SAFE v1.0 without Safecoin?

[janitor]

We’ve had discussions related to preferential (discounted) pricing for public data and Project members said that hasn’t been decided yet. There have been persistent calls (before and now in another active topic) for freebies (free space, limited or unlimited) which could be done fairly easily, but would have a significant impact on the economics of the network.

Also related to this topic is the post from last March with SAFE launch predictions where the only prediction from that time that still has a chance of being correct is this one for March 2016.

Considering:

• the coin part is far from being completed (frankly, it sounds like work on that part hasn’t even started),
• beta may happen in December 2015 or later,
• there’s a lot of support for “freebies”, and even those who don’t support freebies have said the coin is not essential for what SAFE network does

I am beginning to wonder about the likelihood of v1.0 being released without Safecoin.

• Can the network function without a coin? Yes
• Would this get support from the redistributionists because it would help the adoption of the network? Yes
• Would this get support from the app vendors? Probably yes
• Would this make it possible to release some 8-12 weeks earlier than otherwise? Yes
• Would this make SAFE Network offer same or better features than simpler projects that already can be used (Maelstrom, Zeronet, etc.)? Yes

Which leaves the farmers, who according to some aren’t that financially focused, and MAID holders, who could still get their SAFE coins, it’s just that there may not be that much use (and demand) for it initially, until the economics is sorted out (say, in v1.1).

I’m not arguing for SAFE v1.0 with or without SAFE coin (“without” also means with SAFE coin which can be spent only on apps, since storage space would be free) - I’m just summarizing existing arguments and circumstances and pointing out that if farmers aren’t paid, there’s no point of delaying v1.0 in order to finalize and fine tune the coin module.

I don’t know if there is really such a choice, but if offered March 2016 without the coin or June 2016 with the coin, I’d pick the former.

[smacz]

Actually, you can use Freenet right now!

EDIT: For clarification - I’d pick the latter.

[janitor]

Right, that’s another working solution without a coin.
Zeroconf isn’t as anonymous as Freenet or SAFE, but it can do forums and DB-driven Web sites and there’s like 5-6 simple open source projects that rely on the users’ altruism rather than a coin. That segment is quite sensitive to first mover advantage, so there’s some value in time preference I think. By next summer some of them could become quite big.

[cryptomaniac]

SAFE v1.0 without Safecoin? Well!You can make thousands of bankrupt holders maid.

[Melvin]

@janitor

Also related to this topic is the post from last March with SAFE launch predictions where the only prediction from that time that still has a chance of being correct is this one for March 2016.

How does a prediction back up your suggestions?

@janitor

beta may happen in December 2015 or later,

Beta doesn’t exist anymore.

@janitor

the coin part is far from being completed (frankly, it sounds like work on that part hasn’t even started),

What’s your source on this?

@janitor

there’s a lot of support for “freebies”,

I’m not too sure who you’re talking about here, please provide names if there’s that much support.

@janitor

Which leaves the farmers, who according to some aren’t that financially focused,

What or who is your source on this?

[Anders]

Farmers must be able to earn safecoins already from the start. Look at cryptocurrencies. Hardly anybody would set up nodes unless they could mine for coins. And in the beginning the coins have a value simply by being hoarded and traded. Even with bitcoin it’s still mostly about hoarding and trading I think.

[polpolrene]

There will be a network without Safecoin, it’s starting in a couple of weeks. David said over and over again that the network will launch in steps. So for a number of weeks/months the network will be up and running without Safecoin. And than, after another sprint it will be implemented. Not so different as you say in you post.

[neo]

@polpolrene

So for a number of weeks/months the network will be up and running without Safecoin.

But also there is no assurances that the data will not be dumped between updates. This solves the problem if all vaults are filled before safecoin functionality is implemented.

[janitor]

@Melvin

How does a prediction back up your suggestions?

As an aside, in the topic with predictions the top poster explained the post wasn’t intended to be judgmental towards MaidSafe devs. This topic is the same - it’s not about delays, but about estimating when v1.0 will be available for production use.
The prediction backs up my suggestions in sense that if no commenter expected v1.0 to be released later than March 2016, maybe it’d be a good idea to consider ways to complete v1.0 by next March.

@Melvin

beta may happen in December 2015 or later,

Beta doesn’t exist anymore.

Yeah, I got that comment on the predictions topic too. “Beta” was renamed into something else (with what purpose?) which I’m too lazy to check now.

