Safenetwork expandability concerns - Economical effects of redundancy mechanisms - farmers make 8 times less!

I just thought of this so i thought i’d post it - an effect of each data getting duplicated 8 times is that, for every 1GB stored, there need be 8GB of network space. Hence, for every 1 GB paid for, it pays for storage on a 8GB “hard-drive” so to speak, known as the network itself.

So let’s say 8 safecoins are paid by me to store 1GB of data(and assuming i was the only customers and the networks total capacity is 8GB), in theory, each 1GB contributed to the network by the farmers will receive 1 safecoins in return, so it means, if you store 1GB onto the network, you pay 8 more times than you’d make if you donate 1GB to the network. I think this can be improved somehow, because basically, being a farmer, just with the model itself, the profit isn’t a lot.

So say dropbox cost $0.1 to store 1GB for a year, how much would it cost on the safenetwork? 10 times more for forever? But each farmer will only get paid 1/8 of the payment anyway, even if the storer pays $1, if you divide that by 8, farmers basically get paid roughly the same amount as if they’d only store the data for a year, to store it forever. that doesn’t sound too lucrative, it also doesn’t sound too lucrative to pay a lot more upfront, many would probably see storing 100 GB on the safenetwork costing $50-80, but on dropbox for a year cost $10, they’d probably use dropbox! Now, i have learnt a little psychology(and still learning), so my knowledge is limited, but nevertheless, enough to know that many people would definitely prefer to pay little by little rather than a lump sum upfront, it’s consumer psychology(also the reason why phone plans are very popular). Pricing Psychology: A List of Tactics see section - “offer payments in installments”, this is simliar to that.

And if the safenetwork cost less upfront instead, maybe $20 or less for 100GB lets say(or double the cost of what other storage providers charge for one year of storage) that then becomes kinda OK for the customer paying for storage since safenetwork offers forever storage instead of one year, but the farmers will basically suffer, in that case, they will get paid 4 times less than what they’d get paid if they were Dropbox for a GB stored for a year, and they have to store it FOREVER with UNLIMITED bandwidth. Even PAID dropbox accounts have 250GB/day bandwidth limit on their files in public folders (What Are Dropbox's Bandwidth Limits?). So basically, it’ll seriously suck for the farmer. Remember, duplication of 8 times is only the BASE figure, for popular files, safenetwork offers not only unlimited bandwidth but it’s duplicated many more times too, taking up both the networks storage space and bandwidth, making profits worse for the farmer. Remember, dropbox is a big company and gets business prices for bandwidth, yet they still limit it, safenetwork is made up of users getting retail prices for both bandwidth and storage, yet receiving 4-8 times less the payment while having bandwidth being unlimited.

This goes along with my other post regarding concerns for sustainability(Safenetwork sustainability concerns - Bandwidth has an ongoing cost however Safenetwork is a pay once, benefit forever model - #299 by digipl), although this issue is a bit different in a sense that the potencial issue, if it does affect the network, it won’t get worse overtime, so it doesn’t affect ‘sustainability’ per say, but it does affect the expandability, as if the economical model isn’t too good for the network, or any network, it’ll grow less.

A potential solution is make the cost of storing forever higher while introducing a second option to have people able to pay 1%-5%(exact % can be decided later) of the cost they’d otherwise pay, but pay it monthly, they can pay a slightly higher than 5% for the first month to cover some initial costs, if any. This also solves the sustainability problem. Anyhow, thought i’d at least put it out there for the community to discuss, maybe it won’t be a problem at all but maybe it will and needs some good solutions from the community.

I don’t know the backend on this with certain knowledge, but I do have a few thoughts to fill out the picture a bit for examination:

– I wonder what the redundancy is for dropbox or google while storing files as it is now. I’d wager that it approaches 8 copies, likely spread over multiple data centers across the world.

– I’ll wager that dropbox, google, etc., maintain multiple copies even after a file is deleted or even after you close your account.

– Setting up a monthly/yearly/whatever repeat payment for storage is a non-starter because it would add lots of complexity to the model and break security by attaching some account ID with the storage and maintanence of the chunks, and have to continually monitor whether they are being continually paid for.

– Thinking of the economics of the SAFE Network from the perspective of current standards is problematic because currently stuff is stored by entities with their individual business models, not an autonomous network that broadly incentivizes its own persistence. Couple with that the fact that safecoin’s value will certainly rise to cover whatever the burden is for maintaining the network, plus a premium because of its privacy, security, anonymity, speed of transaction, etc.

