The Perils of Big Farming

Why do you say so? At 100 KB/s I can store close to 9 GB a day, which is not little.
In my particular case, it’s close to 1 TB/day. Then, in case of SAFE Network, if I don’t see the sucker reading more than 100 GB in the first week, I know it’s a lemon and I should kill it off.

Now, it doesn’t cost me anything (I’ve lost 8 days out of 365) to wipe this vault and try my luck again either on SAFE or on some Network B. In fact I should farm so that I parcel my farm in 20 chunks (say 1 TB / 20 = 50 GB) and bring those online gradually, using multiple storage farming networks (and terminate swiftly, if the ROI is crap), what I mentioned in this topic.
Even for people whose download speed is 100 KB/s, it would take 4-5 days to populate each 50 GB vault and another 4-5 to see if it’s any good.

True enough. I really don’t have any idea of all the involved factors. Just riffing on what I can see. Will be an interesting ride, regardless.

The rate at which your vault filled is determined by the network through the rate of churn and new PUTs, not by your bandwidth (though it is restricted by bandwidth as well of course).

You don’t need to test the farming rewards per network by running a vault on every one of them, such information will be public knowledge. Through churn all vaults will get a near-perfect random distribution of chunks due to the law of large numbers, so their GET rates will be practically equal. Reseting a vault on the same network in an attempt to get more popular chunks doesn’t work.

This will likely result in an extremely stable market, where discrepancies between network’s farming rewards don’t get the chance to grow significant because profit-driven actors will monitor them closely and increase their activities on the ones providing more profit. The networks that have supply&demand driven farming rewards will constantly react to that to maintain their capacity equilibrium by adjusting their rewards accordingly.

  1. From one particular network that is correct, but for crop-rotating farmers we should assume that one will be able to saturate given bandwidth by serving several networks at once.
    Also, if by some chance the churn rate and new PUTs are trickling in at a rate of 20 KB/s and I can do 10 MB/s, that should prompt me to crop-rotate.

  2. I don’t know how to calculate the 95% likelihood of getting a near perfect “average” rate of GETs in a given 50 GB vault, but assuming I could, then we should assume there will be online dashboards which will tell you where you should farm (as well as where you should park your data) now, similar to those mining pool wizards for BTC. This goes in favor of multi-crop farming.

If all the networks work the same way, yes. But I’m not sure the same balance can be found (or exist) in case when networks work in a variety of ways.

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I have zero idea where you got that idea.

I see economics as a very complicated electrical circuit. Resistors, capacitors, batteries, switches. It al flows as physics would indicate if flows – The only problem is that everything happens within a black box, there are so many millions of circuits that we don’t know about that it is very difficult to reverse engineer exactly what is going to happen.

All that i have said above is that networks like Bittorrent, Skype, TOR etc. function without payment, and I suspect that SAFE’s benefits may be plenty payment enough to make the network sustainable. In no way ought anyone imply that that means “@jreighley claims economics is not a science” I am looking at empirical evidence, and challenging the validity of they hypothesis “SAFEcoin is vital”

All right, although your comment the other day implied that economics isn’t a science.

There are many theories on how the economics of SAFE will work because there’s not much else to do at the moment - it’s a nice way to kill time. Economists everywhere have tried to extrapolate trends and create or apply various models and it’s always ended in failure. Networks like SAFE are new and even less predictable.

This is an interesting thought, especially in light of the fact that the SAFE libraries are open source, and even if no one forks a clone, Crust, self-auth and self-encryption, etc., will likely spark other projects which are very interesting and worth supporting, and which may also have farming opportunities.

Must be mistaking me for somebody else.

I would like to see many micro-currencies on SAFE --Tokens for each community – With SAFE being the master translator between them all. I think this is the ideal way of building communities that pay according to their worth rather than paying the pornographers the same as the Cancer Researchers and the pirates the same as the artists…

So I do think SAFEcoin can be useful for expanding and improving the content of the network – Paying people to create quality content without having to sell out… If you build the fund-raising right into the network, it could facilitate a lot of quality research and art…

But I see that as secondary to creating and maintaining the network in the first place.

Note that one can also run several data farming packages on the same system at the same time (e.g. SAFE, Storj, etc.).
Software conflicts may be possible, but they aren’t difficult to get around (by, for example, running conflicting packages in separate VMs or Docker instances).
Also farmers will put pressure on each project to do not create conflicts with other projects so that farming rig investments can be paid off faster.

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On a purely random distribution you will have those 5%-10% at each end of the distribution which have significant higher/lower rates, but the vast majority near equal. Just look at the random distribution of 2 dice and consider the numbers on the dice as GET rate for that chunk. Now imagine that with thousands of dice and 100’s of sides. The curve still has those vaults above and below average with a few with near zero rates of GETs.

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Question, If I setup a wifi-tower node and people are connected to my node, does this means I get all the farming profits being the single point of entry to the network?

Please understand the XOR address space before asking question like that.

EDIT: The answer is no.
EDIT: I should not have to say that: Please understand the XOR address space before asking question like that.

Sorry!

let’s reverse the question, because I do not fully understand xor address space apart from 4 copies are stored into many mega bit chunks if you hold a piece your the winner and awarded.
Now if I am in a remote region and first enter point along the line would not the data pass through my node first like a 6 lane high way turning into a dirt track on a bush road. So if my connection is first does this mean my broadband connection is abused with high usage? or am I downloading the chunks straight from the holder of the chunks.

You’re downloading from cache if it exists, if not, from a random node. In any case it doesn’t matter to you, all data will go thru your ISP anyway.
Of course you want to abuse your connection while downloading, that’s the whole point (to download as fast as you can, rather than wait) since you’ve paid for your connection to the Internet.

It’s not physical proximity (geo location) that counts, but address space proximity.

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Thank you for your answer, I now explain in simple terms to friends and family.