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

Not trying to criticize you in any way BUT what you just said is close to being a logical fallacy called “Appeal to ignorance” if you consider yourself to be true simply due to lack of counter evidence. Feel google this, here’s from wikipedia - “Argument from ignorance (from Latin: argumentum ad ignorantiam), also known as appeal to ignorance (in which ignorance represents “a lack of contrary evidence”), is a fallacy in informal logic. It asserts that a proposition is true because it has not yet been proven false or proposition is false because it has not yet been proven true.”

I’m just bringing this up so other people don’t get confused! Because this is a logical fallacy we all unconciously make sometimes, so it’s totally cool but just beware!

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but it makes no sense though, why would they do all this and implement rate limiter and all when all they really have to do, and this will make their economical model make more sense too, and more sustainable and rely on things less, is make people pay for their own needs/desires, like how the current model works. Cos unfortunately the world as is right now, as much as I want it to be otherwise, people still need to pay for what they want and can’t solely depend on others as much as we all should be able to and want to.

When I see people replying long post of an idea won’t hold water, I’m sure that the network will not die for lack of new data.

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Ok seriously that’s not a valid counterargument.(also a logically fallacy called Red Herring) Red Herring

BUT, like i said, it MAY be just fine. But the philosophy of the model is brand new and does raise sustainability concerns, as you may better understand from the SafeFood example I used

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For data storage, I think it makes a lot of sense to offer ‘pay once store forever’, which is a great selling point that can be sustainable due to the storage and bandwidth cost of old data diminishing greatly over time, combined with the constantly increasing demand for new data storage / retrieval.

I do assume a constantly increasing demand for new data, and in reality that’s really not a risky assumption to make.

In the end, it’ll be a market, so people still are paying for what they want even if there’s a bit of a subsidy for consumption of data (which rate limiter can temper if required). If farmers aren’t willing to provide the bandwidth required to run a node given their Safecoin earnings at any point in the network’s life, they’ll stop offering their services. The network & developers will need to figure out adjustments to fix that situation before data is threatened.

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Yes, may be, if that’s the case then we should be fine, bandwidth, and electricity, may even be free one day, but I’m just preparing incase that’s not the case. When Bitcoin first started, the creator Satoshi Nakamoto thought that as technology age advances the size of the blockchain might not be a big deal, he knew it was going to get large. But technology didn’t advance as fast as he anticipated. I feel like same MAY happen with Maidsafe. So it’s nice if we’re prepared for bandwidth costs incase they don’t reduce as quickly.

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There is a subtle difference, I can maybe help.

food is a consumable and must be replenished every X period of time. So requires continuous payment, if you like.

Data though is more akin to a thought or piece of information. Sort of like a new idea going into your head. You do not need to make more room for it. Just as you do not need to eat more to store the idea or thought.

A bit like the saying

  • I have an apple and give it to you, now you have the apple (safe Food).
  • I have an idea I give it to you, now we both have the idea (Safe network).

In terms of paying more to share these ideas, we just don’t.

Also in line with this evolutionary type thinking we have disk space / bandwidth / cpu etc. These are all exponentially decreasing cost commodities. For a long time and possibly still, you could store all the worlds data from 5 years back on a single disk today. It’s probably changed now with streaming etc, but like your own brain, there is no need to store every single detail you see. That would cost too much in terms of your capacity :wink:

Not easy to see this and much easier to disregard it, but this is how the world actually does work around us. It’s just all us computer folk are programmed to deal in a world that is not real, or is binary right/wrong (it isn’t), but instead it is a super connected sets of probabilities, but I digress now :smiley: Anyway pay once for important “stuff” is how brains work and also how SAFE Works.

Hope that helps.

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You misread what I wrote.

The reason it dies is that people stop using it to read data as well.

If uploading stops then people won’t be using it for downloading either. Then the farmers leave.

