Very much extreme brainstorming, free everything for everyone!

[David Irvine]

Be aware this is brainstorming, not a detraction from the work being done, but it is how MaidSafe have worked from day 1, leave no stone unturned and look at everything, especially core algorithms. Much of this can be after launch and should not slow us down, however, occasionally if an idea like this can be worked out, then it's faster to implement it immediately. 

###################################

We have a pretty solid system in place at the moment. Users get tied to resources in some manner as per the paper. It's pretty much a closed loop that funds the network in terms of resources etc. As discussions have gone on and people have really started to grasp this, then some interesting ideas have come bubbling up. I would like to discuss these here and get as much input debate and discussion as possible. We do this continually in the office, I think now we have such discussions in the open, so do not be afraid to mention something really daft. In fact I will lead the way here :-)

Proposal - All users get unlimited disk space and pay zero POR/safecoin for this. All safecoin is mined by miners who are heavily encouraged (algorithmically to mine above network average space). In this proposal miners only, provide the network resources. 

Pros: 

1: This is terrific in terms of the network not requiring to manage users stored/deleted space etc. Reduces network traffic management and allows much faster churn (one of our continuous goals). 

2: In terms of user adoption then free access to unlimited resources would drive user adoption and allow developers to create amazingly powerful and immediate benefit to users, at practically zero cost (in resource terms). So mobile apps etc. would not have to worry about linking vaults or safecoin purchases of resources. This is incredibly frictionless.

3: One of my favourites : This also allows people in less developed countries who cannot afford the resources to mine or purchase safecoin the ability to connect, consume, create and add to the vast pool of human knowledge at no cost. To me this changes everything!

Cons:

1: This puts a lot of the weight on miners in terms of their responsibility to the network. This is probably not too bad.

2: The resources put on the network are limited to miners, which may be a smallish pool, if the mining is not required to get POR for individuals. 

3: There may be vast discrepancies in the resources per user in this case.

4: Most importantly, as safecoin is not recycled via the POR then how do miners continue incentivisation after the safecoin is all mined. 

######################################

If we can remedy the cons I believe the Pro's are compelling. This is still proof of resource, but for mining alone.

Some ideas: 

1: Allow everyone to store up to the network average and pay in safecoin or use POR for above that. (this though means a good bit of work for MaidManagers and brings back as much management as we would have saved, so less efficient). Interestingly though even with the current system this would work and still allow all the pro's. So miners still go above network average, but everyone gets to network average without POR or vault being required. We still use POR in background though.  This may be the half way house step.

2: Work out other mechanisms to ensure miners stay incentivised 

a: Transaction fees (I personally do not like this, but that's personal)

b: Do not put a limit on safecoin, but do make it harder as time goes past (easy to implement). This is a deflationary measure though, but then, is that in itself wrong?

c: Somehow have app developers who get revenue still pay a 1% fee or similar and most of this (or all of it) goes to purchasing safecoin for recycle. (I think there is something decent here if it would work). I feel with the community we are building this would self police.

d: In 2006 when I did the perpetual coin design, it was in itself deflationary, i.e. it went to zero value over time, this was to prevent hoarding and encourage spending. It's too big a proposal for here, so I mention it as an adjunct.

This is kinda where we were yesterday in the office, lots of hands on heads and grunts :-) 

I know Chris and Christophe and others have been playing around in this thought experiment as well, Please feel free to join in, if we did manage this then it satisfies many of my wishes. Core algorithm simplified, more of the worlds people included early etc. It would be an amazing market entry for us all at the same time.  It certainly puts project SAFE in a place where existing cloud providers would find it hard to ignore, in itself that would drive adoption rates. Fortune favours the bold :-)

--

David Irvine

maidsafe.net 
twitter: @metaquestions

blog:  http://metaquestions.me

[Christophe Aguettaz]

Okay, so to summarize how I understand this:

The idea is to create a currency analogous to Bitcoin, especially in that mining requires non-trivial but easily verifiable work to be performed.

In the case of Bitcoin, this work consists in finding the hash of a block starting with a given number of 0s. It serves its purpose, but is otherwise useless, a complete waste of resources.

In MaidSafe, the work would be useful for someone, as free online storage.

So we've got two parts here: the mining part, and the online storage part which exists as a consequence of it.

The mining part of the network can be seen as an independent entity, existing purely for its own sake. From its perspective, the online storage system that it creates is kind of a 'waste product', like the block-chain is for Bitcoin. It doesn't matter what this waste product is, so long as it makes the system work.

Well, it doesn't matter for miners, but it does for us, since this free online-storage 'waste product' is actually the thing we care about.

---

So let's discuss incentives.

I'm not convinced that being able to spend Safecoin on storage would provide much incentive. If others can store data on the network without paying for it, how much is that storage worth spending on? Zero.

What if we set an arbitrary limit on how much you can store for free? Well, users will create additional client/vault pairs as needed (or their software client will do it for them), and carry on storing anything for free. Still worth zero.

But do we really need to tie Safecoins and online storage cost anyway? Couldn't we have people mining Safecoin while mostly ignoring the underlying system, much like it is with Bitcoins and other crypto-currencies?

In this case Safecoin's value would become purely market-based. I like the idea of having (a part of) the app-derived revenue spent on buying Safecoins. This could help bootstrapping the currency by seeding the market, although this would only come after a while.

---

About Safecoin supply:

Bitcoin miners nowadays are mostly incentivized by the newly-minted Bitcoins they get when claiming a proof-of-work. The supply of Bitcoins is limited however, and eventually transaction fees will provide most or all of the incentive to miners. Well that's the theory anyway, some academics seem to think transaction fees won't work so well for Bitcoin.

I do not see however how transaction fees would work for Safecoin. Would you mind expanding on that David?

Also, I'm not so sure about the concept of 'recycling' Safecoins. How do you make this recycling go at just the right pace to keep Safecoin mining rewarding, knowing that mining rates and app revenue could be largely uncorrelated? Do we have to rely on a central authority, even the MaidSafe Foundation, to keep the Safecoin economy going?

---

So, maybe we've got miners doing their thing for the sake of getting Safecoins. Maybe Safecoins are sought-after like Bitcoins are today, and people are investing heavily in them, with custom rigs and dedicated hardware. Does this mean that MaidSafe works, as an online storage platform?

I'm still not sure about that. I mean, even with a sizable portion of the World's population mining, you'd still have finite storage capacity, while offering infinite storage capacity for free to everyone.

Would people play fair?
Would storage capacity grow faster than data got uploaded?

If think that as soon as the MaidSafe platform leaves the hobbyist realm, the answer to the first question becomes "some won't". There will be abuses. There will be people trying to store as much as they can by any means necessary.

So it all hinges on the second question, and frankly I don't have an answer. Maybe no one does. What happens when storage capacity gets used up?
- Best case scenario, mining can still happen but its online storage by-product becomes mostly useless.
- Worst case scenario, even mining becomes impossible because a little bit of mining-related information needs to be stored on the network. The whole system collapses.

In any case, the primary goal of providing decentralized online storage isn't met.


I would be more comfortable with a system that guaranteed that such a failure would not happen, based on maths baked into its very structure. That's why I proposed chunk TTL.

It's very possible however that the system can offer strong guarantees based on modeling the world around it (that is, how people will interact with it based on economic incentives, how storage capacity will evolve over time and so on), but that's a much harder proposition, and much more of a leap of faith in the end.

Cheers,

Christophe Aguettaz

[Mark Hughes]

I'm following this with interest while unable to dive in due to time constraints. I do have some thoughts about the context for these questions though. 

To succeed, MaidSafe must tend towards some optimum (within its sphere of operation), with a better starting point and improvement rate than the alternatives. Think evolution - which I suggest is both the overall context, and the underlying operating principle for this work, and indeed the universe! 

As humans we are trying to ape ;-) evolution using our mental capacities to design a network/organism, which (as our technologies advance) is not surprisingly borrowing increasingly from the evolutionary systems around us, and less to do with solutions based on the simple modelling and "suck it and see" engineering techniques of the past. 

It was David's citing of natural systems which caught my attention as I have a lot of faith in the largely ill explored and little understood mechanisms at work in the natural world, and the incredible power of the evolution that created them.

So, I try to see the MaidSafe network both as an *organism* competing within a larger environment of decentralized network-organisms, each seeking reward for service to the larger whole (economic, social, environmental, humanitarian... ), *and* MaidSafe as an environment in itself, comprised of its constituent actors (miners, users, vaults, data etc). That is, as part of a [holarchy](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holarchy).

This requires careful consideration of our beliefs around what is at work in evolution. It is my belief that we place too much emphasis on competition, survival of the fittest etc. when it comes to business, economics, markets and so on. I have heard, though I have not verified this, that Darwin's *On The Origin of Species* observed both competitive behavior, and cooperative behavior as important aspects of evolution, and that it was the latter which was most prevalent, while our culture has become obsessed with the idea that evolution (= efficiency, excellence, even divine truth) is almost entirely about ruthless and pathological behaviors. And that higher human qualities are somehow an expensive side-effect, a luxury (= compassion, awe, beauty etc). When in reality, if you truly believe in evolution as a disinterested force of nature, *all* these qualities must have arisen out of an evolutionary imperative, and "higher" qualities may have been just as crucial to our progress this far. They seem crucial to me if we are too get out of the mess that our civilization is making of our planetary ecosystem!