@Melvin

the coin part is far from being completed (frankly, it sounds like work on that part hasn’t even started),

What’s your source on this?

This forum. Examples:

• Will public data will be cheaper or not? No answer yet and last time someone commented (David), the answer was it hasn’t been decided.
• Is the current plan to convert all issued MAID to SAFE on Day 1?

@Melvin

there’s a lot of support for “freebies”,

I’m not too sure who you’re talking about here, please provide names if there’s that much support.

David, here:

Farming Rewards, free space for new users, and processing power rewards

I agree this would be best, initially the issue will be distributing enough safecoin for folk to jump start the network though. If there were enough farmers and some clever marketing/seed rounds then perhaps we can get momentum. I will write about this sometime, but there are a few pretty neat options for us.

If public data is 75% cheaper to attract more users with a lower price, why not completely eliminate the cost of uploads to attract even more users?

Also many others in topics like these:

Price difference between public and private data

Public data upload price is planned to be 25% of private data upload price. After thinking about it for some time, I don’t think charging differently is a good idea for the following reasons: Ideological One of SAFE’s main goals is providing us with digital privacy. More expensive private data prices gives people on a tight budget the incentive to upload their personal data as public data. We’ll essentially be in the same situation as we are right now, where people use services that destroy pr…

Using the SAFE network without money

I have pointed out that the safecoin market cap will be larger with my model. Market cap = total value.

@Melvin

Which leaves the farmers, who according to some aren’t that financially focused,

What or who is your source on this?

Several members said that financial gain isn’t the main focus, for example Fergish below, but I also think happybeing and jreighley elsewhere, although I can’t find those posts at the moment:

The point is that safecoin is an incentive which reduces friction, not one that motivates the project overall.

(From Risk of Safecoin making the SAFE network fragile - #18 by fergish)

@polpolrene

So for a number of weeks/months the network will be up and running without Safecoin.

If it runs without Safecoin but on test network (or whatever it’s called now) and data would be discarded, that won’t produce meaningful results (people will behave uneconomically since it won’t matter).
If it runs without Safecoin but on real network (that is, on which you can lose reputation if you delete or destroy your vault), then it’s different.

@neo

But also there is no assurances that the data will not be dumped between updates.

Exactly. And it may even be better (I’m not saying it would, but it’s a possibility) for the value of the coin to implement it correctly within 2-3 months after the rest of the code is done, than to implement it poorly with these freebies and weird incentives built in from the start.
If vault reputation is built into the code from the start and works in a meaningful way (that is, it somehow matters), then a bad implementation would be harder to fix (because vault destruction would hurt early farmers relatively more).

[Melvin]

the coin part is far from being completed (frankly, it sounds like work on that part hasn’t even started),
–
Will public data will be cheaper or not? No answer yet and last time someone commented (David), the answer was it hasn’t been decided.

This doesn’t say it’s far from being completed of course, it also doesn’t state that they haven’t started on working on it.

@janitor

David, here:

Farming Rewards, free space for new users, and processing power rewards - #17 by janitor

Don’t see it, maybe you can copy+paste which part you’re talking about.

@janitor

Several members said that financial gain isn’t the main focus, for example Fergish below, but I also think happybeing and jreighley elsewhere, although I can’t find those posts at the moment:

in the OP you stated:

Which leaves the farmers, who according to some aren’t that financially focused

You’re saying two different things here…

For me personally the main focus isn’t the potential profits on Safecoin but that doesn’t mean I’m not (that) financially focused (which I am because I paid for the Maidsafecoins I own)

[janitor]

@Melvin

Don’t see it, maybe you can copy+paste which part you’re talking about.

Quoting David’s response to Raivanen:

(raivanen) Make account creation cost the amount of safecoin that storing such an account costs. This is the only true solution to this problem.

(dirvine) I agree this would be best, initially the issue will be distributing enough safecoin for folk to jump start the network though. If there were enough farmers and some clever marketing/seed rounds then perhaps we can get momentum. I will write about this sometime, but there are a few pretty neat options for us.

I try to follow Safecoin economics as closely as I can and I remember seeing only one more recent comment in which David said this part about discounts for Public shares hasn’t been decided yet. (I don’t know where that comment is).