– The technical/economic weight of maintaining the network will be spread very broadly. To some degree it will depend on how valuable participants find it. Will it work out economically? That’s an untried point, but consider how valuable such a network will be to almost everyone. Those value inputs add up quickly, especially as network effect grows. Now consider not having centralized entities siphoning off huge portions of the value.

Not to say that your points are not valid. I just think it’s difficult to plug it into a different paradigm than the network will create, which is quite different than what exists now–anywhere I can see, anyway.

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Someone, somewhere down the line will have some fixed costs. Assuming Dropbox are big enough to own their own infrastructure, they have fixed costs to for it. In short, as a consumer you may pay rent, but the provider owns the assets.

Likewise, there is nothing to stop Safebox from being a middleman too. Safebox could could provide a similar interface to Dropbox and charge a similar rate in rental. However, they will then store the files at the fixed rate. Safebox would hedge the rate to cover their fixed cost, just as Dropbox do with their infrastructure.

I am sure sore sort of multisig could be used to allow both parties to directly read the content (Without Safebox UI/interface), etc.

In short, many businesses provide rental or their assets. Safebox could be a similar busineas model.

Furthermore, duplicated data is a feature. Dropbox with also have various layers of duplication for backups, most likely over multiple sites.

Dropbox cannot rely on using spare capacity from computers around the world either, which is both abundant and already paid for by the end user (another fixed cost). On the other hand, end users have already paid for their storage and likely have an under utilised broadband subscription too. Anything they make back is a profit, so they do not need to charge a high price.

Safe net also has deduplication too, which means the same file chunks aren’t stored over and over. If people upload something that already exists, they can be billed to store the file, but the network doesn’t need to create it.

This is been discussed at length previously. I would suggest searching for other threads on this.

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SAFE’s payment model is not to reward for farmer’s storage. So this analysis is based on error and thus cannot arrive at a correct result.

SAFE rewards for data retrieved so there could be any amount of data data stored on people’s spare storage resource

The model is for spare resource to be used by people so the cost of the actual (incremental) storage is nix, nil, zero, nothing. And this is why that analysis is meaningless

Are you saying that dropbox doesn’t have multiple backups of the data being stored? If you are then the price is only covering data that you could lose at any time.

No the farmer is paid according to the model. They don’t get 1/8 or 1/6 or 1/anything. They get what they “signed up for”

Remember that there is a disconnect between paying to store and being paid to retrieve. Payments to upload only provide more coins that can be created in a future time. Farmers are paid according to an algorithm that does NOT include the payment made. Payments are not considered when calculating if or how much a farmer is paid when retrieving a chunk for someone.

All payments do is maintain the future of payments. As I told you before, rewards would continue for decades without payments (assuming farmers continue to farm obviously). Payments simply reduce the scarcity of available coin for the network and this is the mechanism that channels through to rewards.

Now you did pull that out of thin air since this is globbly gook as far as SAFE is concerned. Using results from different pricing models comes up with some weird results. The rest of this paragraph is not right

Obviously not enough knowledge gained. Its that people are being channeled into that model of paying little bits at a time, not they prefer it.

EDIT

tl;dr

All of your proposals and discussions are showing that you think of SAFE storage as the dropbox or google or whatever style of storage. That is where a user pays the storage company to store their data and the user retrieves the data from them. That is the user pays the person storing the data.

This is most certainly the wrong concept and explains your reasoning concerning this. Also you analysing SAFE according to these traditional business models is always going to trick you up and bring negative reactions from those who desire the new model that SAFE is introducing.

With SAFE the uploader is NOT and I repeat is NOT paying the person storing the data. Its a different model using a different method for paying the person retrieving the data

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Um… Most people prefer it…it’s not like they do not have a choice. No one forces you to sign up for a plan than get the phone outright. You may prefer to pay one off, but please don’t introduce your own biases over several studies that have been done to test this experimentally.

Well I don’t think of the safenetwork as such just that the service it provides practically in effect is similar to such services like Dropbox. And when I think of Dropbox giving bandwidth limits even to paid accounts and safenetwork does not, it just raises some concerns. For example.