There's a risk of digressing into politics and ideology from this point, but if MaidSafe is to maximize its potential I think it needs to be able to leap that hurdle and keep developing on all levels. IMO there's no problem with diverse opinions on this or anything else, all are good in the pot, and from that can come a better consensus, and no need for any particular belief system to dominate, not even mine :-)

So, following my belief for the moment... it may be that MaidSafe advances by recognising and incorporating the lessons of evolution, in ways appropriate to its internal operations (functions) and it's external environment, better than competing systems. In which case, we need to consider all the elements I've just enumerated while forming and reviewing these ideas. 

I'm not sure how helpful this is in this specific discussion, but hope it may stimulate our thinking to borrow from evolution, natural systems, and higher human qualities, and help us to evaluate different approaches, and improve on other networks.

I'm going to post a copy of this in the subreddit (see link), so if anyone feels like a discussion on the issues I've raised, that may be the best place rather than in this thread or on the developer list. 

Subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/maidsafe/comments/21bg17/how_evolution_natural_systems_can_be_a_context/

Mark

-

My Services & Blog:

http://theWebalyst.com 

Sent from mobile - apols for autoccorrrct & brevit ;-)

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[David Irvine]

time constrained so quick answers (this is very much brainstorming remember)

On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 11:19 AM, Christophe Aguettaz <ague...@gmail.com> wrote:

So let's discuss incentives.

I'm not convinced that being able to spend Safecoin on storage would provide much incentive. If others can store data on the network without paying for it, how much is that storage worth spending on? Zero.

Agreed (with the suggestions of free resources for all) 

What if we set an arbitrary limit on how much you can store for free? Well, users will create additional client/vault pairs as needed (or their software client will do it for them), and carry on storing anything for free. Still worth zero.

Mostly agree, I am not convinced many people will create multiple accounts, but lets assume so anyway. 

But do we really need to tie Safecoins and online storage cost anyway? Couldn't we have people mining Safecoin while mostly ignoring the underlying system, much like it is with Bitcoins and other crypto-currencies?

Yes I think the overall proposition in this thread is just that. 

In this case Safecoin's value would become purely market-based. I like the idea of having (a part of) the app-derived revenue spent on buying Safecoins. This could help bootstrapping the currency by seeding the market, although this would only come after a while.

Yes I agree. Although with the crow sale thing there would be bootstrap revenue, so this may have some legs. 

---

About Safecoin supply:

Bitcoin miners nowadays are mostly incentivized by the newly-minted Bitcoins they get when claiming a proof-of-work. The supply of Bitcoins is limited however, and eventually transaction fees will provide most or all of the incentive to miners. Well that's the theory anyway, some academics seem to think transaction fees won't work so well for Bitcoin.

Agreed 

I do not see however how transaction fees would work for Safecoin. Would you mind expanding on that David?

In the same way as bitcoin, so each transaction would require an additional part of a safecoin to complete.  

Also, I'm not so sure about the concept of 'recycling' Safecoins. How do you make this recycling go at just the right pace to keep Safecoin mining rewarding, knowing that mining rates and app revenue could be largely uncorrelated? Do we have to rely on a central authority, even the MaidSafe Foundation, to keep the Safecoin economy going?

In the actual proposal this is where the network can calculate the average network data, this is why there is a POR. Think of this as a token tied to space or resources, but internal to the network. This POR can be purchased by safecoin, the amount will increase per safecoin as we need more resources, but they decrease in value over time. So today a safecoin may be £1 and buy 1Gb (a POR) but soon a POR will not be 1Gb it may be 1Tb, but also a safecoin may be £10. A safecoin (part)will buy this POR at whatever the (internal to network) market will sell it for, this price should be cheap and will likely be less than the £1 paid in the past for a 1Gb. Hope that makes sense. This is the graph of resource cost dropping and value of safecoin increasing.  

---

So, maybe we've got miners doing their thing for the sake of getting Safecoins. Maybe Safecoins are sought-after like Bitcoins are today, and people are investing heavily in them, with custom rigs and dedicated hardware. Does this mean that MaidSafe works, as an online storage platform?

Yes, well storage and computing I think. 

I'm still not sure about that. I mean, even with a sizable portion of the World's population mining, you'd still have finite storage capacity, while offering infinite storage capacity for free to everyone.

The storage capacity will always be finite, the miners are encouraged to mine over the average of the network though. This is to balance supply/demand for resources. We are always hungry for more and as we want more then miners are better rewarded with more safecoin to get. 

The recycle safecoin is really the network providing a resource for safecoin, then the network allows miners to challenge (work) for that coin. So it is like a single transaction, safecoin for resources.

Would people play fair?

I always think not :-) 

Would storage capacity grow faster than data got uploaded?

This is where the miners are encouraged to meet demand. Everyone with a desktop PC can be a miner, this is not like asic wars. 

If think that as soon as the MaidSafe platform leaves the hobbyist realm, the answer to the first question becomes "some won't". There will be abuses. There will be people trying to store as much as they can by any means necessary.

I agree, I think all networks and system have this issue, it is just how hard and how much is it worth. I think the general populus do not do this so much as the hassle is not worth it. I remember when fuse for google mail came out and you could use gmail as a drive for free storage. 

So it all hinges on the second question, and frankly I don't have an answer. Maybe no one does. What happens when storage capacity gets used up?
- Best case scenario, mining can still happen but its online storage by-product becomes mostly useless.

 I am not sure what this part means, can you elaborate a little.

- Worst case scenario, even mining becomes impossible because a little bit of mining-related information needs to be stored on the network. The whole system collapses.

 If mining was impossible any such system fails I think.

In any case, the primary goal of providing decentralized online storage isn't met.


I would be more comfortable with a system that guaranteed that such a failure would not happen, based on maths baked into its very structure. That's why I proposed chunk TTL.

 

It's very possible however that the system can offer strong guarantees based on modeling the world around it (that is, how people will interact with it based on economic incentives, how storage capacity will evolve over time and so on), but that's a much harder proposition, and much more of a leap of faith in the end.

I agree on the leap of faith part. I am interested in prodding this question a little more though.  

Cheers,

Christophe Aguettaz

[Christophe Aguettaz]

I don't think any serious biologist doubts that both cooperation and ruthless selfishness arise from natural selection.

The basic unique of selection is the gene, and genes are purely selfish. For things that are on higher levels of abstraction (individuals, families, tribes...), the optimal behavior ranges from pure selfishness (viruses?) to pure cooperation (ant workers). The maths describing this are quite interesting - read 'The Selfish Gene' by Dawkins for a nice introduction on the topic.

In most situations you find that the equilibrium is a mix of cooperation and selfishness, and that's very much the case in human societies. Charity and stealing are both very much consequences of natural selection (although Dawkins would describe the former as a 'misfiring' of genes in the case of modern humans).

The balance of selfish to selfless behavior in a society is not random. It derives quite predictably from structural constraints. And so does it in online societies.

That's why I think getting the structure right matters so much. It's all about setting up the reward and punishment structure so that selfish behavior is also desirable behavior.

[David Irvine]

On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 12:55 PM, Mark Hughes <mrh...@markhughes.com> wrote:

There's a risk of digressing into politics and ideology from this point, but if MaidSafe is to maximize its potential I think it needs to be able to leap that hurdle and keep developing on all levels. IMO there's no problem with diverse opinions on this or anything else, all are good in the pot, and from that can come a better consensus, and no need for any particular belief system to dominate, not even mine :-)

So, following my belief for the moment... it may be that MaidSafe advances by recognising and incorporating the lessons of evolution, in ways appropriate to its internal operations (functions) and it's external environment, better than competing systems. In which case, we need to consider all the elements I've just enumerated while forming and reviewing these ideas. 

I agree Mark, it will mean poking at every stone and looking at other systems and how they operate. Several things surprise us occasionally and perhaps they should not. I keep thinking of all the differing systems out there and also wikipedia etc. who really bucked a trend and many beliefs, granted it's aging now a little and maybe needs more innovation to prevent spam.  

I know if we don't look we will never see :-) it's important to brainstorm. I like it a lot. 

[Christophe Aguettaz]

Sorry, I meant "basic unit of selection"

[David Irvine]

On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 1:25 PM, Christophe Aguettaz <ague...@gmail.com> wrote:

That's why I think getting the structure right matters so much. It's all about setting up the reward and punishment structure so that selfish behavior is also desirable behavior.

+1 many in the office argue this very point. Crux of the MaidSafe system so far, make thieves valuable until they are not, then remove them.

[Christophe Aguettaz]

In the same way as bitcoin, so each transaction would require an additional part of a safecoin to complete.  

I still don't get it. With Bitcoin, miners get rewarded because when they broacast a new addition to the blockchain, this addition contains the transactions rewarding themselves (in new bitcoins and transaction fees).

But here transactions are not handled by miners are they? Who's getting the transaction fee? Or does it go to 'the network' in general by being recycled?
 

In the actual proposal this is where the network can calculate the average network data, this is why there is a POR. Think of this as a token tied to space or resources, but internal to the network. This POR can be purchased by safecoin, the amount will increase per safecoin as we need more resources, but they decrease in value over time. So today a safecoin may be £1 and buy 1Gb (a POR) but soon a POR will not be 1Gb it may be 1Tb, but also a safecoin may be £10. A safecoin (part)will buy this POR at whatever the (internal to network) market will sell it for, this price should be cheap and will likely be less than the £1 paid in the past for a 1Gb. Hope that makes sense. This is the graph of resource cost dropping and value of safecoin increasing.  

