Of course. The question is which is the largest group? Ethereum is totally useless except for speculation. There is nothing valuable you can do with it, you can only speculate. But millions and millions of people are farmers. Those of them with whom I have contact do so only for the free money. There are probably other believers in decentralization who do it for the idea, but I don’t know any.
So I see two ways. One has proven to work. The other does not. The bad thing is that we have data even that the second way doesn’t work. Sia has over 180 decentralized applications, but only 1 million users and 300 farmers in one year.
I interpret this data as saying that there is no interest from end users at this stage, so I will focus my personal efforts on farmers and free money. Of course I will also participate in the promotion of all Safe apps, as I promised @Nigel, I will promote Jams with posters
I think people will rightly believe what they will and we will only know looking back, but as an anonymous network even then, we may never know
Also largest when?
The question becomes who are the easiest to convince in early days? Crypto as we know is a tiny space, but active participants, particularly if it’s seen a money for nothing type scenario.
There may be a bigger group, I am not sure, SETI at home, folding, early skype (dramatic take off) and others. These depend a lot on the apps on offer. These are all because it’s right, skype perhaps because you get something from it (earning right to free phone calls). I think all of these were/are significantly bigger that crypto adopters.
Then we have hidden decentralisation, I mean here stuff like BBC Iplayer etc. where users provide resources to each other in a way that’s not noticed. Similar to bitorrent, but bittorrent is more obviously sharing for something (earning).
It’s a lot to think on. Folk may do it for free money, that may let the network take off, others will do it for other reasons.
I feel mainstream adoption will be app driven though.
Crypto community may be early adopters, but will they “sell” this to mainstream, because as you say they don’t so far, these folks are seen as weird and scammers by many. Is that a good way to “cross the chasm” ?
I have no idea BTW, just probing and asking questions.
Freemium is enough. You give them free money and some of them will use the tokens as we design then to be used. Apps will appear from there and so on.
My only concern is that the network will not grow fast enough (because people will keep the tokens for speculation), this could give a vampire network a chance to gain momentum and attract our farmers and kill our network. That’s why I have proposed in the past a foundation to upload data to the network so that Safe can grow constantly.
Basically, what Storj does now with their network - they upload test data and have 11k nodes. But I think we can do better by uploading useful data. Of course, this is only for the initial stage of the network while it is a baby. Until it learns to walk alone (ie until people start using it - fake it till you make it)
If someone approached me and tried to sell me a product based on promises of getting rich, I’d suspect scamming, pyramid schemes, etc. I’d wonder what was in it for them, then expect to lose money by ‘investing’ in it. I really wouldn’t want to see the brand associated with any of that.
The network primarily needs users, not farmers. Many folks will farm for free to start with. If there was a desperate shortage of space, the reward rates would spike up and I suspect many here would spring into action to cash in on it. Coping with massive user demand would rarely be seen as a ‘problem’ in the business world - it is an usually a very fortuitous position to be in, especially if meeting that demand just means spinning up more nodes and generating more profit.
We need users to supply data to cause a demand for farming. Having an oversupply of farmers will not increase the supply of data - it works the other way around. It would be like pushing on a piece of string.
Btw, if we really want to encourage uploads and don’t want cost to be a barrier to entry, giving users pre-purchased ‘locked’ tokens (non-transferable) would be much better. Just giving out transferable tokens would probably just see many sold on exchanges.
Given said tokens couldn’t be transferred, it would mean some folk would never use them. Other folks may just upload stuff that they wouldn’t have paid for too, but that may not be awful, as it may lead to them paying for stuff later (a loss leader). This would seed initial data supply and encourage more at a later date.
However, I don’t think we have a mechanism for non-transferable tokens at the moment (although it was discussed in a thread recently, IIRC). Also, I think this sort of strategy should only accompany a good marketing campaign.
Who talks about getting rich quick? When Noia gave me free tokens for farming in 2019, their value was 2.5- 5$ per month throughout the year. Yes, a year later they cost $ 5,000, but that’s entirely speculative. No one can guarantee a fiat price …
The good thing about the crypto farmers / users is that everyone knows that what is $0.5 today may be $50 tomorrow
My thesis is that going to someone and starting to tell him how the Safe Network is secure and anonymous will be less effective than explaining to him that apart from all these nice things, unlike bitcoin, you can farm with a simple computer. I have never said that I will lie to people that they will become rich. Nobody knows that. As no one knows if the network will store data forever. Yes, this is the design, but it cannot be guaranteed and it is correct to emphasize this so that there are no deceived people.
In my experience and opinion this is where the others have failed to get good traction. As @Traktion says it is no good to have all the storage but nothing to store and it is like trying to push string.
Promise of farming giving good returns would help get nodes online and they expect to be farming a plenty. But without that need for storage happening prior to that means having a heap of water tanks in the world without any water to fill them or people to use the water that does get there.
The best solution in my opinion. (read the lot before criticising)
do not push the farming aspect too much in the beginning but market the hell out of APPs etc that are available on the Safe Network to create some demand for farmers to be there.
Push the APPs and data storage. (EG bittorrent replacement natively with public files).
this means we need to encourage applications to be written prior and that the public files are permanent.