Well either way, I’m just saying people will pay 8 times more than other storage places while farmers get 1/8 of the payment. It could be fused between the two like customers pay 4 times more and farmers get 1/16th of the payment etc, but give unlimited bandwidth and unlimited time to store data…

Only because it a hell of a lot cheaper for most. The 12 or 24 month payments here in AU is cheaper than buying outright and paying for the plan. Usually 20-40% cheaper to include phone payments with plan than to just pay upfront and plan for the 12/24 months. EDIT also most 14-19 year olds don’t have the money to buy the desired phone upfront.

People rent when they cannot afford the essential item. Phone, house, etc.

You know the credit card is the perfect counter to your claim and why it is in high demand and overused massively. The credit card allows people to pay for things upfront even when they don’t have the money. The house loan allows many to buy a house outright and pay back the bank.

How many people prefer to rent their fridge when they could pay for it outright.

How many rent when they could pay outright.

NO its that people NEED to rent the item or are being channeled into it by clever marketing. Microsoft is putting a hell of a lot of money into promoting the rental system because they want all their mainline products to be sold that way in future. Money into studies, surveys etc so that rental of software becomes the norm

Yes and funded behind the scenes by companies that want the rental model. EG microsoft Yes look into your studies further, just because a trusted university or whatever does the research you have to look at the funding.

You obvious do though by your remarks and constantly bring up those models as to why SAFE needs to change to rental.

Because bandwidth to them is Expensive and a part of their business model. Again you are thinking of SAFE as another dropbox style of system/model.

And I noticed you picked what seemed to be hanging fruit to discredit my post, rather than the obvious meat of it.

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Sorry that doesn’t even make sense. Its like saying people are paying more for goods because the goods have to be manufactured and transported to the shop.

NO its all inclusive in the cost and payment.

And so like SAFE the farmer is paid according to the model. The farmer retrieves data successfully and is paid for it at the going rate. That rate is INDEPENDENT of what was paid to upload it. I repeat its INDEPENDENT. So there is no 1/8 or 1/whatever of what the farmer is truly worth.

Your argument is simply pulling seeming related figures out of the air and claiming a fact.

The 8 copies is REQUIRED. Without there is no network.

STORAGE is not costing the farmer because the model is SPARE resources and not costing. SAFE is NOT paying for farmers to store data. Again you consider farming as if dropbox style model is used. It is not. This is why you cannot understand what people are saying to you.

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Yes, this, exactly all this was going through my head when I was reading this OP.

Where are these “I’m entitled to an arbitrarily defined 8/8 of something” ideas coming from :stuck_out_tongue:

Thanks @neo for always clearing up misconceptions with grace :slight_smile: day after day

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Yes so the argument remains…

Only because they don’t know there are options to, if the store offered to pay in installment many people do choose that.

Yes, that could very well be, Microsoft and other big companies pay to get these type of data so they can then structure their payment options, but i don’t now why that’s relevant as that in no way discredits the study done by the universities themselves though, in fact, the big companies are ONLY PAYING because the studies done are true and have value to them. For example - They then implement the installment payment model and get more sales.

Ok, so you’re saying then, bandwidth and electricity will cost differently magically to users of the safenetwork than to Dropbox? The reason why I’m comparing is, yes, the model is different, nevertheless they’re using the same infrastructure that should cost the same throughout both models!

No because the phone is very much a unique situation where the phone sellers are in league with the phone companies to make buying the phone outright overly expensive.

It is one of the methods being used to channel people into the rental model by artificial means and counters the “people want rental naturally”

So tell me if you prefer to pay rental for an item if you had the funds to pay for it outright or if you would pay for it outright. I know anyone who works for themselves don’t want to pay more via rental if they could afford the item outright.

Consider why the credit card is so so successful that people beg to have one. Easy it allows them to pay outright rather than pay rental.

HA HA HA these people don’t watch TV obviously. Rental companies are constantly advertising during news and views shows. We have Radio Rentals as a major one in AU and they advertise constantly in prime time and google adverts etc etc.

Yet they are a tiny portion of the fridge usage and TV usage. By tiny I mean so tiny its in the statistical noise margin of any study.

Why do Microsoft want rental, because they make a hell of a lot more money that way. So SAFE trying to be the cheapest for the masses is going to increase costs by rental?


Oh darling I am going to rent the disk space on SAFE for our Honeymoon photos, the whole Giga byte of them. I could pay the $0.001 to store them upfront. But I decided to pay $0.0002 per month and please remind me darling to pay the rental each month. It’ll take me 4 hours each month since that is the time period the uploads took. Each year it’ll cost me like $0.0024 to keep them stored each and every year.

