Question about the wallets of the Sections

When all 4.3 billion tokens are printed and in circulation and people use them to pay for storage the paid goes to a section’s wallet. There is a delay in payment from the network to the farmer.

As network usage grows, is it correct for me to expect that the number of tokens in a section’s wallet will also grow? I’m trying to find out if there is a limit on the tokens that a section wallet can store. For example, is it possible for the section wallets to store 90% of all tokens for a certain period of time (a peak), or is there some mechanism that prevents this?

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So far, all I know is what ever supply the sections hold is held roughly evenly amongst them. Great question @Dimitar would love to hear more from Maidsafe on their thoughts on this so far.

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Not directly, but it would take a lot of strange events to get to that level. These wallets should be paying out at least as much as clients pay to store data. They should also slowly drain the 85% rewards. For them to hold 90% of coins would mean they did not pay out and accumulated which is wrong.

I see these as drains of coins and not accumulators of them.

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Thanks for the clarification David!

Another question - let’s say that daily consumption increases by 1%, ie. today people spend 1 million Safes, tomorrow they spend 1 million + 1% and so on for an indefinite period of time - will this lead to an increase in the number of coins held in the wallets of the sections?

It should not, it just means the rewards in coins are increasing, which may mean the value of each coin in fiat terms has decreased or there is more activity which means the network has grown (more sections etc.).

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If the network grows, ie. more sections are created, doesn’t that mean that these sections hold wallets with more coins (in total) in them? Does a network with 100 sections hold the same amount of coins as a network with 1 million sections if people spend an increasing number of coins per day?

What happens is a section with X coins splits into 2 sections with x/2 coins in it.

Spend mean recycle coins to the nodes in the network. So clients will not be putting coins in and they stay there for any appreciable time, they are quickly paid out in rewards and those nodes earning get paid.

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This may be going off-topic for a beginner thread, however…

In a scenario where resources are plentiful, and demand is very high, then an accumulating function would be rather beneficial. Think capacitor or flywheel for handling transients. I suspect that a need for this scenario will arise whenever the price of SNT in terms of fiat rapidly spikes/pumps. By having an accumulation function for that scenario, the network can later handle the opposite effects caused by downward spikes/dumps of fiat price for SNT. No analysis or simulation performed yet to back this up… just my intuition based on other dynamic control systems. So rather than a complete drain, the network has a long term target balance it is slowly trying to maintain (ex. 50% of all tokens). The peak amount of tokens payed to farmers might reach 99.99% if there is some dire need or emergency, but later the network would try to accumulate back to 50% should conditions allow.

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Agreed, this is an area we don’t have a fixed approach to. The speed of that drain, it should be greater than zero but perhaps not 2X or more of payments made for resources. I mean pay 1 safecoin 2 get paid in rewards. That may be too quick, but we need to dive into that. Perhaps rewards should be a % of section balance as opposed to a straight ratio?

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