Safenetwork sustainability concerns - Bandwidth has an ongoing cost however Safenetwork is a pay once, benefit forever model

Guys, what if safenetwork implement some kind of divided basic income for farmers to keep rigs online ?

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This is what i’ve been suggesting all this time. Just implement a safety net! It doesn’t hurt at all. I wouldn’t understand why David doesn’t seem to like the idea. It’s a weakly dominating proposal.

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The point was that you don’t own your data. At best the system owns it because it will delete it on you if you don’t pay rent. So the ownership is the network and you are a secondary owner with limited rights.

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Two observations:

  1. All data has different market value. Private data only has direct value to those storing it, but public data may have immense value to many people on the network. How can a cost per GB reflect this? Why should the uploader be paying any regular fee for such highly valued and frequently accessed data?

  2. Data is stored asynchronously and simultaneously. Thinking of the economics of storing a single data item is not especially relevant here. Time does not stand still and new data arrives perpetually, as consistently as night follows day.

While I can understand a nervousness about 2, the network would have to be economically unviable for this cycle to cease. If this happens, no amount of recurring fee is going to help, as it simply won’t be competitive with alternatives.

Given we have the power of exponential on our side for driving down data costs, maintaining old data will be tiny though. Old data is largely paid for long ago.

This brings me back to 1. Well received public data is a common good, not an individual cost. People want and benefit from this data. It isn’t about how much the individual should pay to upload it, but how much the network is prepared to pay to share it. Popular content is a good thing for those using the network, not a bad/costly thing.

As soon as you start to see data just as bytes stored/retrieved, you lose the context of the value it may or not contain. The actual cost of storing said data may be dwarfed by the value received and dispersed by the network. Do Twitter, Facebook etc worry about the bytes or are they more concerned with the value of the content? I highly suspect the latter.

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One way could be to reward vaults for the bandwidth they supply the network.

Well, not really, because obviously then, people knowing how the network works, will set it up so that there can be multiple maintainers. AND, we could also set it up such that public data can be donated to be maintained by anyone! So imagine watching a good YouTube video and you can donate to keep it online. Thats why i was saying we can introduce the concept of Gigabyte-hours(GBH) which i talked about earlier, people can see how many GBH each piece of publically available data have left in them, and chip in their own GBH which they can either earn themselves or have bought, to the data, to maintain it, this way, we truly create an internet that’s for everyone, and maintained by everyone. It is truly OUR internet!

What do you think of this @neo?

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From my prespective basic income will help the network , and keep all farmers happy, i am pretty sure it could work, even if its only for bandwidth and minimal electricity cost + rewards (profits)

Adding further to that, so imagine if all public sites have GBHs, and of course, the initial creator of the site gives it a bunch of GBH, but if the public(everyone else) finds it good, even if the creator stopped contributing GBH(for example he/she dies etc), the public can, if they so want to, to keep the site active. They may or may not be able to edit the content of the site, depending on how the creator of the site has set it up, but at least it’s a internet that’s determined by truly everyone and anyone.

Won’t happen, not part of the personality of most who are obsessed with creating these data libraries. Its part of the obsession.

Also you assume that when the library is being set up that the one doing it has a personal network of people they can rely on. Often the libraries are only found to be useful AFTER they have been there a while.

If and only if this would happen could it be possible, but then if I am researching a project then I find the data sheets and have no thought in donating. That could mean tribling my time just to search out the datasheets and would I? Again you will see a lot of libraries not meeting the rental once the usage is below a certain point. It only takes one engineer to access a data sheet to build the world’s next revolutionary product. So that library maybe rarely accessed but highly valued.

On another note, studies show that the greatest access of new data is soon after its uploaded and the access of that data reduces as time increases. That is not to say the data is not valuable, just not accessed as much. Yes some exceptions exist, but that is the general rule of thumb. So a rental model would see safesite pages disappear often because people don’t want to pay to keep them there because its no use to them. But those pages are a lot of use to others maybe.

Also all the forum comments/blogs that disappear, social sites become ghost towns except for the newest data still within the initial rental period.

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As a counter to the thread, I think this model may actually be hugely positive for the network. Sometimes, what appears to be crazy and different to everything out there is actually a game changing event.

Thinking of public data as a common good, instead of an opportunity for rent seeking, is actually rather inspirational! Let that value feed the network and we are on to something special here.