Yes, I understand that part, but I'm not sure how this relates to recycling being handled by one central entity.
Also, you agreed above that storing a limited amount of data (and perhaps an unlimited amount although you have your doubts) is basically free. Doesn't that mean that POR is worth 0?

 

This is where the miners are encouraged to meet demand. Everyone with a desktop PC can be a miner, this is not like asic wars. 

So you say that miners are rewarded for mining 'above average'. Is that a new idea? I don't see it in the whitepaper.
How would this work? By setting a vault's mining interval using |healthy_space - average| instead of healthy_space alone, or something like that?

So it all hinges on the second question, and frankly I don't have an answer. Maybe no one does. What happens when storage capacity gets used up?
- Best case scenario, mining can still happen but its online storage by-product becomes mostly useless.

 I am not sure what this part means, can you elaborate a little.

I was just figuring that we could make mining resilient to network space shortage by having special rules for mining-related data. For instance each mining vaults reserves a fraction of its available space for chunks describing transactions, so that these go through even if vaults are otherwise full.


That brings another question to my mind. How do DataManagers find usable Pmids?
I imagine they'd have to iterate through random nodes until they find one that declares some usable space.

Now what happens if, say, 90% of Pmids are full? That'd be a hell of a lot of iterations to find a place to store to. At some point, even before the network is saturated with data, it'll become saturated with book-keeping traffic between DataManagers and PmidManagers.

Or won't it? Have you analyzed of perhaps tested cases where the network gets space-stressed?

[David Irvine]

On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 2:27 PM, Christophe Aguettaz <ague...@gmail.com> wrote:

In the same way as bitcoin, so each transaction would require an additional part of a safecoin to complete.  

I still don't get it. With Bitcoin, miners get rewarded because when they broacast a new addition to the blockchain, this addition contains the transactions rewarding themselves (in new bitcoins and transaction fees).

But here transactions are not handled by miners are they? Who's getting the transaction fee? Or does it go to 'the network' in general by being recycled?

Yes transactions are handled by the miners. Recycling is a mechanism for continued mining as is a transaction fee. We are favouring (but not insisting on) recycling. I would really like to have zero transaction fees involved.

 

In the actual proposal this is where the network can calculate the average network data, this is why there is a POR. Think of this as a token tied to space or resources, but internal to the network. This POR can be purchased by safecoin, the amount will increase per safecoin as we need more resources, but they decrease in value over time. So today a safecoin may be £1 and buy 1Gb (a POR) but soon a POR will not be 1Gb it may be 1Tb, but also a safecoin may be £10. A safecoin (part)will buy this POR at whatever the (internal to network) market will sell it for, this price should be cheap and will likely be less than the £1 paid in the past for a 1Gb. Hope that makes sense. This is the graph of resource cost dropping and value of safecoin increasing.  

Yes, I understand that part, but I'm not sure how this relates to recycling being handled by one central entity.

There is no central entity in this case. The network space purchased can take many forms. An easy to imagine one is where each users puts up POR for sale in an ebay type system, or the network automatically handles this in a lottery type fashion, similar to mining. I like the latter as this allows users to make purchases from the network itself and no human is involved. Then miners mine for safecoin and can also sell POR for more safecoin. This is close to the reason for the brainstorming approach.

 

Also, you agreed above that storing a limited amount of data (and perhaps an unlimited amount although you have your doubts) is basically free. Doesn't that mean that POR is worth 0?

 

This is where the miners are encouraged to meet demand. Everyone with a desktop PC can be a miner, this is not like asic wars. 

So you say that miners are rewarded for mining 'above average'. Is that a new idea? I don't see it in the whitepaper.
How would this work? By setting a vault's mining interval using |healthy_space - average| instead of healthy_space alone, or something like that?

We have not documented the details of this. Miners are also PmidNodes (storing nodes) and the group managing a miner can tell the average space that group has stored (takes into account lost & rank etc.), this can be stored on pmid nodes but also stored by clients on that area. The network can the start to tune based on supply/demand. This part is pretty cool. (sorry I am rushing between calls so abbreviating a lot here).  Easy way to think is |healthy_space - average] allows more attempts. If this gets tied to requests for store as well later on it becomes very attractive I think.

So it all hinges on the second question, and frankly I don't have an answer. Maybe no one does. What happens when storage capacity gets used up?
- Best case scenario, mining can still happen but its online storage by-product becomes mostly useless.

 I am not sure what this part means, can you elaborate a little.

I was just figuring that we could make mining resilient to network space shortage by having special rules for mining-related data. For instance each mining vaults reserves a fraction of its available space for chunks describing transactions, so that these go through even if vaults are otherwise full.

Yes I think space shortage should produce more safecoin for mining. This is an interesting part of the algorithms we are looking at now.  As space fills then mining gets more rewarding. This part will tune over a few years I think, like pagerank type algorithms. It's a key part to balance supply and demand properly. 

We have toyed with a 4Gb limit before a vault is actually a routing node. So can only store. This 4 Gb would be for admin data on the network so reducing available space by that amount to allow the network to use this 'buffer' when necessary. If vaults cannot do the admin they will become non routing nodes and stop mining until they have space available again (they will still provide data though). 

That brings another question to my mind. How do DataManagers find usable Pmids?
I imagine they'd have to iterate through random nodes until they find one that declares some usable space.

This is per session random. It's done like that so vaults with no space (which may be in non routing table) randomly get checked to see if they now have more space.  The randomness is per session, so a DM that churns will create a new bunch of random nodes for storing. In that session there is no need to try a full node twice. 

Now what happens if, say, 90% of Pmids are full? That'd be a hell of a lot of iterations to find a place to store to. At some point, even before the network is saturated with data, it'll become saturated with book-keeping traffic between DataManagers and PmidManagers.

Or won't it? Have you analyzed of perhaps tested cases where the network gets space-stressed?

This is an area that is hard to analyse, we have done a ton of work simulating the routing layer and node distribution etc. but simulating human nature is really difficult. How often do machines go off, what amount of data stored, how valuable is mining, does that change attitudes etc. There are guesses in this part in terms of analysis. The net effect of shortage of resource is slowing of data writes on the users drive. I would hope we never get to those levels though as these measurements are mostly built into the codebase. This is one huge reason never to use magic numbers in the code. We avoid these at all costs where possible. So the key, as I am sure your aware is to make the network base all calculations on data around it and act accordingly. It's up to us to make sure it has enough rules to handle all this. 

 

I think you are seeing the supply/demand issue. This is where mining has to become more attractive and this is a great way to reach that point. The network and all the people using it will work in a manner we can watch and learn from. The deduplication will play a big part in efficiency, but can be ignored if we went all out for everything free for everyone as the resultant space is what matters. 

 

Tying mining speed with the supply of space is a really cool way to achieve some of this. I think what is currently a key issue though is proving more than space, which is the result of many other factors, but also account for transactions, not so much in charging, but rewarding. This is interesting and again personal to me. Imagine bitcoin miners got no transaction fee, but were rewarded with a higher opportunity to mine a block for doing transactions.  This is a similar idea either charge fro transactions or make them part of the mining for new safecoin. Then we would need to consider what happens when there is a shortage of safecoin? I think there are many options there too. 

There is another part not described and this is archiving nodes. They are not needed straight away, but massively reduce administration traffic etc. for old or unpopular data. That's definitely for another day :-) 

Great point and glad your here to quiz and question. This is how we can get many folks working on the code and make it truly open in all ways. Thanks again (brainstorm anytime :-) )

--

[David Yamanaka]

