If you read the fine print, they cover themselves by charging a monthly fee
An approved licensed vendor of the USPS, Stamps.com allows you to buy and print mailing and shipping labels for all USPS mail classes using a standard ink-jet or laser printer. There is a monthly service fee of $17.99 plus applicable taxes, if any to use the service.
So are you suggesting a monthly fee be charged to allow the user to use perpetual?
This is an important consideration as to why this real world situation can occur with prices always rising.
The other thing I did not mention is that you pay first, they invest the money. Quotes are not that, they are a promise. For these stamps to be a reasonable analogue then it would be people can obtain free certificates (or similar) and then when they want to post in years to come they present the certificate and pay the old price at the time of posting the item.
By paying first the money is put to work by USPS and they earn from that investment. Another way to view these prepaid stamps is that the person is funding USPS and receive a free stamp in return.
Bought from the U.S. Postal Service (in-person or online) they cost the same as regular first-class stamps. From usps.com:
As the name suggests, Forever Stamps can be used to mail a one-ounce letter regardless of when the stamps are purchased or used and no matter how prices may change in the future.
Forever Stamps are always sold at the same price as a regular First-Class Mail stamp.
The Postal Service developed the Forever Stamp for consumers ease of use during price changes. Forever Stamps are available for purchase at post offices nationwide, online at usps.com, and by phone at 1-800-STAMP-24 (1-800-782-6724). They are sold in sheets and booklets of 20.
But still not an analogue for quotes since you paid upfront.
If you paid for the quote at the time of the quote then that is what this is an analogue for. Its actually a case for not having perpetual quotes, but pay now upload anytime.
But Safe is quote now and lasts forever and you pay later (days/months/years)
USPS can do this because it is an investment they use and future worth is expected to be more than the future cost to do the work.
I was just pointing out that the stamps are not an analogue.
With Safe, I have tried to point out potential, likely problems with perpetual quotes. Can they work, I am not as sure as some are but they are nice, clean, and useful for the network and users. I was modelling some scenarios where the token price could dive for a period and also looking at outages effects. But after being shut down on that, I stopped since there was no point in doing that work, combined with the delayed hand-to-mouth economic model meant Iâd need to add that into the modelling. Not as easy as it sounds.
One way is to have the quotes be like âDo you accept this quote?â and the user accepts or rejects at that time. But this is not so good for those who need to get more tokens and come back after getting them to find they need more.
I suppose not. A good case of pay now, and guaranteed upload whenever you want though. The perpetual quote takes it a step further, ie. pay when you upload whenever you want.
The pay now and upload whenever has really good use cases since it solves the unknown cost issue and prices changing while uploading. Especially if the upload will take a decent amount of time.
Yes the perpetual quotes adds an extra benefit in that there is no need to pay now.
Not to dismiss your concern, but I think that in practice a fresh quote will probably give the user a better deal than one received far in the past. This is likely if we expect a large fiat appreciation of snt over time. If it doesnât, then the added convenience can be appreciated by the user, which can spur demand indirectly for the benefit of the network.
Yes we all hope this is the case. The concern is the effects of SNT market flux. We saw MAID drop 75% one time relatively quickly. Also (semi) permanent and not long outages on loss of farmers causing low Spare space (larger store cost).
Perpetual quotes are nice from a UX point of view and I hope they can work well. But to assume price will always be going down medium term is unrealistic in the real word. Yes, if the network is successful then it seems reasonable that a relatively stable store cost will be reached and be slowly dropping according to cost to run a node.
But this has been all discussed above.
The very conservative model is pay now upload anytime. The nicer one is quote now pay later and upload anytime after paying.
Yet such big drops tend to only bring the price back to where it was a couple months earlier, so itâs quite possible that not too many users will manage to take advantage of it. No way to know for sure at this point. Itâs possible that the average storage price in fiat with perpetual quotes will end up higher than with pay first upload later, with just a small group of users getting lucky and getting a really good deal on a few uploads with perpetual quotes.
The modelling I did get done showed that a large drop would have a shorter term effect on farmer numbers than any market recovery period. In other words 2 months for the market to somewhat recover would be longer than space recovery.
Its to do with the rates at which farmers decide its not worth it and the rate the store cost compensates and the effect of large quoted uploads have on dragging back the effect of rising store cost. The main concern is that too many farmers leave before new/old ones are attracted back for either scenarios (market & outages). The spare space drop is on the order of double the spare space of the lost farmers and worse if the spare space was low (<40% of total) before the event.
Needs modelling to get a real feel for what happens. (market flux and/or large outages like China closes internet traffic o/s)
Assuming quote prices are quickly updated, the effect would largely depend on user behavior though.
If the majority of uploaded data is uploaded within hours or days of getting the quote, then farmers would still keep their revenue and any effect would be minimal.
If a large group of users are getting quotes for uploading large movie collections or whatever and then spending weeks or months on the uploads it might be more problematic.
Well there is not updating of existing quotes of course. That is the plan of perpetual quotes, they remain at the original quoted price.
If you meant by updated quickly to be for any new quotes, then quotes reflect the actual current price. Any store cost increase will not be super fast because the network is looking at the network conditions and not markets. This means the store cost will react to the spare space condition (farmers leaving etc) and this will not be quick either.
For instance if a large market price drop occurs, most farmers will not even know immediately and the decision to leave even longer as they see if recovery is quick or not. Also the delayed payment of SNT from previous spending means they have incentive to remain till at least that payment occurs.
Thus store cost based on spare space will not rise approx immediately after a market crash. New quotes will reflect the store costs at the time the quote is done.
I do think that for people who have been using Safe for uploads will fall into this category. Jim pointed out though for newer people they would be getting a quote then going out to obtain the required SNT. This takes time. ALSO need to consider the upload time for a DVD or BRay movie they are uploading on their ADLS2 connection (1 or 2 Mbit/s max upload speed) - 450 Mbytes max per hour if they are doing nothing else and can maintain those speeds.
This was one example that is likely if there is influential articles written and people decide to do that.
As mentioned before the effects I saw from the initial modelling was that its a lag between the event and when the network would recover with desire free space. Any issues is during the time from the event to this recovery. Probably in terms of week(s) for a significant event.
For outages then I consider say China and similar countries deciding that the âwestâ is too corrupt and closing internet traffic to the âwestâ (majority of world). Would that ever happen, I doubt it would in a permanent sense, but âŚ