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And is why it gains a lot of resistance, since people cannot see it working. But most could not see bitcoin working when it came out… And all the other projects that charge rental of the data. People storing the data on their node/computer then want to charge their own rates for the data stored in their node since they feel they deserve more (maybe high bandwidth costs, or greed)

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Sure, but not having the rental model would limit the growth of the network, such that people may have to pay quite a bit for storing data onto the network in order to fuel the farmers to expand it, the concept of having a perpetual data library is awesome, but it would need volunteers to keep making, first hard-disks which have storage space, for free, with bandwidth for free and electricity for free. If those things are not for free there has to be SOME form of payment to maintain the existing library, and they come from new storers of data, and if they so do not exceed the demand to access the data then it won’t be good.

Think of this, people can pay to store a bunch of personal photos or photos of their dogs lets say, and if they die, those data are completely useless, it makes no sense for them to be permanently on the network and taking up permanent space if not a single human that exists in the world still find it useful. So the concept of a communally maintained internet isn’t bad. Data exist if the community finds it useful for it to exist. And it doesn’t otherwise. it’s the best way to manage the current data otherwise there’ll be a lot of junk taking up the safenetwork storage space!

You could also make people pay MUCH higher prices for perpetual data storage, like 10 times the cost but in return the data will be permanently there, if they so think the data is very useful and important, that way at least it’ll increase the limits to the expansion of the network by 10x too(or maybe not) but either way, if it is going to be PUBLIC data I’m assuming, why don’t people just give it to all centralised websites too, so everyone who find it potentially useful owns the data and has a copy?

if it’s publicly available and useful data, it has no problem going on the current all centralised data sharing sites and staying there forever, and available for anyone to download, and communally maintained if on the safenetwork. And if it’s private and useful data, then it’s the persons responsibility to keep their data safe, aka paying recurring to the network, or keeping the data stored elsewhere, ask friends to maintain it etc etc.

I think you’re also miss calculating just how powerful GBH are. Right now cloud storage is $2 per month per 50GB stored, that’s $2 for 50(GB)*30(DAYS in a month)*24(HOURS in a day) = 36000GBH. So let’s say an important piece of data on mathematics or quantum mechanics is 100MB in a library(so 1/10 of a GB) so with $2 you can store it for 36,000 *10 = 360k hours, which is 15000 days! Which is 41 years!! All for just $2!!! You get your important piece of data stored on the network for 41 years, publically accessible by anyone and you OWN the data fully during these years. So if you really think it’s that important, pay $25 and get it stored for 1000 YEARS on the network! Remember, during this time if ANYONE finds it useful they can pay another $25 and extend it for another 1000 years for other people to discover it!!! It’s not bad having this, and it will make the network not only more sustainable but can expand to much greater limits.

Inversely, it also holds a key to marketing safe net. It is a bit like Wikipedia on steroids… ‘help us build a global data library’. That is a powerful message, especially if the cost to host a vault is negligible.

Once people get that data should not have rent seeking gatekeepers, the game is changed forever.

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Think about the exponential increase in storage capacity. Old stale data is in the noise. It is not worth worrying about.

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I think “junk taking up the safenetworkspace” is not a likely issue, if we go back to what has been mentioned a few times already, about storage 5 years ago not being any problem at all to store today. So, a bit of looping going on now in the arguments :slight_smile:

Regarding things only existing if enough people find it useful now: that places a time pressure on what our society needs to understand for it to not lose potentially valuable data. Societies do not at all times know how to value their knowledge. It is not a good management rule for data.
Since data storage capacity did not seem likely to be a problem, putting this time pressure on society to always know how to value its data, is not a cost we need to take. Again, losing so much of what the current ambitions would give.

Some VPN providers have one time fee, like 50$ for lifetime(but who knows), I would like safenetwork to let users pay for a period of time to store data. Like one year or two years or maybe lifetime but have to pay high fee and if data doesn’t get accessed within five/ten years will get deleted.

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Again, think about exponential. Forever or 5 years is essentially the same. After 5 years the costs are in the noise.

Who stored stuff for less than 5 years? Not many I suspect. You just buy more storage somewhere… because it is exponentially cheaper than last time you bought some. It costs more time to filter and archive stuff than it does to just add more space.

I suspect storage will be cheap when home vaults come online too. There is so much spare capacity out there, all of which may as well be contributing to the global data library, rather than sitting idle.

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Well @no1 what do you think of my concept of GBH then? It’s actually an astoundingly small cost to store important data for a LOONG time…

What do you think of this also @dirvine?

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If there are no users of the network, yes then your data is lost. That is a basic fact.
However, the whole point of the project, is to create a network that would reach the usage adoption where the probability for it to not be used, will be so low, that it in fact will be more secure than any other way of storing data.

You say, “based on a probability function” like if that would not be good? I think it is quite probable, that the physics, everything around us, is based on a probability function… But I digress.

That it would be insecure because it is based on a probability function, is simply a misunderstanding of secure. What do you think cryptography is?

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