This discussion is very similar in other forums. The main issue issue is balancing a virtual economy.
I'll add my point of view for what it's worth. Hopefully, it will help the SAFE project.

~~~ ~~~ ~~~

Proposal - All users get unlimited disk space and pay zero POR/safecoin for this. All safecoin is mined by miners who are heavily encouraged (algorithmically to mine above network average space). In this proposal miners only, provide the network resources.

This is like a Free-to-Play business model for online games. All players get free access while a few pay money to have special benefits in game.  This method is very successful because of "mass adoption" and more companies prefer this business model over Pay-to-Play. But there is a drawback, in order to keep "paying" players; paying must remain beneficial to them. Eventually, the game becomes Pay-To-Win. The free players quit and move to another game. Most online games have a very short lifespan. Companies have no problem raking in profits as fast as possible before the game expires. Then they create a new game, rinse and repeat.

Just like online games, the SAFE network is dependent on miners (paying players) to support the network and keep it running. Free users will quit if they feel disadvantaged compared to miners. They will move to another network, probably a forked SAFE network. If you under incentivize the miners, they leave the network for a more profitable network, probably a forked SAFE network. Because this is open source, it can and will be forked. Bitcoin has over 300+ alt coin clones with more added everyday.

 

Cons:

1: This puts a lot of the weight on miners in terms of their responsibility to the network. This is probably not too bad.

Miners are willing to carry the weight as long as they are rewarded for supporting the network.

2: The resources put on the network are limited to miners, which may be a smallish pool, if the mining is not required to get POR for individuals.

The pool of miners will also decrease if they find another network that is more profitable for their resources. Same thing happens to Bitcoin. Many miners moved to Litecoin.
Make it worth their efforts and more will come.

3: There may be vast discrepancies in the resources per user in this case.

Yes, with this model, you will have mostly free users. Smart miners will allocate their resources to the most profitable network, which may or may not be the SAFE network.

4: Most importantly, as safecoin is not recycled via the POR then how do miners continue incentivisation after the safecoin is all mined. 

 The SAFE network has to remove the safecoin cap and allow miners to keep mining. If the value of safecoin is constantly increasing, then inflation should be manageable.

######################################

If we can remedy the cons I believe the Pro's are compelling. This is still proof of resource, but for mining alone.

Some ideas: 

1: Allow everyone to store up to the network average and pay in safecoin or use POR for above that. (this though means a good bit of work for MaidManagers and brings back as much management as we would have saved, so less efficient). Interestingly though even with the current system this would work and still allow all the pro's. So miners still go above network average, but everyone gets to network average without POR or vault being required. We still use POR in background though.  This may be the half way house step.

Putting a cap/restriction on free users didn't work well with online games. After the free players hit their cap they left the game for another with full access. With less users on the network, the game quickly died and the miners will also leave. One of the reasons Dodgecoin rose up the ranks was its community. Accessibility was easy, and people created demand through inspiration.

2: Work out other mechanisms to ensure miners stay incentivised 

a: Transaction fees (I personally do not like this, but that's personal)

b: Do not put a limit on safecoin, but do make it harder as time goes past (easy to implement). This is a deflationary measure though, but then, is that in itself wrong?

c: Somehow have app developers who get revenue still pay a 1% fee or similar and most of this (or all of it) goes to purchasing safecoin for recycle. (I think there is something decent here if it would work). I feel with the community we are building this would self police.

d: In 2006 when I did the perpetual coin design, it was in itself deflationary, i.e. it went to zero value over time, this was to prevent hoarding and encourage spending. It's too big a proposal for here, so I mention it as an adjunct.

I disagree about diminishing a miners earning potential over the long run. You will have a blitz of miners at the beginning, and then they will leave once all the "easy" safecoins are mined and reallocate their resources to another network. If you want miners to stay, they should have the same earning potential per resource at the begining as well as in the future. In theory, the supply of safecoins increases along with higher demand for more storage. Example: Today people use/need 100GB of storage, in 1-3 years they may need 1TB. There are other variables to consider like: velocity, speculation, hoarding, and government intervention. The idea of a functional currency is to achieve price stability.

~~~ ~~~ ~~~

I believe the world is looking for a better alternative currency. They know our current financial system is collapsing. Despite, government bans, regulations, and disapproval, people are still using crypto currencies. Inflation is when the prices go up due to increase in the money supply, while deflation prices goes down due to decrease of the money supply. Many believe a little inflation is ideal.

If safecoin is to stand apart from the rest, it must prove it can be a "functional" currency.
These are the reason I believe safecoin is different.

1. It is private, there is no public blockchain.
2. It is faster, transactions speeds are practical for everyday use.
3. It is economical, no need to waste energy on mining rigs.
4. It is cooperative, we all benefit from pooled resources, rather than biggest mining pool takes all.
5. It is secure, the SAFE network guards it with encryption.

If you're truly worried about safecoin inflation, and you want to create demand for safecoin. Simply charge safecoin for SAFE access. Example: 1 coin gives SAFE access for 30days. People with no coins can enter as a free user to mine coins as a vault only. If they want to browser the rest of the network, they will need to pay in safecoin for that right. Safecoins paid for network access are recycled. A currency is not defined by what it is. It is based on what it can buy. In this case, safecoin buys protection on an encrypted network.

[David Irvine]

On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 8:15 PM, David Yamanaka <drey...@gmail.com> wrote:

 The SAFE network has to remove the safecoin cap and allow miners to keep mining. If the value of safecoin is constantly increasing, then inflation should be manageable.

I agree with all your arguments and this part in particular. My feeling is a little inflation is perfectly fine. 

I find this argument compelling and I feel we are extremely close to a system that could work very well. Like the game analogy (a good one) I think if we get the mix right then there will be no better network. I don't mean this is best so there. I mean if we allocate resources freely to all (a dream of mine) and also continue to offer miners an eco system of longevity and prosperity then we have a great opportunity.  

So if people were to get resources at the best possible price (£0) and these resources were the best on the market (all of us need to prove this with apps and faster more responsive networks etc.) then it looks very good. Miners will only leave for better prospects if better networks and apps were available for users. If this community created apps that were stunning, profitable and the cheapest possible (free) then the miners would not leave as nobody would be on the fork (even ignoring network effect, which to me is close to monopoly or bullying). We should not care if maidsafe or any other name works here, just that this network works. It's like I say about bitcoin, it may be around in 100 years, like a brush with several new heads and the shaft replaced many times, the vision would still exist.

Many in the community feel a fixed cap is the only way, I see this as a false economy as things just inflate. When I was a baby, a billionaire was a made up word. 

Very interesting David, really cool, I thought I was alone in this crazy notion. I am still not convinced we are correct though :-) I am sure it's right to investigate this.

[trak...@gmail.com]

David,

I think it is important that this problem is looked at from an economics perspective. The SAFE network will essentially be its own micro-economy, with good and bad actors, all trying to gain maximum benefit.

Whenever there is a free resource, you are going to have the free rider problem (aka tragedy of the commons). What will prevent people abusing this? I suspect people will not delete old/stale files, they will not optimise their data usage and there will be much space wasted as a result.

Moreover, if this free resource is to be funded through creating new Safecoins alone (given to miners), this will act as a tax on everyone (as inflation of the money supply behaves like a tax on savings). As this monetary inflation will soon be reflected in prices, the miners will need to spend this money quickly, to gain the most value from it. The same will be true for others holding the currency.

While I can understand the desire to give storage to as many as possible, I don't believe this is the best approach.

If you want people to use the network efficiently, then they need an incentive to only use what they need. Therefore, there has to be a cost to use the resource.

If you want miners to contribute resources, then they need an incentive to provide as much as economical feasible. Therefore, there has to be a fee to use the resource.

With both of the above in place, you have a virtuous circle. The costs are driven down through miners providing more for less, while the network is used as efficiently as possible.

Ultimately, this drive for efficiency will be what gives poor people access, as the resource will get cheaper and cheaper. Ofc, there is always charity too, but fundamentally, the aim should be for the market to drive down costs to give access to all in the long run.

I'm only an armchair free market economist, but I would seek advice from Austrian economists if possible. They may be able to help with the subtleties. If the economics of this are too far wrong, it will be unsustainable and that will be a *great* shame.

[David Irvine]

On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 8:59 PM, <trak...@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm only an armchair free market economist, but I would seek advice from Austrian economists if possible. They may be able to help with the subtleties. If the economics of this are too far wrong, it will be unsustainable and that will be a *great* shame.

I think we all are to an extent, even the heros of the economics world. There are just so many variables. Experts led us into a crash and I think decentralisation means ridding ourselves of layers of unneeded experts and consultant as well as financial instruments. to me simplification is good, I see no need for mass complexity in economics. It is a science though and needs thought (probably beyond me).

I am attracted to the market driven price of safecoin and the data driven size of POR model though. If data is the new precious material this looks good from my angle. The ability to offer a free amount regardless though would be amazing. I said many years ago to investors who asked about return in this project, "imagine a person from the depths of Africa with an OLPC device and access to data because of us who cured cancer, what value is that return?". It still echoes in my head and drives me. 

Of course harsh reality does bite and getting economic freedom and market traction is very important. I agree completely with you there. So the balance is delicate I think. In saying that I feel sure the paper describes a great system, I am just pushing the envelope here in this thread (the guys in the office are used to it and now everyone else gets access to the same pushing and questions ) :-)  I feel though the expansion of this list helps everyone, I know I am learning at a rapid pace. 

[trak...@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, 25 March 2014 21:15:17 UTC, David Irvine wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 8:59 PM, <trak...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> I'm only an armchair free market economist, but I would seek advice from Austrian economists if possible. They may be able to help with the subtleties. If the economics of this are too far wrong, it will be unsustainable and that will be a *great* shame.
>
>
> I think we all are to an extent, even the heros of the economics world. There are just so many variables. Experts led us into a crash and I think decentralisation means ridding ourselves of layers of unneeded experts and consultant as well as financial instruments. to me simplification is good, I see no need for mass complexity in economics. It is a science though and needs thought (probably beyond me).
>
>
>
> I am attracted to the market driven price of safecoin and the data driven size of POR model though. If data is the new precious material this looks good from my angle. The ability to offer a free amount regardless though would be amazing. I said many years ago to investors who asked about return in this project, "imagine a person from the depths of Africa with an OLPC device and access to data because of us who cured cancer, what value is that return?". It still echoes in my head and drives me. 
>

Perhaps the best way is to explore the charity donation model you have mentioned previously? Being able to donate a percentage of resource to charity would be a way for people to give something back. How the resources are managed in order to give it to those who need it may be a challenge, but I'm sure it would be feasible - especially as a lot can be described with a small amount of data.

>
>
>
> Of course harsh reality does bite and getting economic freedom and market traction is very important. I agree completely with you there. So the balance is delicate I think. In saying that I feel sure the paper describes a great system, I am just pushing the envelope here in this thread (the guys in the office are used to it and now everyone else gets access to the same pushing and questions ) :-)  I feel though the expansion of this list helps everyone, I know I am learning at a rapid pace. 
>

I appreciate your candour. Pushing to the extreme as a useful thought experiment to bounce back from.

I thought the white paper was very good. I meant to comment on it directly, but time worked against me all last week. The SafeCoin vs POR pairing was very appealing, as was the recycling of SafeCoins for mining to avoid having to pay the miners directly (via fees etc).

