StoreCost for a sustainable network

The recycling won’t affect the value of the coin. When people go to the exchange they will look for current/max supply and a price that matches the popularity/value of stored data on the network. Price*current supply = market cap (market cap/current supply = Price). Only coins in circulation affects price when traded by supply/demand.

The price to store data will be affected by demand for storage and how many farmers their will be at any given time.

See my previous comments for examples.

@neo I think i accidentally just showed why recycling won’t affect Price/value of Safecoins.
Because on exchanges where people buy coins the price will be dependent on what the network is worth, how valuable is the data stored on the network.

If the market cap on the exchange is dependent on current supply * price then there is no other way to get the price then market cap/current supply, because that would break logic. So recycling can’t affect the price on exchanges where the price of the coin is determined by traders.

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Yes as I said the speculation price is concerned with the existing coins.

The store price is what I was concerned with. See my later posts for a better thought

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I’d have to disagree there. Future supply also affects price, with Bitcoin’s known supply schedule being a prime example.

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I meant only coins in circulation at any given time in the future up to max supply of approx 4.5 billion coins.

That is why my previous comment uses “current/max supply”, trying to describe possible situations, the point of the comment is that never above 4.5 billion coins at max supply, regardless of recycling, only supply up to around 4,5 billion matters, never above, so the max supply will always be known.

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As an aside to this discussion, it’s very interesting to me that traders of the future network coin “safecoin?” can work to infer the value of the coin from the costs associated with the network.

I follow the swings of bitcoin nearly daily in my news feed and I wonder - how does one value bitcoin? It seems to me that most bitcoin traders are just optimistically buying or optimistically selling (and shorting) … but where are the value investors? I.e. in the stock market there are the day traders who are merely working to make gains on patterns they discern in capital flows in and out of stocks … but there are also investors (e.g. Buffet) who analyze a stocks underlying value and then buy sell based on that analysis. But it seems really hard to do any such analysis with bitcoin - you’d have to be able to determine how much of it was really in use as a form of circulating money and then ascribe some value to it’s utility as money.

https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Regression_theorem

So, without these value investors, it seems to me that bitcoin will always be highly speculative and volatile, and the only reason it has been as successful as it has, is because the alternatives are also really bad (different problems, but all have serious deficiencies IMO).

Enter “safecoin?” (and I put it in quotes as I am still wondering about it’s future name) into the ring … what currencies will survive?

Anyway, it’s interesting to think about and makes me feel very hopeful for the future, not merely the future of the Safe network, but literally the future of human civilization.

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I agree with your points on Bitcoin. When thinking of the future SAFE-network it would be important if there are some ways to determine approximate size of the network and how much is stored on the network, coins in cirkulation, to not intruduce unwanted volatility from not knowing size/use.

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That’s a great point. Having the total amount of data stored on the network as well as daily churn (in both SAFE coins and amount of data) could be very useful as published stats. Could imagine this right along with SAFE coin price and market cap as important metrics on the exchanges. Will allow for better market price discovery of the SAFE coin.

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In my opinion the whole recycling concept/analogy is no longer useful (if it ever was) now that coins are divisible and conserved via the section balance method.

More simply stated there is a fixed quantity of safe coin (2^32), a portion of which is owned and controlled by humans, the remainder owned and controlled by the network. The safecoin will circulate between and among both populations following a strict conservation law.

As an analogy, there roughly a constant supply of gold in the solar system. The fiat value is driven largely by the portion of that supply available to or controlled by humans. Some that is currently accessible could one day be lost (given back to the system), or new supply made available due to luck or technological ingenuity.

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only a supply/demand feedback mechanism will work

yes, that is what I think we should be discussing here. The mechanics of how such a mechanism could work.

For example, what if every participant providing resources can specify a $safe/Gb price. There could be different price settings for mutable vs immutable, etc. The provider figures out their real world costs (in fiat for now) and sets a $safe price based on exchange rate. Or maybe UI allows to set in fiat amount, but $safe amount is automatically calc’d and updated at runtime when node is queried by a potential “customer” wanting to store data.

