Right now, how many people are merely using browsers and phones to access websites, every day? How much data are being downloaded daily? vses how much NEW data are being uploaded onto the website servers etc?
So from the image here, we can see that just WIRELESS data is used 18264GB EVERY minute. And netflix users stream 80,000 hours of video, while ONLY 400 hours of NEW video are being uploaded. So, lets think for a bit. First, Youtube videos are FREE to upload, not only that, it PAYS the uploader, with safenetwork videos have to be PAID to be uploaded, so if you do think about that, lets just assume the amount of videos uploaded to a site similar to YouTube on the safenetwork is halved because of this, so 200 hours of new video are being uploaded to a site on the safenetwork that’s similar to YouTube, while 80k hours of video are being streamed every minute, and popular ISPs right now have a data cap per month and then charge $10 for every 50GB hence $0.2 per GB on average ( Data cap analysis found almost 200 ISPs imposing data limits in the US | Ars Technica). And let’s just assume, with their monthly allowance and monthly fee included it all averages out to be just $0.1 per GB(let’s say)
So for it to all make economical sense lets convert it all to GBs. lets just say one hour of video is 1 GB for simplicity. So, you have 18k GB of data wireless data streamed every minute, and then 80k GB of data also streaming every minute, costing the farmers about $9800 every minute, just for bandwidth. You might argue that the 80KGB of netflix streamed overlaps the 18kGB of wireless data, but I did not even calculate the WIRED data as well as the amount of YouTube videos watched every minute(which is about 20k hours actually, so just know that i definately did not over assume.
Then, you have new people uploading data, at about 200GB per minute. So that’s a cost of $49 per GB uploaded just for farmers to break even. I don’t know who in the right mind will pay that to upload a 1GB video to a site like YouTube, so newly uploaded data to the network will be even less, say 100GB, then it’ll cost $98 per GB to upload new data to the Safenetwork. And if it goes like this, it’s a positive feedback loop which may severely damage the network, it is this i was afraid of. So instead of making it a one time payment for all data, make recurring payments possible as they’re needed.
And also make it available that website creators can pay for it’s users. Because let’s say you have social media, do you honestly expect people to PAY everytime they post something? If not, a social media site is impossible on the safenetwork due to the economic model. But if website owners are able to pay for users and make it’s users freely upload stuff, they could make money from the advertisements just like Facebook does.
Another thing to do to make social media possible and the network better in general is introduce the concept of Gigabyte-Hours, so one gigabyte-hour can be a “credit-token” given to someone who have donated 1GB of their space to the network for one hour. And this credit then allows them, to, and for free, store 1GB of their data on the network for one hour.(it could be different units like megabyte-days etc etc) But the concept remains. This would also be good for the network and make it more sustainable. Not saying it won’t sustain now, as there probably will always be people running vaults even if they lose money, but if the positive feedback loops gets going, there will be a point where the existing farmers are contributing WAY more bandwidth costing them way more than their income that, even if they love the network, they’d have no choice but to close down before their ISP takes their house for them unable to pay the massive bills!