Moreover, as the (other) David said above at the end of his post, there are a series of major strengths for SafeCoin. That SafeCoin is just the tip of the iceberg of what this technology can deliver, I find that thought extraordinary - on paper, SafeCoin is already far better than Bitcoin with its $8bn market cap. That's food for thought!

[David Irvine]

On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 9:32 PM, <trak...@gmail.com> wrote:

Moreover, as the (other) David said above at the end of his post, there are a series of major strengths for SafeCoin. That SafeCoin is just the tip of the iceberg of what this technology can deliver, I find that thought extraordinary - on paper, SafeCoin is already far better than Bitcoin with its $8bn market cap. That's food for thought!

One of our guys (a trained economist) described safecoin as coin v1.0 today and somebody would create a better coin v2.0. To me that is exciting and our strength. No ownership and searching for a better mechanism will make this community better faster. This is where I see the community going. I am motivated to make v1.0 great so v2.0 is even better and who knows who will come up with that. Maybe the chap from Africa with the OLPC will, that would be perfect!

[David Yamanaka]

Many in the community feel a fixed cap is the only way, I see this as a false economy as things just inflate. When I was a baby, a billionaire was a made up word. 

I'm glad we are in agreement. I study philosophy and economics, even the ones I don't agree with or understand. Because in the end, it only matters what works, not what I believe.

Most experts agree on 1-2% inflation because of population growth. Population has a big influence on demand. This is also referred to as demographics. The idea is to match currency supply to meet the demands of a "growing" population.

1. If the demand for SAFE network keeps increasing, and you cap the currency supply, you will end up with deflation, which discourages spending.

2. If the demand for SAFE network decreases towards zero, then I agree, the currency inflation rate should also be decreasing towards zero.

The reason #2 is more popular is because companies have stages of development: concept, start up, growth, adoption, expansion, maturity, decline.

From (concept) to (expansion) you have rapid growth in demand.
At (maturity) you have a slow down in demand, or staturation of the market.
Then (decline) which usually happens when a better company or concept replaces it.

Based on Bitcoins development thus far, my guess is safecoin should take 2-3 years to reach adoption.
I don't know how long crypto currencies will last. But as I said earlier, a currency is valued by what it can buy.

[Christophe Aguettaz]

Following the economic approach... Ways to make SAFE widely accessible:

- diverse payment mechanisms that favor the poor. Are there things are not onerous for the poor to provide but which the rich can't exploit our control? Time is one possible differentiator, as poor people may find it worthwhile exchanging their time for resources, while rich would see this as expensive compared to "money". I'm not sure how this could be applied. 

- making it hard for "rich" to corner resources, or currency, in ways that make the poor have to pay more. Various tools here, as a tax on holdings (wealth) for example. 

- diverse pricing (e.g. small amounts free or cheap, larger amounts increasingly expensive - would "tax" heavy users, the "rich" more than light users, who would tend to be poorer )

But what about the ecosystem analogue? I seem to have failed, so far, to inspire any such ideas! :-)

Mark

--

My Services & Blog:

http://theWebalyst.com 

Sent from mobile - apols for autoccorrrct & brevit ;-)

(replying in the main thread instead of the branch)

So how about this for an idea:

- Clients generate some kind of token simply by being 'alive' in the network. These tokens (or parts of them) can be used to pay for chunk upkeep.
- Safecoins can be used to pay for chunk upkeep as well.
- Chunk upkeep derives from chunks having a TTL. This way the network is self-cleaning, stale data gets removed. (I really don't like the idea of stale data staying around forever, but maybe that's just me).

These 'alive tokens' could be a restricted kind of Safecoin. Restricted in that they're not transferable and can only be used to pay for chunk upkeep (at which point they're converted to unrestricted Safecoins and paid to miners).

This way everybody gets limited free data storage, and those willing to go beyond this can pay in mining or money. Free users only need to connect every once in a while to make sure their data stays on the network.

---

So yes, I'm getting back to TTL again. David (or anyone else on the MaidSafe team), I gather TTL has been discussed internally before. Could you please summarize where you stand on this? What made you decide against it?

[David Irvine]

On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 11:57 AM, Christophe Aguettaz <ague...@gmail.com> wrote:

So yes, I'm getting back to TTL again. David (or anyone else on the MaidSafe team), I gather TTL has been discussed internally before. Could you please summarize where you stand on this? What made you decide against it?

Like many things we bounce back and forth with this one. It is the same for accounts, i.e. if users create loads of accounts and never use them etc. A the network is privacy enhancing we do not know what data belongs to whom. This is critical. So this gives us a problem, TTL and other mechanisms all have a failing we cannot get over and it is this. 

A person uses SAFE, totally happy he has stored all his data and family photo's will etc. and is comfortable. Then he goes off on a world tour for two years away from the computer. 

We cannot distinguish his data from junk data. 

This is the dilema I think we have with fully autonomous and private networks like this. We do have options though for handling outdated data and that is a tertiary storage mechanism. So we store huge numbers of such data in mega chunks. These mega chunks are stored as a single chunk (like a sparse file).  This can be extended of course. So the mechanism would be we have mega chunk addresses as such

000...(all zeros)

001...

010...

etc. Any old data starting with 000 is pushed into the sparse mega chunk at that address (same as normal chunks are stored, except in very high ranked vaults). These mega chunks then only carry some disk space cost (this is trivial I believe and even more so as time goes by and disk is cheaper). The admin cost is looking after the chunk ID 000... etc. so we can administer billions of chunks with one hash. As I say this can be easily extended. 

I hope that helps you see the dilema and also a potential 'fix'. It also would allow no deletes of data at all, thereby reducing maintenance overhead by a significant amount. With no deletes, then no MaidManager account lists, therefore we can handle faster churn, which in turn means smaller devices and on line times. This is one reason too keep pushing the get everything free and pay the miners properly. There are a lot of side benefits the feed back into the system design and efficiency. 

We have debated it for years and when the network is up we can try out some of these actions on test nets and see how/if it helps. 

[David Irvine]

On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 12:19 PM, David Irvine <david....@maidsafe.net> wrote:

A person uses SAFE, totally happy he has stored all his data and family photo's will etc. and is comfortable. Then he goes off on a world tour for two years away from the computer. 

Or is in a coma for three years etc. 

[trak...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, 26 March 2014 12:19:45 UTC, David Irvine wrote:
> So yes, I'm getting back to TTL again. David (or anyone else on the MaidSafe team), I gather TTL has been discussed internally before. Could you please summarize where you stand on this? What made you decide against it?
>
>
> Like many things we bounce back and forth with this one. It is the same for accounts, i.e. if users create loads of accounts and never use them etc. A the network is privacy enhancing we do not know what data belongs to whom. This is critical. So this gives us a problem, TTL and other mechanisms all have a failing we cannot get over and it is this. 
>
>
>
>
> A person uses SAFE, totally happy he has stored all his data and family photo's will etc. and is comfortable. Then he goes off on a world tour for two years away from the computer. 
>
>
>
>
> We cannot distinguish his data from junk data. 

Could the user specify their TTL on their data storage, with the price adjusting accordingly?

I'm not sure how big a deal it is having 'dead' space being consumed, but this would be a way to put it in the user's hands, rather than trying to second guess their motives.

> With no deletes, then no MaidManager account lists, therefore we can handle faster churn, which in turn means smaller devices and on line times. This is one reason too keep pushing the get everything free and pay the miners properly. There are a lot of side benefits the feed back into the system design and efficiency.

With free riders not clearing up after themselves, you may get a faster churn, but also *more* to churn. I'm obviously basing this on a finger in the air, but people tend to dump junk on common ground! ;)

> - Clients generate some kind of token simply by being 'alive' in the network. These tokens (or parts of them) can be used to pay for chunk upkeep.

I read somewhere that nodes will cache data locally when it is in demand. Is there some way these two things could be linked? Just thinking aloud.

[Christophe Aguettaz]

David, thank you for this thorough answer.

So these mega-chunks would be kind of equivalent to Amazon's glacier - large files that get read very infrequently.
You would have live chunks, and frozen chunks.

~Ideas mode~

Live chunks are frozen when nobody pays for their upkeep. Alternatively, clients could request storing frozen chunks directly, and pay nothing.
To make this work, clients pay for reads. Either by 'thawing' the chunks, turning them into live chunks by paying for their upkeep, or with one-time GET costs.

So long as the network is reasonably far from full, everything gets kept in the network.
At some point though, if the network get too full, a garbage collection process is triggered that remove a sufficient amount of old chunks. There could be a reasonable lower bound on chunk age to avoid unpleasant surprises.

This way, there's no need to conjecture about user behavior anymore. If miners keep the network growing with demand, everything is kept forever. If however the network approaches dangerous load levels that could threaten its existence, it heals in the least damaging way possible to users.

Of course there's still an unpredictable element. The network could find itself in a position where it can't honor the lower bound mentioned above - kind of a 'panic' mode. How likely that is remains to be seen - that may happen on day 1, or be so unlikely that it's not even worth discussing.

[Taylor Singleton-Fookes]

Thoughts on David Irvine's Proposal:

 

Goals:

• Create reliable, *free* access to the network. 
• Abandon the idea of "payment" with drive space because mobile adoption is the key to mass adoption. 
• Remove friction & incentivize the transition between server based storage to encrypted, decentralized storage. 
• Create a market based incentive scheme that both encourages early adoption (short run), and persistence (sustainability - long run).  

