Hello, I’ve been following Maidsafe for a couple of years now and thus far have refrained from doing anything beyond reading. I’m waiting for vaults before I join the fray.
I am a big fan of the idea of a decentralised network and all that this represents.
I created my account to ask a specific question. I feel that it’s a pretty fundamental one and it needs to be answered, I don’t think I’ve seen this anywhere on this site already.
Imagine this scenario:
I create a new Maidsafe account.
I set aside, say, 10GB of space on my PC for this account. That means that I have 10GB of space on the network.
I use some of that space to store content.
Now I remove my PC from the network. As I understand it, my data would still be on the network taking up space on other people’s hard drives.
The issue I have is this:
What is to stop bad actors from simply doing this: Join the network, upload data. Then remove their PC from the network. Now you have an account with data on the network but you are no longer ‘paying’ for that data to be stored.
Does it just disappear? How does that work with your PC going offline temporarily?
If it is still persistent, then you have an issue: Bad actors could flood your network.
Give space, upload data. Remove space from network.
Help please! I need to understand how this would work.
This is an old concept and is no longer being used.
Safecoin is used whenever you store data on the network and the network no longer uses you supplying space to pay for your storage of data. Your thought here is one reason it was changed
Thus when you store your files there is some (portion) of safecoin used to store the data.
If you decide to farm (supply disk space) then you become a node on the network with a (data storage) vault on your hard drive. When you retrieve chunks then you will be also be earning safe coin.
There is a primer for the safe network that should help to answer any basic questions you may have. It is a very good read
It was about bad actors creating accounts by setting up a vault then removing it after they have an account. So there is actually a couple of effects the bad actor does.
Adds space and stores data on the network (for free)
removes the space causing a space shortage, but still got their data stored for free and no responsibilities.
But the network no longer does it this way so that cannot happen that way.
Yes it still possible for people to add lots of space for a while and then remove it and this is a worry for a small network. But once the network is out of baby stage it would take a well funded bad actor to cause problems by doing this.
But as the network gets large the possibility of doing this reduces. And it won’t take long before this attack has little effect on the network.