Thanks for the reply! I was thinking, continued access uses bandwidth, and since bandwidth isn’t free, it REQUIRES continuous payment, just like food though. Have you thought of this David? The only thing that can make things better is the decrease in cost overtime, so it could be a time where the cost of maintaining and accessing the data(namingly electricity cost to run vaults and bandwidth cost) are matched with the demand for storing new generated data, but that seems like the ONLY way Safenetwork is going to survive, am i correct in saying this?

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If people only use it to read existing data, and not store new data, would it be still OK?

In todays world YES. Without data processing a lot of people would die from food shortage. Do you realise how much data is generated to produce food. From the grain farmer who increases his yield by 300% using data processing which produces data, to the milling where data is generated (weights, orders, etc etc) tot he baker to the retailer.

With out those food production drops by 300% and that means people starve.

Same for beef, pig, chicken industries.

Yes they could go back to no data generation, but so does the population drop that they can feed…

And health too. Those xrays are so many mega bytes in size. and everything in health relies on data generation

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The network would survive yes although it would never happen that way. But you still miss the point. No new data means people are simply not using SAFE even for reading so by definition it dies.

Remember that YouTube would also die if people stopped uploading new content. Old content would get boring, users stop watching, advertisers stop paying, and server bills become unsustainable… unless they used SAFE as a back end & so did many others who are still uploading new data :slight_smile:

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Like guarantee, definite etc. I don’t believe in ONLY etc. If you look now compared with 10 years ago to store 10MB of data in “the cloud” it’s somewhere close to a thousand times cheaper. Regardless of bandwidth etc.

Data storage and processing costs are all decreasing in such a manner. We as humans cannot really “feel” exponential growth or decay, but it is powerful. SAFE though is not free everything for everyone, it is based on costs of looking after all data that’s public for sure. There are debates about private data, but the difficulty is the network cannot determine what is private and not used any more. There are many options though moving forward, such as archive nodes and deleting data (private) and they will continue through launch an beyond.

In the longer term (just to ponder for a second) we may have quantum networks (limitless instant bandwidth via entangled neutrinos etc. Not so far fetched the Chinese are testing this now), data stored in crystals (IBM) or even biological (dna etc.) and much much more. SAFE does not require these but makes great use of them. Even if we had a storage “thing” that could store every data item on the planet we still need SAFE though as knowledge evolves and local information must always feed in from all localities. so we need to ensure this local data is correct and secured, then included in the global knowledge pool.

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The comparison is more to do with data generation needed in food production. To do with how data keeps us alive in producing more food, creating health procedures through data generation that keep us alive 20+ years more on average.

Also that in todays society data is pretty much on par as essential to our lives as food is. Remove data and they estimate more than a third of first world people starve.

So it is very relevant if you see what people are trying to say.

Data generation will not stop, your scenario is unrealistic and on-par with the scenario of a world wide EMP happening. Both have the same likelihood and most likely your scenario would require the world wide EMP or similar to happen.

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fwiw I agree with you; this is a section from my unpublished ‘wish list for safenet 2.0’

  • Storage based on very-long-term rent (eg 100 years) rather than permanent storage of chunks
    • option for clients to turn on ‘crowdfunding mode’ so when data is visited the rent can be topped up a little bit by the visitor if they choose to do so (like flattr)
    • controversial for sure, but in my opinion economically necessary

But I feel the concerns also miss the forest for the trees.

Why does wikipedia work? Why do torrents work? Why do public libraries (ie common goods) work? Nobody is paid to contribute, and contribution actually costs the contributor. Yet people still contribute (economic irrationality?!). I guess I’d have to say their behaviour is altruistic. I don’t think pure altruism is sustainable or desirable (which I think we can both agree).

It’s better to conceptualise economic sustainability on a spectrum between ‘purely altruistic’ and ‘purely rational’ behaviour. The key difference is how users measure value. In purely economic behaviour, for every give there’s a take. Zero sum. Purely altruistic behaviour is based on all give with any take being outside the economic system of measurement. Altruism is a bit like creating a positive externality.

