandwidth, and the network will continue on it’s merry way – but if SAFE is the “New free Netflix” then ISP’s are going to put a pretty tight cap on outgoing bandwidth pretty fast, and it will become expensive to farm. At the scale of 500 the network will not flip any tripwires, but those tripwires do exist, and at full scale there is a significant risk of setting them off.

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Also, the catastrophes take time to manifest. There will definitely be a time in the beginning of the test when the economics will look like everyone will be getting safecoin. However, given time, the value of the currency, and the amount in the recycle bin will trend downward. Only after it hits a critical turning point though.

Similarly to what you proposed that Free GETs won’t fly - at scale, without well-thought out rationale, it starts to fall apart at critical mass.

@jreighley No doubt the economic model will undergo adjustment, which is all the more reason to have forks running and natural selection weed them out.

What tripwires, exactly? There are many ISPs and it is a competitive industry. Also, the cost of bandwidth is subject to a power law similar to Moore’s Law (which was the premise of this video) so there is a competitive pressure for all-you-can-eat service offerings.

ISP’s are not a competitive market in the US. Or most of the world. You need government permission to string fiber. I have two choices, both of them Government sanctioned monopolies. There are some other “alternatives” but they are significantly inferior.

Markets work because scarcity can be regulated with price. SAFE’s economic model is broken in my view because GETs will be the ones putting strain on the system, and the only mechanism that the network has for generating revenue is by charging for PUTS. (Which isn’t the problem In the vast majority of the cases) As a result my theory is that it is very likely that the network will be too expensive to use unless you have something very valuable that you care to keep safe from hackers.

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I never questioned that analagoies such as bittorrent are relevant to the discussion, did I? The question regarding my knowledge of pirated content was clearly rhetorical and your judgement that he is “evidently more experience” judgemental. You didn´t know, you still don´t know, you didn´t ask. So, maybe let´s leave it here. I don´t see how this going to become a productive exchange.

Sheer projection, that.

Wow, that’s a first (if I ignore @janitor’s gut responses, obviously.) Anyway, I’ll choose to listen to the wise advice: “Don’t accept criticism from anybody you wouldn’t hire.” :smirk_cat:

Suit yourself. I’m not 100% against the idea, but it is unlikely to work for anything that is not thought of as “content” (pages, videos, etc.) Most useful content, however, will be metadata (e.g. search responses) that people don’t usually think of as something to “like.” Even if they did, having to do it manually would be about as welcome as the stupid EU enforced cookie consent crap.

In short, paid likes would make pirating profitable, but they wouldn’t help honest, community serving services (again: search.) More of a problem is how you would implement it at all, because:

From a technological point of view, there are a lot of problems with likes. How does one “like” a chunk of data? How can we make sure likes won’t get hijacked? Which of the 2000 chunks that make up a video file should be liked? How should a like on a content aggregator’s (e.g. SafeTube’s) site propagate to the content it links to, so that the original poster (the artist) would also get some of the love? I’m not sure an explicit like feature can solve these problems, but they are trivial with PtP.

Yes, we may reward some stuff that was accessed by accident, even against the desires of the user, and it sucks. I still can’t see anything better that can make the network work (again, I’m referring to those services that can’t function without a return of investment.)

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The proof is in the fact that people don’t pirate everything. And on top of that they go out of their way to support artists. By examining how pirating works you can find out how to identify the best source for material. And if the orginal source is the best source for material, which any decent artist should be unless they’re DEAD or completely incompetent, then people will use these methods to find them. Ergo studying pirating shows you how people can find and filter out artists from those who are just copying material. Because it’s the artists that will be regularly producing new original works. Have you ever followed a web manga? New content every day sometimes, or at least every week. Sure you could copy the material but only one person could PRODUCE the original cannon.

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Content rewards can be handled apart from the network level (probably need to). Also, as far as I know MaidSafe distinguished app rewards and reward of content, so I guess rewarding search enquiries would be in the former category, but I may be wrong about that.