3 years later they go on that 2 month holiday they saved up for during their 3 month long service leave. When they come back he says, darling I knew I forgot something, I forgot to pay the rental on the Honeymoon photos. She goes into a rage saying “I told you SAFE was insecure to store those valuable photos. It was the last time I saw Uncle Jack and have no other photos of him for the last 20 years.”

Oh did I mention he paid $0.0072 during those 3 years, yet paying up front would have been $0.001 and SAFE forever

Noooooooooooooo Why are people going to balk at cents to store a movie. You are going to see greater adoption of SAFE if you can tell them SAFE is actually secure and that their data is not going to be deleted by some system daemon. To have rental means people no longer OWN their data. The system owns it and will delete it if you don’t pay up constantly.

And human nature shows that what people use is what they use and support. If your focus is on something then that is what you gravitate to in general. And the exceptions to this general rules only go to show that the general principle holds true most of the time. If people are using SAFE then it actually safe to assume that they will also be storing their data there too and those who can will want to farm to get some SAFEcoin to pay for their uploads.

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yeah that would be super super horrible and remove all the good progress of this entire project :stuck_out_tongue: please no to that!

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You’ve not read about the studies done by these universities giving seeming favorable results for those paying for them. The studies are not for internal use of the paying companies, but for marketing and feeding further studies done legitimately. Its how these companies can introduce bias into related studies because those new studies used the “fake” trusted study as a resource that can be trusted.

Living many decades allows insight to the devious ways “truth” is created.

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No I am not. Its not magical. But if you had understood what I and others have said in the other topic then you would now KNOW why its different and not magical. And your inability to conceive of this and the use of the word magical shows you treat SAFE as another style of dropbox.

If you are visiting your Mother and your brother visited you and asked you to take the hundred dollar note to her. IS that costing you extra petrol? Extra wear and tear on your car?

Well yes, but its like not really measurable. Oh you could get your calculator out and determine the miniscule amount it would.

So for SAFE (most) farmers will be on unlimited (or effectively so) quota connections (bandwidth =$0.00000000) and the disk is running anyhow. So its like the example of the $100 above. The extra electrical costs for the average farmer is so small that they will not consider it and the SAFE coin payments will be so much more than their costs they wil not waste the time to calculate the miniscule amount. Its a distributed network and for Dropbox paying for all the bandwidth CANNOT compare to home users using what they already pay for and use the leftovers for SAFE.

Do you understand?

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Actually paying upfront to upload files onto SAFE actually has the benefits of rental without having to pay each month.

Consider that tablet or phone user wants to start storing their photos.

  • DropBox they have to pay big upfront and each month. Is it $5 per month or $15
  • Buying a USB Hard Drive. Like $50 to $100 for a 1TB
  • Buying a bunch of USB memory sticks. Like $5 a pop

OR

  • SAFE
    • paying for the SAFEcoin, which they have to to even for foreverjoyful’s rental system (what 50cents today, maybe $5 10 years time when inflation has risen the costs of other methods above)
    • Paying like $0.0000003 per photo uploaded.
    • so each month they upload 1000 photos costing like $0.0003 each month
    • Its actually forever storage and cheaper than any other style of DropBox out there.
    • so paying upfront to store is cheaper than any other system for the person who wants to store say photos they take. And its a once only payment and a fraction of any rental system.

EDIT NOTE: even if my costs to upload is somehow too low then multiply them by 100 to being way higher than expected and its still way cheaper

So in future isn’t the rental model actually useless and undesirable since the upfront cost of storing any reasonable set of files so small that to claim its unaffordable is so laughable.

And since people are using SAFE then they will want to Farm so they can get SAFEcoin.

Reasons for not farming

  • only having a mobile phone and no reliable WiFi to farm on.
  • Their home internet plan has unreasonable small bandwidth quota.
  • Their disk is full and they are too cheap to buy a new drive
  • Don’t want to

People who do farm will be those who

  • have a suitable computing device
  • have very high quotas or unlimited or want to farm anyhow ignoring the cost
  • have some spare space on their computer
  • willing to click on the install vault link and let it install
  • willing to run on tight margins and use data centre computing/storage (this may or may not be profitable) But even they have plans that are bandwidth unlimited.

To try and cost SAFE using those people in situations where it is unsuitable for them to farm is like saying DropBox is going to buy way over priced computers and Harddrives, and then find local ISPs that charge retial rates per Megabyte transfered for bandwidth.