In a system like the safe network there’s some value besides just the economic value / safecoin value / ‘purely abstracted monetary’ value. The data stored on the network is worth keeping for its own sake. Like wikipedia. So the incentive structure should balance between

  • those who will take part no matter what (ie altruistically)
  • those ‘normal’ users who take part in the rational economic sense
  • those who behave in an economically maximal / selfish / malicious manner.

To me, pay once store forever is sustainable if the network data is valued beyond just an abstract token for transfer and storage of wealth. Which I think it clearly will be.

If the safe network was just a currency maybe I’d agree more strongly with the concerns. But it’s much more than that, and having a network to distribute ideas rather than just tokens of value is worth enough to justify some alturistic contribution. It comes down to ‘what do I / you / we value’. It eventually must lead to something beyond just ‘the abstraction of value’ (ie money).

The emotional conclusion I always come back to is there should be no reason for something like the destruction of the Library Of Alexandria to happen in the modern world. Pay once store forever is the answer to that problem.

I realise this doesn’t answer the concern, but hopefully it makes it a little less binary.

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Good post BTW.

About the 100 years, I doubt that it would be worth the effort to delete (or charge rent) for data 100 years old.

I say this because assuming things continue along the current trends in storage then in 100 years your (equivalent of) mobile phone will likely hold many hundreds of times the total storage capacity existing today.

If we are able to continue increasing storage at the rate of 10 times every 5 years (not the same rate as transistor density increase of double every 18 months) then using 10TB as the approx largest desktop drive today, the approximate largest storage device will be 10^21 TB in one hundred years.

Thats 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 TB

So I smile at the thought of people even thinking about the cost of maintaining all the data generated 100 years ago.


In 1982 the small physical drive held about 5MB
35 years later I just bought a 10TB drive
This is a tad under the 10 times in 5 years. The reason for the slight slow down in last 3 years is the magneto limitations of current methods. Then again over the last 35 years there has been slowdowns and speedups and we may just be in a slump. But newer technologies are catching up and likely to take up the slack an exceed the 10 times every 5 years.

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Yes, it depends on this. And it is no problem. It boils down to the simple fact that it depends on humans existing.
Because…
Humans will always generate new data. As long as we have technology to store and access data, humans will do that. New humans means new accounts, humans communicating means data stored. You will not open your eyes in the morning without data being stored about it (your secure SAFE healtch check loggers).

Sure, someone will live in a cabin in the forrest, not storing a single byte ever again (even among those, that would be rare), but for any larger share of humanity choosing that, something must have gone terribly terribly wrong (like total nuke wars, super meteorite etc.).

So, the network depends on humans existing. That is really all. We will never stop wanting to store new data, because we as a race constantly produce new data just being us (thinking, communicating etc.), and if we can store it we will.

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@foreverjoyful James you missed my point. I’m sorry if my responses were overly challenging, but that was the point of them - you are basing your argument on a couple of key points. One being that people might stop storing data when history suggests that the demand to store data (from ancient times) grows regardless of the increase in storage capacity.

From clay tablets to quantum state memory - never has man invented a medium that was a big enough increase in capacity that it crashed the data storage industry - but the key point is, never has man stopped wanting to store more and more data. So I think your worries are unfounded.

However, I was not trying to prove this won’t/can’t happen. I focused on it because to me it is implausible, and unless plausible your argument falls. So I challenged you to come up with a scenario where this might happen. But you have not, cannot.

(Instead you took the analogy of food, which was only an illustration of the fallacy here - that people might stop storing data. There’s the straw man - because I’m not trying to prove or disprove anything with my food analogy. I’m asking you to come up with a scenario. I could have said car industry, or energy industry or any number of others. My point would be the same, and only about the implausibly of people stopping storing data.)

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Humans will always create new data but would they be able and willing to pay for storage of their data on the safenetwork when they can just keep it in their phone without any charge? Who would want to be charged every time they took a photo?