@Melvin

Which leaves the farmers, who according to some aren’t that financially focused

You’re saying two different things here… For me personally the main focus isn’t the potential profits on Safecoin but that doesn’t mean I’m not (that) financially focused (which I am because I paid for the Maidsafecoins I own)

I didn’t mean that everything would be free forever or that MAID holders wouldn’t get to use the coins, but if limited (e.g. 5GB for Personal data) & targeted (e.g. 75% off for Public data only) freebies are planned on mainnet, because these are complex and can be gamed in really bad ways, it may be better to simply make everything free (again, I’m talking about mainnet) for several weeks until the coin economics is better understood and a solid model built.

If this could move the release date 2 or 3 months forward and eliminate drastic changes and gaming of the giveaways, it may be worth it.

You didn’t comment (but no one did, so no pressure) on my question whether all MAID will be replaced for SAFE right away. Because that’s another uncertainty during the bootstrapping stage: if on Day 1 there’s 400 TB of usable storage and 400 million of SAFE, how much will a single PUT cost? I asked about this in one of recent topics (I assumed 4PB of available storage on Day 1 and the price still wasn’t good) and didn’t get any comments. I don’t know if this is a problem and if yes, how it can be solved. Maybe making uploads free during first couple of weeks could smooth things out.

[electric]

If the project launches without safecoins it will be seen as a ponzi scheme and people will quickly lose interest. There is skepticm in the crypto community whether maidsafe can solve the double spending problem or not, lets not add oil to the fire.
It’s best to get it right and launch when everything is working properly, even if it takes much longer.

Is there any particular reasons why safecoin is being rolled out last? I underrstand it needs the network to function but maidsafe said the network was working a few months ago in a pod cast, should they hire one more dev to work on the implementation of safecoins?
I’m not up to date with the project , sorry if these issues have already been brought up.

[janitor]

@electric

There is skepticm in the crypto community whether maidsafe can solve the double spending problem or not, lets not add oil to the fire.

This is the first time I hear about this, but this is the only place where I go for MaidSafe news so I can’t say I am completely up to date with regard to non-mainstream news.

There’s could be concerns about the coin (related to this topic, not to double spending), but there could also be if it goes live and there’s widespread abuse and (perceived) unfairness with regard to the pricing.

@electric

Is there any particular reasons why safecoin is being rolled out last? I underrstand it needs the network to function but maidsafe said the network was working a few months ago in a pod cast, should they hire one more dev to work on the implementation of safecoins?

I wasn’t aware of the coin dev thing.

But that’s a great question and matches my observations (no news about development of the “coin module” yet, let alone on when the coin feature might become available for early testing).
I also don’t understand why the coin couldn’t work on LAN (it’s not like the nodes “know” they’re on LAN, and even if they did, why would that matter - one student should be able to PUT files to another student’s vault in the same dormitory).

If a testnet version of the coin won’t become available this year (and so far there are no indications it will), is it completely unreasonable to expect that no mainnet version will be available only 8 weeks later (that is, by March 2016)? I think that possibility should be considered and feedback about users’ preferences obtained.

[digipl]

A working network without Safecoin is a free invitation, to the many who are afraid of this development, to try to kill the SAFE network before it grows.

Sometimes I wonder if some are here to support the network or to fail.

[polpolrene]

How would someone “kill” this network? Quite impossible I think. As long as people share resources. It’s like attack a popular torrent from kickass-torrent. It won’t work. When people up- and download in swarms there’s not that much one can do. Especially on Safenet.

[janitor]

@digipl

Sometimes I wonder if some are here to support the network or to fail.

This topic linked below is named “Using the SAFE network without money” (the author doesn’t even understand what money is - he meant “currency”) while mine is a question to discuss pro’s and con’s of potential modifications to roll-out precisely to eliminate calls for gratis use of the network.

In the topic below at one point halfway I even got a warning from the forum s/w that I was posting too much because my comments were over 20% of all comments under that topic. All of them were against using the network for free.

That topic that calls for free use of the network got > 200 comments and you didn’t say anything like this there, while I was arguing against the gratis use. But now in this topic where I am asking for a reasoned discussion about a more reasonable approach (delayed introduction of the coin), you’re calling me out. And from the very beginning I’ve probably been a leading opponent of freebies, giveaways and free use of the SAFE Network, so considering everything I find your comment really strange.

Using the SAFE network without money

Cryptocurrencies are really great, and safecoin can become the best so far. However, I want to examine it from a really large and long-term perspective. Then the following occurs to me: Money is the hallmark of a primitive society. In the future it’s information and user engagement that will be valuable, and money will basically become just an additional burden and overhead. Already today, scientific studies have shown that when people are given money depending on how well they perform a task, …

[neo]

@polpolrene

It’s like attack a popular torrent from kickass-torrent.