The argument “likes” could be hijacked, well, I think that argument can be (and was) directed towards “Pay the Uploader” as well. When I referred to likes I actually thought about paid likes and transmission of love via watermarking. I don´t see how that is would make pirating necessarily profitable (unless users are willing to pay, of course), but admittedly there are other ideas about the liking part, so you may be right depending on implementation.

Anyway, I have spent too much time on this thread and rereading it remembered me of the fact that originally I only wanted to point out that I find it misleading to name the feature “Pay the Producer” and not more accurately “Pay the Promoter” or rather (as @joshuef has correctly said) “Pay the Uploader”. To me that´s marketing a feature which cannot be delivered for the network is agnostic to social semantics, but yeah, I am repeating myself, therefore I follow the friendly advise of @happybeing and leave it here.

I saw that before, not recently though. I just never understood how that would be possible on a network where apps and “regular” data are both just opaque blocks of ones and zeroes, indistinguishable until a client decrypts them, so paying or not paying is at the discretion of the user and their willingness to follow the “rules” (demoted to guidelines at this point.)

My single strongest argument for rewarding uploaders is that many of the most important community serving services are impossible without it: a statement nobody challenged in any substantial way yet. I understand PtP can be played, and there may or may not be good ways to thwart some or many or most of those attempts. None of these arguments are stronger than the requirement to make the above mentioned services possible (profitable enough to maintain.)

EDIT: sry for editing after your like by accident; i hope i didn’t mess it up too much with it haha

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I think it will be pretty easy to break, tbh. You just need to get a sufficient number of people making requests to your data. You could do this by embedding requests in legitimate software or via some sort of XSS to embed the requests in someone else’s software.

In short, requests just need to come from a far and wide user base, in sufficient volume to generate income. This must be possible (acknowledging caching, etc), as otherwise legitimate producers would be unable to generate usual income.

As soon as you have a few devs/hackers exploiting the network, either:

  • The PUT costs are either going to have to increase to cover them (making the network uncompetitive due to high cost)
  • The payout per request will tend to zero (as the PUT fee is shared out), rendering the process a) pointless and b) a drag on the efficiency of the network

We can test this though. It seems to be the only way this will be resolved either way, as this debate has ranged for a long time with no sign of agreement.

I didn´t like by accident, don´t worry. I liked the argumentation (even though I don´t fully agree)

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lol i meant that, accidentally, my edit got committed after you (presumably non-accidentally) liked my comment :joy_cat: nvm

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youtube, without curation wouldn’t exist. it was constantly in the process of being sued into oblivion in the early days. my objection to ptp is that it fosters, rather than hinders, the kind of behavior that threatens safe network. and i would like safe network to succeed.

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Glad to hear your opinion.

I completely disagree

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There are pros and cons with regard to the success of the network. Attracting content uploading, and users wanting to access that content could make the network very much more likely to succeed for example.

But again, which way you each of us sees that question is a matter of opinion. I think we don’t get anywhere with simply stating opinions I’ve easy or the other.

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I think the question of whether or not to incorporate PtP as a function of the core system has been most valuable and at this late stage I’d like to add a few of my thoughts:
• most forum contributors seem to thinking of “producers” as writers of news, music, books, software and so on whereas to me such works are all goods and/services and are part of the great world of commerce consisting of commodities, goods, services and currency. So in voting I considered PtP to apply to all such commercial transactions;
• “all commercial transactions” to my mind includes everything that can be bought and sold;
• every time someone, a corporation, a bank, a central bank or government meddles in the market for commodities, goods, services and/or currencies the effect is destruction of the essential part of commerce namely “free market price discovery” and that is the prime cause for the monetary mess that has engulfed the world today;
• it seems to me that where and whenever man creates rules for the medium of exchange, unit of value or what constitutes a unit of account, whether by limiting the issued currency or debasing it by increasing its issue or by way of creating inflation by running a deficit current account, the result is the inevitable booms, busts and depression which is usually followed by war;
• therefore I think the prudent course for development of the SAFE network and Safe Coin is to avoid the issue of PtP and encourage this essential facility to be provided by app developers.

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