Proposal: 

All safecoin is mined by miners who are heavily encouraged (algorithmically to mine above network average space). In this proposal miners only, provide the network resources. 

Comments: 

• What is the effect of using "above average" as a mining incentive? 
• Does it create barriers to entry for small miners? Economies of scale already is a large advantage when purchasing / building drives. 
• Will the result necessarily drive small miners from the market? (too costly to be above average.)
• Should the network incentivize decentralization (more smaller nodes) in some way? Does that increase the speed and resilience of the network? How important are small miners to the ecosystem?
• For example if maidsafe's incentive scheme results in few large miners, could the simultaneous failure of several of the large miners (obviously extreme situation) risk data loss, network interruption? 

Brainstorming thoughts:

• In the long run three factors matter: total availability space, total stability of space, & network propagation.  
• Could an idea analogous to 'coin age' in Bitcoin reward continuous supply of space (and punish  downtime)?
• How about rewarding data relaying & network propagation as well as useful space provided? 
• There is an inherent problem in supplying unlimited free access to a finite non-free resource. 
• What about a differentiation between permanent data on the network and flux data. Flux data would be free, open, but not guaranteed to be maintained. 
• What about linking to the scarcity of Bitcoin. If you can sign a Bitcoin address that contains coins you can access permanent network space proportional to how many coins are being signed. (Note you do not need to send the coins - this is a solution to scarcity not payment)

Just some thoughts.

P.S. This weekend I went to my fathers house and took about 10 books on C++. I've been procrastinating learning to code (was going into finance). But Maidsafe & Bitcoin are beautiful things and I must be apart of the crypto-decentralization revolution :) You guys are doing something great.

[Benjamin Bollen]

Hi David!

I’ve not had the time to follow this email thread up to now, and I’m still catching up some very interesting brainstorming.

In particular your pro number 3 resonated with me:

3: One of my favourites : This also allows people in less developed countries who cannot afford the resources to mine or purchase safecoin the ability to connect, consume, create and add to the vast pool of human knowledge at no cost. To me this changes everything!

As you might have already gotten a hint from another project I’m working on (www.intertricity.net) I care deeply on closing the information/technology gap that keeps widening in the world.

In particular I want to make a difference with Seetale, my crowning project on augmented intelligence.  In particular one of the ambitious goals here is to allow anyone, regardless of material possessions to learn and take control over their destiny.

The problem is, very similar to a Safecoin on an unlimited free storage network, that things need to be paid for.  In my case, I reasoned every (or most) human being is born with a brain. So from their usage of Seetale, I intend to extract a proof-of-consistency.  Algorithms can provide useful work, but so can human brains and the collaboration of the two is more powerful then any one separately.

The aim is not just to enable anyone, in any country to enable them to ‘pay’ for their usage of the network.  Inspired by the concept of micro work, I hope to even establish a proper source of income from dedication to using their brain on the network.

This is all very much still a high mountain to climb, but I wanted to suggest that it might be interesting to consider other ways of contributing to the value of the network in a win-win situation.

Kind regards,

see you in a minute, Im actually late and missed the beginning :)

Ben

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[David Yamanaka]

Live chunks are frozen when nobody pays for their upkeep. Alternatively, clients could request storing frozen chunks directly, and pay nothing.
To make this work, clients pay for reads. Either by 'thawing' the chunks, turning them into live chunks by paying for their upkeep, or with one-time GET costs.

This is a good idea.

So long as the network is reasonably far from full, everything gets kept in the network.
At some point though, if the network get too full, a garbage collection process is triggered that remove a sufficient amount of old chunks. There could be a reasonable lower bound on chunk age to avoid unpleasant surprises.

This way, there's no need to conjecture about user behavior anymore. If miners keep the network growing with demand, everything is kept forever. If however the network approaches dangerous load levels that could threaten its existence, it heals in the least damaging way possible to users.

It is normal for people to upload stuff and forget about them, especially if storage is free. This is like "clutter" and we should have a "MAID" clean up the network after sometime. If people want their clutter to remain on the network, they can pay safecoin to reset its time or status

[David Irvine]

--

Yes this is along the lines we are thinking off. I think there are some edges to it yet and we need to work out the correct metrics to implement this. It is completely feasible, especially the garbage collection thing. I have argued the network should lose chunks occasionally and this is what I mean. What it cannot cope with it should discard fro the sake of live data. 

You need to get into the code and help with some of this. Really good thinking and debate. 

[David Irvine]

On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 5:13 PM, David Yamanaka <drey...@gmail.com> wrote:

It is normal for people to upload stuff and forget about them, especially if storage is free. This is like "clutter" and we should have a "MAID" clean up the network after sometime. If people want their clutter to remain on the network, they can pay safecoin to reset its time or status

+1

[David Irvine]

On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 4:10 PM, Benjamin Bollen <benjami...@gmail.com> wrote:

see you in a minute, Im actually late and missed the beginning :)

Was good to catch you there on the hangout. We chatted more about how to engage people and I think Viv has some good points and ways to get involved fast. I hope you like it and I look forward to seeing you on the other side (the c++ side :-))

[Christophe Aguettaz]

You need to get into the code and help with some of this.

I've been diving into the code these past few days, but it's a lot to take in.

Right now I'm trying to get a feel for the big picture, seeing how stuff fits together, and these discussions help.

I'll probably have more technical questions in the future. Is this list the right place to ask them? So far discussions have been pretty high-level on the dev list, is that the appropriate place to ask code-related questions, or is there a better suited one?

[Benjamin Bollen]

I share the concern, Im also still working out how the different  classes fit together in a working piece.

I’m pretty sure this is the right mailing list, we just need to start asking those questions, I guess :)

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[David Irvine]

On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 10:42 PM, Christophe Aguettaz <ague...@gmail.com> wrote:

I'll probably have more technical questions in the future. Is this list the right place to ask them? So far discussions have been pretty high-level on the dev list, is that the appropriate place to ask code-related questions, or is there a better suited one?

Yes this is fine. We have a users list too, we will follow the boost model. When people start getting technically deep we will enable the users list for users of the API etc. This will remain the core library list and will get pretty technical. We did not want to do that immediately and allow people to get involved slowly.  

[Kevin Croombs]

Hi,

I've been reading this thread and the whitepapers with interest.

It is a noble aim to give everyone in the world access to free data storage, but I don't understand how that can work in practice. As I see it, the facts are that storage space has an associated cost in terms of hardware and energy. In order to offer free space therefore someone else must be paying for the hardware and energy. Maidsafe appears to be proposing that "miners" provide the network with storage, and they are compensated with safecoin, generated through proof-of-resource. In order to pay for their energy bills and hardware investment, the miners must exchange their safecoin for national currency.

What is it that drives demand for safecoin and gives it a value?

You might ask the same thing about bitcoin, but with bitcoin there are now hundreds of stores and businesses and people willing to exchange goods and services for bitcoin. These network effects give bitcoin its value. safecoin doesn't have this in place, so initially at least the demand for safecoin will be driven by speculators hoping to sell later at a higher price. If there is no goods and services trade in safecoin then the speculation bubble will eventually burst and the people who bought safecoin at the peak of its value will lose money. If the value of safecoin drops below that required to maintain network storage then "miners" will leave the network. The end result of this is that some speculators (people who get in early) will make money from safecoin, some speculators (people who didn't get out in time) will lose money. The investors who lose money are the people who end up having paid for the "free" storage offered by the maidsafe system.

If safecoin does achieve a level of adoption and is traded for goods and services then the "free" storage on offer is paid for by holders of safecoin, i.e. the reward paid to miners creates inflation which is a stealth tax. Obviously the bitcoin block reward is also a stealth tax on network security, but if maidsafe is offering unlimited free storage then the mining reward must cover miners costs or the miners will cease to provide the network with their storage. If storage is unlimited then it follows that inflation in safecoin must also be unlimited. If inflation in safecoin is not unlimited (i.e. if there is a cap on coin issuance from proof-of-resource mining) then it cannot be profitable to provide the resource (disk space) required to serve free-for-all storage space. If it becomes unprofitable to provide storage to the network then the network will not scale, i.e. it will quickly become full and therefore not able to achieve the stated aims.

Clearly if there is too much inflation then that will hamper adoption of safecoin as a real currency, users will prefer to trade in bitcoin.

I may have misunderstood some of the proposals, if so perhaps someone can explain who it is that ends up paying for the free storage on offer?

This is a bit of a lunch time braindump, but I think that for this project to be sustainable it is necessary to charge end users for storage. If you charge them in safecoin then that provides a built in value underpinning safecoin. The question then is how can we make it easy for people to obtain safecoin?  

Thanks,

Kev.

[David Irvine]

Cheers Kev, it's all brainstorming to no worries

On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 1:21 PM, Kevin Croombs <kevin....@gmail.com> wrote:

I've been reading this thread and the whitepapers with interest.

It is a noble aim to give everyone in the world access to free data storage, but I don't understand how that can work in practice. As I see it, the facts are that storage space has an associated cost in terms of hardware and energy. In order to offer free space therefore someone else must be paying for the hardware and energy. Maidsafe appears to be proposing that "miners" provide the network with storage, and they are compensated with safecoin, generated through proof-of-resource. In order to pay for their energy bills and hardware investment, the miners must exchange their safecoin for national currency.

What is it that drives demand for safecoin and gives it a value?

safecoin is not the proof of resource it is a stand alone currency.  There will be an initial crowd sale of 10% of coins to stimulate that activity. I see safecoin values unrelated to data costs etc.