Then, when a “customer” is doing a PUT, the software automatically looks for lowest cost storage nodes, but also provides “customer” an option to favor lowest cost or widest distribution/redundancy.

I’m just spitballing here. I realize implementing such a thing could mean big design changes, which nobody wants this late in the game.

But I also think it is important to get this right.

Probably before shooting my mouth off any more I need to do some reading to understand what the already-designed approach is. Can anyone point me to documentation that outlines exactly what storecost is and how it fits into the larger picture?

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This reminds me of the idea proposed by @JoeSmithJr in the Perpetual Auction Currency topic, post 116 worth a read there was quite a bit of discussion.

The current idea for storecost is in rfc0057 Establishing StoreCost but it “will very likely need to be refined as we gain a better understanding of how the network is being used”.

There’s a very long discussion on rfc0057.

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@mav thanks for the pointers. I’ve read through some of it, and wanted to share a thought regarding storecost. Forgive me if too basic.

ok, so if storecost is too low, vaults will start to disappear and if that continues then data starts to disappear from network, congestion occurs as remaining vaults are overloaded, experience is bad, and eventually nobody uses it anymore.

if storecost is too high, then customers won’t pay to use the network and it remains very niche and fails to grow or possibly dies off.

So we want storecost to always remain at an optimum level where the number of vaults is stable or increasing and the number of customers (puts + gets) is stable or increasing.

This reminds me a lot of the situation with bitcoin difficulty adjustment where we have a target value that is automatically adjusted based on recent performance.

So, I am thinking of an algorithm that would automatically set storecost at a global level, similar to bitcoin’s mining difficulty, and is likewise based on changes in aggregate participation. In other words, our algo does not need any oracle: no fiat value, no bandwidth costs, nothing outside of the system. And also no complex marketplace mechanism because market participant values are reflected in the daily changes, just as when bitcoin miners enter/leave.

I would need to think about it more before offering a concrete algo.

has a proposal like this already been made?

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I was alluding to something like that here ^

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Yes, back when the project started and continually rediscussed. You have about 5d of reading to do. Don’t despair, it’s worth the effort.

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For fiat price reference. Pcloud Lifetime data storage cost 2TB for £350 (offer for current users is £245.)

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Useful, also worth noting that ‘lifetime’ offers from a business don’t always turn out to be lifetime of the user. Be interesting to have a list of ‘lifetime’ products that ended.

Also SAFE’s ‘perpetuity’ is very much greater than ‘lifetime’. Call me picky! :stuck_out_tongue:

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Lifetime Subscriptions
pCloud users can pay for a lifetime plan. A lifetime plan is in effect for the duration of the account owner or 99 years, whichever is shorter.

However, if the company goes out of business the Ts&Cs say ‘tough’

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A minor nitpick: Do you think it’s number of vaults that matters or total storage space? It seems to me there are two dimensions that may be tweaked to manage this optimum, either as you say adding more vaults (and thus more space) or adding more space to existing vaults but no new vaults. A subtle point but one that I think is quite important economically and strategically.

I think the aim for the purpose of storecost is to have stable or increasing space but the aim for game theory / governance / security is (as you say) to achieve that by having stable or increasing vaults. Do you think this distinction is valid or maybe too close to equivalent to bother?

Worth noting this doesn’t invalidate your point, and what you say makes good intuitive sense.

Yes truly the important thing is total accessible storage space just as in btc mining it is total hashing power not number of miners. However if that number is not easily obtainable or can be lied about then total number vaults could possibly be a proxy especially if there is a min vault size requirement.

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Those two objectives alone are not sufficient. Consider a pareto criteria to determine which system state is more or less optimal for the bi-objective maximization you propose. The issue arises when two conditions are equally optimal. Consider two extremes 1) A single giant vault capable of storing all the universe’s data or 2) an infinite number of vaults containing an infinitesimal amount of data in aggregate. These are both pareto optimal given only those two objectives. Additional constraints and objectives are required to have a satisfactory system. IMO the first two missing objectives to also consider are connection bandwidth and latency. (Hint: To think in 4D use XYZ and Color)

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I remember there being discussion about having vaults be a standard size, with people wanting to give more space running multiple vaults. Is that idea dead?

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