Now before anyone goes and sees this as black and white and I am saying no push for farmers, I said not push too much, meaning not concentrating on farming as being the Safe Network’s best feature or money making machine. Not yet anyhow.
So we balance it something like 80%-90% push for usability (Apps and storage w/- security etc) and 10% farming earning
Because earning tokens will speak so loud to those who like getting those things and those who suffer the love of wealth will hear that 10% push louder than any push for users.
In the end we will have as @Traktion says the demand for the storage and people initially who are happy to make the network work providing early storage then others wanting to earn tokens will join.
If you go 50/50 pushing farming and users then you will get that glut of storage then a lot of disappointed farmers who will not return unless we fluke getting big in spite of that mistake.
All opinions are good. I wonder @Dimitar in your opinion do we need to shout to the crypto community, here is free cash! or would a whisper do? (I mean relative to normal marketing where getting new users is really really hard).
The discussion is good, but maybe more about getting us ready than knowing in advance where to direct resources and what forms to focus on. I think of this as getting the full menu of possibilities together and making sure we’re in a position to measure how good they are.
Probably what we need is to get the metrics in place for measuring what are doing and who is arriving in response, and whether they stick around or move on. With that information we can see where more resources are needed, where we have enough etc.
I think we can agree we need people making apps, farming and paying for services. What we don’t know is how much effort and exactly what will be needed to attract enough of each and to keep them interested and active, so that needs monitoring and adjusting as we go. Also what’s working what needs improving in terms of the offer in each case.
So how do we measure:
what is on offer to reach group,
what we’re doing to reach them,
how effective is this, and
the relative balance in terms of numbers in each case (i.e. who we need more of)?
Small contribution from my side, whenever I try to explain what the project is about I highlight different aspects of it depending the person I’m talking to and what I know/don’t-know about that person, so I’m wondering if there is anything in particular that should be pushed more than other things, perhaps making sure the whole concept of what is being aimed at would be better and let anyone pick the aspect that is more important for him/her. I’m sure this is kinda silly comment, but perhaps the message should be more neutral in how to weight each of these aspects, while only the main thing to shout out loud is that we are after a decentralised and Safe internet…just my thoughts.
100%. Apps like JAMS and Project Decorum (and any other relevant app-in-the-making) should be front and center of any marketing campaign . The extra benefit of earning tokens would only be a supplemental part of the approach imo. The biggest challenge will be convincing potential users to switch from the clearnet version of the app to Safe’s version. Needs to be other reasons besides just tokens earned though, and specific to the app.
Personally, I think the following will happen. There are millionaires in the community. Once the technology is proven, they will start buying tokens. The price will go up. We will enter the top 100, top 50, top 20. The big players in the crypto will look at us. I’m sure that the anonymous copy of UniSwap (sushiswap) is not the work of a random person, but is supported by the big players. They will see that our project is open source too (like UniSwap) and will start thinking about how to steal it (@bones saw the video in this link and knows what I’m talking about). If they can’t steal it, they will try to copy it and destroy our version or divert all new resources to their copy.
We see that there is no huge consumer interest waiting for us to start - we see it from Sia, from Storj, from FileCoin. This gives time to copies of Safe to steal the code + the code of all the apps we run on our network.
@Sotros25 says people are ok with the current internet and we need a spoonful of honey. I say the same thing after talking to thousands of people on the street. How can Safe grow and compete with the copies? Yes, we want to grow naturally, but we see that everyone else in the crypto is ready to fake it until they succeed - Storj has 11k full nodes without any (or very few) real clients. They just push data to their network and accept new farmers by paying with their token. A copy of Safe will do the same if they are smart, and we have to assume that they will be smart.
I have pledged to spend 10k MAID from the very beginning to push data to Safe + everything I farm from my farms, but I am afraid that this will not be enough for the network to grow fast enough. That is why my hope is that the farmers I managed to attract to us will also become users. Simply because I don’t see how an ordinary person would take our token for something real after 11 years of being told on the news that all cryptocurrencies are scams. The only people who take the crypto for real are the other people in the crypto, they will also be farmers and if we are lucky both users and promoters. The question is whose farmers will they be, ours or farmers on a copy of Safe?
Authorize dot net, the facilitator for credit card transactions via websites issues the following seal to provide assurance to users that the site is verified. I know, it’s not much and could probably be counterfeited but would something like this help the problem of competing networks stealing Safe’s customers?
Quick point along the lines of what @bochaco was saying.
I often find the conversation about the benefits of Safe is taken out of my hands because someone will pick up on something that is relevant or interesting to them quite quickly and run with it, and it’s not always what I expected from that person.
For example I was talking to someone who works for a disability charity, and they picked up on the data storage aspect because they were struggling to store the charity’s data legally.
Yeah, that’s the point I was making about it being such a multifaceted project, that trying to pin it down to one single strap line, or aiming to condense it to a concise one-size-fit all elevator pitch is not only very challenging, but is not necessarily desirable. Tuning the pitch and describing it’s benefits based on the needs of who you are talking to will always be more powerful.
No need to fear building up a picture over time in multiple passes either.