You might ask the same thing about bitcoin, but with bitcoin there are now hundreds of stores and businesses and people willing to exchange goods and services for bitcoin. These network effects give bitcoin its value. safecoin doesn't have this in place, so initially at least the demand for safecoin will be driven by speculators hoping to sell later at a higher price. If there is no goods and services trade in safecoin then the speculation bubble will eventually burst and the people who bought safecoin at the peak of its value will lose money. If the value of safecoin drops below that required to maintain network storage then "miners" will leave the network. The end result of this is that some speculators (people who get in early) will make money from safecoin, some speculators (people who didn't get out in time) will lose money. The investors who lose money are the people who end up having paid for the "free" storage offered by the maidsafe system.

Yes I agree, but this  this is true of any currency virtual or now. I think without POR tokens (which is the internal data depended value at the moment)  the network may grow much faster, perhaps too fast!

If safecoin does achieve a level of adoption and is traded for goods and services then the "free" storage on offer is paid for by holders of safecoin, i.e. the reward paid to miners creates inflation which is a stealth tax. Obviously the bitcoin block reward is also a stealth tax on network security, but if maidsafe is offering unlimited free storage then the mining reward must cover miners costs or the miners will cease to provide the network with their storage. If storage is unlimited then it follows that inflation in safecoin must also be unlimited. If inflation in safecoin is not unlimited (i.e. if there is a cap on coin issuance from proof-of-resource mining) then it cannot be profitable to provide the resource (disk space) required to serve free-for-all storage space. If it becomes unprofitable to provide storage to the network then the network will not scale, i.e. it will quickly become full and therefore not able to achieve the stated aims.

Yes this is one of teh debates, to keep miners paid, bitcoin will use transaction charges, I personally like increasing the number of coins at a more fixed rate (ish) of 1.5 - 2%  or perhaps whatever the value to society the whole eco system is worth ? (calculated by the network, this is possible if the network has visibility of safecoin, which it will have)

Clearly if there is too much inflation then that will hamper adoption of safecoin as a real currency, users will prefer to trade in bitcoin.

Yes I agree 

I may have misunderstood some of the proposals, if so perhaps someone can explain who it is that ends up paying for the free storage on offer?

You are right, my proposal was miners provide this. The thing is miners are only small computers, nothing special and the more of them the better. This is also important we really want millions of miners. Commodity PC's, set top boxes etc.  

This is a bit of a lunch time braindump, but I think that for this project to be sustainable it is necessary to charge end users for storage. If you charge them in safecoin then that provides a built in value underpinning safecoin. The question then is how can we make it easy for people to obtain safecoin?  

It is the question :-) The answer I think has to be through mining (which in the early days will be very easy) and exchanges as bitcoin does at the moment. I would hope outlets supporting bitcoin would find this a great proposal to in time.  Again this is true of every new currency type device, I do not see us as special in this case. 

A very valid issue though is the network should not fail with a failure in the underlying currency for sure. The POR token goes a long way to ensuring that I think as it ties resources to value (safecoin, BTC or any other)

[Mark Hughes]

Kev,

I think that's a good analysis, and that you ask a key question: who pays? 

Payment can be monetary or in kind, and is very much under debate. Options I'm aware of are:

1) users of applications, who pay fees to application providers, who are taxed at 1% of revenue. This is a done deal, though we don't know how much income it will provide, or what the foundation will do with it. 

2) users of SAFE, who pay with PoR acquired by providing more resources (useful space) to the network than they consume. The network retains a "profit" in exchange for the value it provides. 

Miners are not net contributors, but instead, I assume, amass excess PoR/SafeCoin by providing more resources than they use. Revenue and resources from 1), 2) and anything I'm not aware of (T-shirt sales? ) must exceed the expenditure of miners by enough to keep SAFE mining more attractive than alternative investments - 5%? 10%? ...?

David would like to do away with 2) which leaves 1), as the only source of income that I'm aware of. 

Variations we could play with:

- freemium (e.g. first 500G free forever), and which could be made more generous when as revenue rises and resources costs fall

- early adopter bonuses (e.g. unlimited or, larger free-for-life allowances for the first million users). 

I like the second option because: a) it encourages users to sign up which helps the critical start up phase, b) it is less risky than "free to everyone", but can be changed to "free to everyone" (to great media fanfare) at any point, achieving David's commendable goal, but only when we believe it is sustainable. 

We could also achieve "free for everyone" in stages, promoting the network with "bonus space" bounties for referral signups, announcements of extra space for everyone who signs up on SAFE's birthday etc

Mark

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-------- Original message --------
From: Kevin Croombs <kevin....@gmail.com>
Date: 27/03/2014 13:21 (GMT+00:00)
To: maidsafe-d...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [maidsafe-development] Re: Very much extreme brainstorming, free everything for everyone!

Hi,

I've been reading this thread and the whitepapers with interest.

It is a noble aim to give everyone in the world access to free data storage, but I don't understand how that can work in practice. As I see it, the facts are that storage space has an associated cost in terms of hardware and energy. In order to offer free space therefore someone else must be paying for the hardware and energy. Maidsafe appears to be proposing that "miners" provide the network with storage, and they are compensated with safecoin, generated through proof-of-resource. In order to pay for their energy bills and hardware investment, the miners must exchange their safecoin for national currency.

What is it that drives demand for safecoin and gives it a value?

You might ask the same thing about bitcoin, but with bitcoin there are now hundreds of stores and businesses and people willing to exchange goods and services for bitcoin. These network effects give bitcoin its value. safecoin doesn't have this in place, so initially at least the demand for safecoin will be driven by speculators hoping to sell later at a higher price. If there is no goods and services trade in safecoin then the speculation bubble will eventually burst and the people who bought safecoin at the peak of its value will lose money. If the value of safecoin drops below that required to maintain network storage then "miners" will leave the network. The end result of this is that some speculators (people who get in early) will make money from safecoin, some speculators (people who didn't get out in time) will lose money. The investors who lose money are the people who end up having paid for the "free" storage offered by the maidsafe system.

If safecoin does achieve a level of adoption and is traded for goods and services then the "free" storage on offer is paid for by holders of safecoin, i.e. the reward paid to miners creates inflation which is a stealth tax. Obviously the bitcoin block reward is also a stealth tax on network security, but if maidsafe is offering unlimited free storage then the mining reward must cover miners costs or the miners will cease to provide the network with their storage. If storage is unlimited then it follows that inflation in safecoin must also be unlimited. If inflation in safecoin is not unlimited (i.e. if there is a cap on coin issuance from proof-of-resource mining) then it cannot be profitable to provide the resource (disk space) required to serve free-for-all storage space. If it becomes unprofitable to provide storage to the network then the network will not scale, i.e. it will quickly become full and therefore not able to achieve the stated aims.

Clearly if there is too much inflation then that will hamper adoption of safecoin as a real currency, users will prefer to trade in bitcoin.

I may have misunderstood some of the proposals, if so perhaps someone can explain who it is that ends up paying for the free storage on offer?

This is a bit of a lunch time braindump, but I think that for this project to be sustainable it is necessary to charge end users for storage. If you charge them in safecoin then that provides a built in value underpinning safecoin. The question then is how can we make it easy for people to obtain safecoin?  

Thanks,

Kev.

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[David Irvine]

On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 2:21 PM, Mark Hughes <mrh...@markhughes.com> wrote:

- early adopter bonuses (e.g. unlimited or, larger free-for-life allowances for the first million users). 

I like the second option because: a) it encourages users to sign up which helps the critical start up phase, b) it is less risky than "free to everyone", but can be changed to "free to everyone" (to great media fanfare) at any point, achieving David's commendable goal, but only when we believe it is sustainable. 

Nice idea, perhaps free during beta 1 launch, require POR after that period if needed? Interesting thought, stimulate the currency via crowd sale and stimulate the network by a very similar means.  We can use part of the crowd sale to fund a lot of miners to cover this I imagine.  Maybe this encourages miners anyway as people are asking them to mine at high rates :-) (each X put attempts goes towards a coin creation attempt, this is the graph in the paper). 

[David Yamanaka]

These are legitimate concerns. We make certain assumptions in order to plan for the future. But the hard answer is, we don't know exactly how things will unfold.
So here is my best guess...
 

It is a noble aim to give everyone in the world access to free data storage, but I don't understand how that can work in practice. As I see it, the facts are that storage space has an associated cost in terms of hardware and energy. In order to offer free space therefore someone else must be paying for the hardware and energy. Maidsafe appears to be proposing that "miners" provide the network with storage, and they are compensated with safecoin, generated through proof-of-resource. In order to pay for their energy bills and hardware investment, the miners must exchange their safecoin for national currency.

We know storage capacity is constantly increasing while costs is decreasing. Years ago we had KB, then MB, then GB, and now we have TB... So future storage space in not the main concern. Energy costs and ISP access cost is a different matter. There is growing interest in free internet access through mesh networking, planned to eliminate ISP monopoly over the internet. Until that becomes a reality, safecoin must have enough "national currency" value to pay for those costs.

What is it that drives demand for safecoin and gives it a value?

Valuation is a very fickle thing. Bitcoin fluctuates with great instability. One way to valuate safecoin is by it's network. As the network grows with new apps, features, functions, and freedom through private encryption, so does the value of safecoin which exists on that network. We assume this value will grow in the future. In my opinion, safecoins value will scale better if it were used to grant "access" to the SAFE network rather than used to buy storage. This is why ISP providers are growing everyday. They provide access to the wonderful treasures that are on the internet. Safecoin could do the same.