But unlike DropBox who pay for every megabyte/second link speed (not quotas like the ISPs) and pay fr every building space and every computer and every drive, SAFE farmers will be those who have virtually no overheads/costs.

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One thing that seems to be missing in your communications, @foreverjoyful, aside from any of the other points made, is that the SAFE Network doesn’t run on any profit, as do file storage companies like dropbox, etc. Are you thinking that there is not a huge profit margin being sucked off by these guys? Why else are they doing it (aside from surveillance, anyway, which has its own profit aspect)?

EDIT TO ADD:

That is, the network itself isn’t scooping any profit. None at all.
All the individual players have their incentives which could be considered to include “profit”.

Farmers: If not awarded enough safecoin to at least be considered a viable and appealing exchange for the effort and expense of participating, farmers won’t do it. Network will then adjust the reward as resources wane. Consider also that the marginal expense of running vault should be minimal in terms of hardware, bandwidth, electricity, etc., because it’s spare capacity for the most part, unless one wants to pay for it to be more.

Users aren’t paying to “store data” in the traditional sense. They are paying to “PUT” data to the network, by buying a number of PUTs at whatever the going network rate is at the time purchased, one batch at a time. As I see the model from examining all the inputs, the network sehould be so much more efficient in function, cost of retaining/maintaining data on the network, that PUTS will be really cheap, whether one is intending on “storing” the data forever or not.

Really, as @neo pointed out, this is not just a different way of doing what’s been done before, so you really have to get the whole picture of the different interactions and incentives rather than thinking in direct analogy with models that the network has been designed to change completely.

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NOT at all! Credit card lets people pay things outright so then they can slowly, in INCREMENTS, pay off the item! You are arguing against yourself…

I have been to the Radio Rentals store, along with the amount of paper work, they also have very limited models… otherwise i personally would have signed up for their service!

First you’re proposing 20% a month, i have never said that figure, that’ll be a bit much, also the amount is too tiny. But try something like, “i could pay $100 to store them upfront, but instead I chose to pay $10/month” That’s very doable and in fact done by many people. Go to any storage deals or hosting deals, or VPN deals, companies offer discounts when people pay for yearly or lifetime even, however people do not choose that option, SO many people choose to pay monthly. SOOOO many. I used to have a website that offered to pay $10/month or $100 lifetime membership, about 90% of the people chose the $10 monthly.

And no, a GB won’t cost $0.001 even in your wildest dreams… I mean come on! Even a GB in COLD storage aka no bandwidth, is charged $0.07 by Google cloud services. You HONESTLY think you can pay 70 times less to store it FOREVER just because it’s on the Safenetwork? Does safenetwork have different storage, electricity and bandwidth costs? No… that’s kinda not how it works… especially with 8x redundancy…

Yes, you’re absolutely right! Although my proposals do not undermined the entire project at all, as it simply gives an option(that many people probably will WILLINGLY choose, and have the option to upgrade to the other option also at their disposal).

At the same time, it helps make the network more expandable, so maybe reconsider your stance of saying no to that.

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Come on my friend, first, what good is Microsoft telling people offering to pay in increments attract more customers? They only help other businesses. Also universities do not do this type of stuff. I’ve participated in psychology research first hand, and have had contact with the research department as well at a university, I don’t know where you get the idea companies bribe university to publish fake results, a study that’s published and fake is useless because other people simply repeat their experiments(which they often do) and will get controversial results hence undermine their research paper.

@neo you’re not simply fighting me when you argue that, you’re fighting all of scientific research, all scientific reports, their methods and their credibility. Let’s not do that , at least not in this forum hahahahaha. :slight_smile: Also there’s more than enough evidence to assume scientific papers published are indeed true and not faked, a few quick reasons are they’re all peer reviewed and published in a way where their method is clearly outlined for ANYONE to repeat the experiment and verify their results.

Yes i do understand a bit more now from where you are coming from, and you’re right to an extent, it may not cost hundreds, but nevertheless the bandwidth WILL STILL have a cost, and that cost WILL STILL be paid for by people storing NEW data on the network, not people accessing existing data. Also that cost is certainly NOT $0.0000000, it is $60 per month for about 1.3TB(taken from ADSL internet in Australia, one company, TPG, offers unlimited data but at about 500kb/s realistically, which is roughly 1.3TB/month max even if used 24/7) Which is $0.046 per GB my friend. And also for every GB they store, the network needs 8GB of space. Hence the safenetwork model as is can still be limiting to the growth.