Is it really. Is that attack where the swarm is storing data onto everyone elses computer?

The difference is that with a torrent people are getting data then sharing it. SAFE is people storing data into the network vaults. Imagine storing faster than people adding disk space (vaults)

[polpolrene]

That would be an attack. But the moment the Dev-team introduces Safecoin/Farming it would be a great opportunity as well. And if things really got mad, like people storing TB’s of useless data for free on the testnet, there’s always the opportunity to reset the network once Safecoin is in place.

[Anders]

@janitor

This topic linked below is named “Using the SAFE network without money” (the author doesn’t even understand what money is - he meant “currency”)

No, I mean money, as in dollars and euros. Farmers must be able to earn safecoins. That’s my whole point in the argument. Your thread is about farmers having to farm for free in the production version (1.0) of SAFE! That’s totally different. In a test network, sure, that would be possible, but in the real version farmers must be able to earn safecoins. Few people would farm for free.

Actually this thread is like the opposite of my proposal. I claim that safecoin will be able to fuel the whole SAFE network economically. Without safecoin from the start, big trouble. My long-term vision is that it will be possible to use SAFE for free for most things, including storing data. But that doesn’t mean that safecoin can be removed from the system. Safecoin is crucial for making the economy of SAFE work. And even long-term, safecoin will be hugely important I estimate, for services. Look at the Web today. For end users most usage is free, but for companies there is huge business involved.

EDIT: And also for ordinary customers around the world safecoin will be a superior (unless something even better is launched by someone else) cryptocurrency for buying goods and services. That’s an enormous potential.

[janitor]

@neo

Is it really. Is that attack where the swarm is storing data onto everyone elses computer?

But, but … @Anders said that’s a non issue
That is one of reasons why I started this topic: I think it’s worth considering a ramp-up approach in which the network is open for all, so at least if this “free upload attack” happens, it would take a while until content is uploaded and farmers could simply reset if they didn’t like

And something else, related to the timelines and my use of “beta”: I now took a good look at maidsafe.net/roadmap and as far as I can tell from posts in development > updates and the roadmap image (I don’t know whether it’s up to date and I’m not sure I understand what the shadowed areas mean - completed?) it appears that Dev Bundle 1 has been done, and Dev Bundle 2 is coming up. Then I again read yesterday’s (Oct 13) Dev Update which lists 2 deliverables for this “sprint” (none of which is coin-related).
It looks like Dev Bundle 2 is supposed to have “farming” code. If that and other stuff takes 6-8 weeks, then Dev Bundle 2 can be delivered by X’mas, which would leave another 8 weeks (assuming March 2016 launch, which is just a random guess) for Dev Bundle 3 to be developed and tested.
Dev 3 Bundle has a lot of coin-related stuff, so 8-12 weeks for that part seems quite short. I asked above whether Dev 3 Bundle will be testnet with fake coins and fake data, or some combination thereof.

Why I’m elaborating on this? Because this is the 2nd time was reminded that I’m using outdated terminology, but unlike the first time now I have a bit more time to take a look at this.
Before (last year) the plan called for more extensive coin testing.

 ================================================================
 | NET         |  COIN	        |  DATA SURVIVAL TO NEXT VERSION|
 | Testnet2    |  No            |  No                           | 
 | Testnet3    |  No (testcoin) |  Yes                          | 
 | Beta        |  Yes           |  Yes                          |
 | GA          |  Yes           |  Yes                          | 
 ================================================================

Source - this comment

I was able to find another clarification about testnet transitions from April this year, which I missed to spot until now:

Near end of testnet3 data may stay and safecoin may also stay in place. So basic answer is testnet3 builds all components for beta.
Beta still will not guarantee safecoin (no conversion yet) but will stabilise all API’s and data (we will not drop data in beta). By then we will have carried out a number of tests and hopefully had a lot of community audits etc. (we will be awarding security related bounties for exploits in code/algorithms).

Source - this comment

Then after some renaming, what used to be called Testnet2 seems to now correspond to Dev Bundle 2, Testnet3 seems to translate to Dev Bundle 3, and “beta” is gone. That’s why I’m asking if Dev Bundle 3 has a stage in which real coins and real data kick in, or is it going to be fake coins and fake data. If more realistic coin testing is to be done, then Dev Bundle 3 should probably last longer. But, if I’m the only one concerned that coin may delay the network, I’m probably wrong.