What you give is what you get - more economics

Since I’m still unsure of how data will be allocated and I worry about the economics of the system, I’d like
to bring up the topic of farming, again, with this idea:

Like originally planned, I think the philosophy of “you get the space you give”, will work perfectly.It creates a general purpose user base, me and the family type usage. It immediately removes the threat of data dumping attacks.

In the second level, I think users should have to pay in safe coin for storage. I don’t think that it a good idea for the network to set a fixed price. Since value is subjective, it may lead to people not using the network and farmers losing out, or farmers may leave based on the returns being too low.
Whereas if the farmers had a way of individually setting prices there would be a constant optimisation, and lowering of costs for users. This would also mean that people would
auto prune “bad” data to save on costs.

So it would be no different than a marketplace, the farmer says he would accept data at a fee of X safe
for X time. I have no idea how this could work but if you look at bitcoin the miner fee has the same effect, the miner decides whether to accept the transaction based on the fee associated with it,
without this fee, you could cripple the network with an overload of transactions.

I think a part of safecoin’s value is that storage space is scarce. If you have no limit on user storage,
the value of safecoin will match that, it will become worthless. If I was told that people who provide water get a token for their service, what good is it to me? The water is free anyway. If I had to use this
token to buy water, then it is a different equation.

Also, I think the biggest danger is playing with core incentives after the system is up and running.
There is talk of maybe we could give some for free, or cap usage at a certain level, or charge a set fee. Whatever is decided, I think playing with it after the fact will cause a loss trust in the
network.

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I share your worries of getting the economics wrong @SeanyMc it is an important part of the system, and as you say, hard to change once we’re up and running. I’ll add some thoughts.

Remember that sharing 500GB should give you access to a lot more than 500GB of storage, thanks to deduplication. If 1000 people provide 500GB of storage space each, they will be able to store a lot more than 500GB each because a lot of the data they want to store will be the same.

You could say that the network creates a lot of new, free space. Giving this space away for free makes a lot of sense to me. If every account has to pay a tiny amount when created as suggested here this would give us a model where you get X amount of storage for a fixed amount (practically free - or actually completely free a lot of the time when someone else pays it by sending you an invite) while you might have to start paying when exceeding X.

I personally believe that being able to use the network without providing storage is important and something we should strive for.

Agreed. This was the original POR token system that is hidden right now.
But this system is maintenance intensive. The Network has to calculate/verify each individual node for POR in an ongoing basis. It’s not as simple as a node saying, “I’m here and this is how much POR I have.” A slow Network would negatively impact the user experience.

I know this is a popular incentive for farmers and investors. Please don’t hate me when I say this. The free market already provides a way for anyone to find the cheapest harddrive, bandwith and ISP. If we add safecoin to the mix, it breaks the purity of (resource given = resource taken). If safecoin were to rise in “national currency” value, then it makes more sense to provide resources, farming safecoin rather than using it to buy storage. Will there be specialized vault farmers, who provide storage at super low costs, making it more available to others? Absolutely. But see next comment below.

A user cannot transfer/sell POR directly to another user without the POR token system. Also, farmers cannot “prune” bad data. They are basically leasing their POR, and the Network handles the planting of data as well as the removal of it. Regardless of the status of the data, the farmer will get paid accordingly.

Aside from the FREE amount. Users will be able to buy storage space directly from the Network using safecoins. The Network burns the safecoin thereby reducing the amount in circulation. And farmers will be able re-farm it, in a manner of speaking.

The next question would be, how much storage space does safecoin buy if it is Network Calculated? I don’t know what the formula is at this time. I do know it will not be a fixed price. But I also think it would be less relevant. Most people would provide their own resources anyway, due to reason I just mentioned above. The few that do need to buy storage space, like mobile users, have this option. Doing it this way may not be the most favorable, but it is much faster than an auction system. People should have instant access to the Network and use it for other things. If they think the Network storage price is too expensive, they can become a farmer and earn safecoins to pay for that storage. It actually solves the supply/demand problem. Too little storage, the Network price goes up, too much storage the Network price goes down.

Agreed.
The Network has not been launched yet. This is why I’m working so hard to flush out all the angles, and come up with a solid, practical, efficient, economic model. Our priority is a fast decentralized internet that protects individual freedom in thriving online economy.

Final thoughts
All the above will be made irrelevant if we successfully prevent/reduce abuse from multiple user spam accounts and DOS attacks. If we can achieve that level of Network management, I believe a (Network Storage Limit) will be the most efficient. The NSL is the FREE amount set by the Network, based on the Network average.

Don’t forget that SAFE stores four copies even before caching, so it depends how the equation balances out.

Space Used:

  • each file takes up 4x file-size space, possibly plus an overhead for caching?
  • each subsequent duplicate takes up zero space (effectively returning 1x space)

Sn - total size of non-duplicated files uploaded
Sd - total size of duplicated files uploaded
Ns - average number of duplicates for a duplicated file
Sc - some overhead needed for caching and other network functions

Us >= Sn + Sd = amount of space provided by users on a share at least what you use basis

Space required for non duplicated files = 4 * Sn

Space required (+) / reclaimed (-) by de-duplication = (5 - Ns) * Sd

So to balance we need the second total to at least cancel out the first.

Suddenly the equation is not so obviously in our favour! I guess most heavy users have a mix of stuff - personal photo libraries where there is no de-duplication possible, and downloads where there would be very high amounts of de-duplication.

In the early days while duplicates are mainly uploaded media (music and video) - how will this work out? It could be enough, even enormous, but I don’t really know and haven’t seen any calculations estimating these savings. @dirvine can you help?

Later, when people are shifting from traditional applications to MaidSafe apps, the savings from de-duplication will start to grow and will surely become enormous, but in the short term it isn’t clear. SAFE Network will initially be an addional resource rather than a replacement for users’ hard drives. It will I think take some time for people to trust the network and not keep their own copies, which reduces the amount of space they can afford to share.

Kiss My Space

I agree with @dyamanaka’s points about keeping it simple and trying to handle spamming. It seems preferable to try and can crack those and avoid trying to manage space dynamically while creating complexity and unpredictability: KISS = Keep It Simple Stupid! No offence meant :slight_smile:

LOL, maybe you an I had the same mentor?
I also use the K.I.S.S Method.

@dyamanaka nah, I invented it :wink:

Told you I was old.

Seriously, I really appreciate you fighting for it. I get lost in the fun of complexity very easily.