You might ask the same thing about bitcoin, but with bitcoin there are now hundreds of stores and businesses and people willing to exchange goods and services for bitcoin. These network effects give bitcoin its value. safecoin doesn't have this in place, so initially at least the demand for safecoin will be driven by speculators hoping to sell later at a higher price. If there is no goods and services trade in safecoin then the speculation bubble will eventually burst and the people who bought safecoin at the peak of its value will lose money. If the value of safecoin drops below that required to maintain network storage then "miners" will leave the network. The end result of this is that some speculators (people who get in early) will make money from safecoin, some speculators (people who didn't get out in time) will lose money. The investors who lose money are the people who end up having paid for the "free" storage offered by the maidsafe system.

I agree speculation is a major annoyance. But in life there are no guarantees.
 

If safecoin does achieve a level of adoption and is traded for goods and services then the "free" storage on offer is paid for by holders of safecoin, i.e. the reward paid to miners creates inflation which is a stealth tax. Obviously the bitcoin block reward is also a stealth tax on network security, but if maidsafe is offering unlimited free storage then the mining reward must cover miners costs or the miners will cease to provide the network with their storage. If storage is unlimited then it follows that inflation in safecoin must also be unlimited. If inflation in safecoin is not unlimited (i.e. if there is a cap on coin issuance from proof-of-resource mining) then it cannot be profitable to provide the resource (disk space) required to serve free-for-all storage space. If it becomes unprofitable to provide storage to the network then the network will not scale, i.e. it will quickly become full and therefore not able to achieve the stated aims.

Inflation occurs when you have more money chasing fewer goods. We assume the population will grow at 1-2%. And we assume more goods and services will be added onto the network, same way the internet grows. If both of these assumptions are true, then safecoins inflation should not be a problem.

Clearly if there is too much inflation then that will hamper adoption of safecoin as a real currency, users will prefer to trade in bitcoin.

I suggested using safecoin to pay for network access as a way of extracting the currency supply, thus reducing inflation. But this could also cause deflation.

This is a bit of a lunch time braindump, but I think that for this project to be sustainable it is necessary to charge end users for storage. If you charge them in safecoin then that provides a built in value underpinning safecoin. The question then is how can we make it easy for people to obtain safecoin?

I mentioned this issue on my post regarding Free-to-play vs Pay-to-play business models. In practice, free-to-play is more widely successful for mass adoptions.

[Kevin Croombs]

Hi,

Thanks David and Mark for responding.

It seems that the answer is either the 1% tax is paying for free users or we're relying on altruism on the part of users/miners to provide more than they consume. One problem I can see with relying on altruism is that I'd be providing a free service to anyone in the world for whatever they wanted. So from a personal point of view I'd be happy with that if all of my space went to African teachers with OPLC, but (for good reason) with maidsafe I don't know who's data I'm storing or what it is. So by providing space to African teachers I'm also providing free services to Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. I'd be happy to store some of Mark's data but given his prodigious wealth I would expect to be paid, even if it were below AWS/Google rates. With a free service my donation of storage space is effectively equally distributed amongst all users, regardless of their ability to pay. I think personally I would prefer to better target my charitable giving, so for example I would like the option of being paid for donating my storage space to the maidsafe network - this would provide funds that I could then donate directly to African teachers (or some other worthy group). Perhaps the POR currency could work like the charity tokens you get given in supermarkets :)

Thanks,

Kev.

On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 2:21 PM, Mark Hughes <mrh...@markhughes.com> wrote:

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[Christopher Brandt]

Wow you guys have been busy.

I've been away for a week and it took me two hours to get caught up on these two threads.

In general, I support this new proposal. But I think there are two factors which have been under-discussed.

1. There is a time factor to the real-world cost of data storage that I don't see accounted for (unless I've missed it). Basically, it costs money to run a vault non-stop. While it's collecting data it gets paid in safecoin but it's hard to see how far those payments will go towards offsetting the operating cost because that is based on the valuation of safecoin. So jump to the end state, my vault is full and can't accept any more chunks meaning it can't earn any more. But it still costs money to operate. So what is the incentive to keep it running? I think there needs to be some kind of a vault maintenance incentive. Otherwise why wouldn't I turn it off and start again.

2. If data (or the storage of it) is the new gold, then I think there is a big difference between public data and private data. Public data is stuff like Wikipedia, blogs and open source software. I think it is generally in the interest of society to keep this stuff open and perpetually available. Private (including shared) data is of no value to society because it can't be read by anyone other than the owner (or a small group of people). I think that this distinction is where the line should be drawn between free use vs. paid use. I think we want it to be free for people to store information as this is a reflection of our society. In my opinion we're in danger of loosing a lot of our recent recorded history because our "public" data is stored on private servers and will eventually get destroyed. I should however have to pay to store my private photos, music and memories, just as I have to pay for my physical storage locker downtown. 

And I think there is a definite link between the two. There needs to be a temporal element to my data storage fees, meaning I need to pay a monthly or yearly fee. There are a couple of (to me) obvious reasons for needing this: first my private data is encrypted and of no use or value to anyone else. And, as David has stated, the network can't even tell if I still need it. So I need to tell the network that I still need it, by paying for it periodically. When I die and stop paying for my storage my data will eventually be discarded (and the junk in my storage locker will be auctioned off).  The second need is to ensure the efficient usage of the network. The basic premise is that resource that appears to be free will be abused until it is no longer free (see Canadian health care for an example). A small fee, and it needs to be small, will incent users to be more careful of what they store. Note however that the fee needs to be small, Google is already competing with SAFE by offering huge amounts of storage for a small amount of money. I (we) realize that there is a huge security caveat with that offer, but the average person doesn't see or care about that. They see cheap storage.

One possible solution to the pay vaults for storage over time could be paying for data served, rather than stored. I'd be surprised if you guys hadn't considered that so I'm curious as to the reasoning to not use that metric.

On the topic of capping the number of safecoins, I can't understand why we would do that. In my limited view, if data is the resource then safecoin is "backed" by the amount public data stored on the SAFE network. The more public data stored and reliably available, the stronger and more stable the value of safecoin. I think capping the number of safecoin hides that relationship and creates other problems with artificial solutions (like running out safecoin and trying to recycle them). But I'm not an economist, so we might want another opinion.

Chris.

[David Irvine]

On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 10:09 PM, Christopher Brandt <xtopher...@gmail.com> wrote:

Wow you guys have been busy.

:-) welcome to MaidSafe, we read about sleep :-) 

I've been away for a week and it took me two hours to get caught up on these two threads.

In general, I support this new proposal. But I think there are two factors which have been under-discussed.

1. There is a time factor to the real-world cost of data storage that I don't see accounted for (unless I've missed it). Basically, it costs money to run a vault non-stop. While it's collecting data it gets paid in safecoin but it's hard to see how far those payments will go towards offsetting the operating cost because that is based on the valuation of safecoin. So jump to the end state, my vault is full and can't accept any more chunks meaning it can't earn any more. But it still costs money to operate. So what is the incentive to keep it running? I think there needs to be some kind of a vault maintenance incentive. Otherwise why wouldn't I turn it off and start again.

Even full vaults earn, they earn at the rate they store. If vaults are over the network average sthey start to store faster though. 

2. If data (or the storage of it) is the new gold, then I think there is a big difference between public data and private data. Public data is stuff like Wikipedia, blogs and open source software. I think it is generally in the interest of society to keep this stuff open and perpetually available. Private (including shared) data is of no value to society because it can't be read by anyone other than the owner (or a small group of people). I think that this distinction is where the line should be drawn between free use vs. paid use. I think we want it to be free for people to store information as this is a reflection of our society. In my opinion we're in danger of loosing a lot of our recent recorded history because our "public" data is stored on private servers and will eventually get destroyed. I should however have to pay to store my private photos, music and memories, just as I have to pay for my physical storage locker downtown. 

Yes this is true.  

And I think there is a definite link between the two. There needs to be a temporal element to my data storage fees, meaning I need to pay a monthly or yearly fee. There are a couple of (to me) obvious reasons for needing this: first my private data is encrypted and of no use or value to anyone else. And, as David has stated, the network can't even tell if I still need it. So I need to tell the network that I still need it, by paying for it periodically. When I die and stop paying for my storage my data will eventually be discarded (and the junk in my storage locker will be auctioned off).  The second need is to ensure the efficient usage of the network. The basic premise is that resource that appears to be free will be abused until it is no longer free (see Canadian health care for an example). A small fee, and it needs to be small, will incent users to be more careful of what they store. Note however that the fee needs to be small, Google is already competing with SAFE by offering huge amounts of storage for a small amount of money. I (we) realize that there is a huge security caveat with that offer, but the average person doesn't see or care about that. They see cheap storage.

Yes also agree 

One possible solution to the pay vaults for storage over time could be paying for data served, rather than stored. I'd be surprised if you guys hadn't considered that so I'm curious as to the reasoning to not use that metric.

This has become more talked about recently. It's not as simple to measure (requires extra fields in the record holders of chunks, these are held in PmidManagers). Of course mining attempts could be carried out on get attempts (data served). Hmm may be onto something here Chris.  I wonder if we use data stored as the rate of attempts to mine and data served as the actual mine attempt. This feels quite correct! Any thoughts anyone ?

On the topic of capping the number of safecoins, I can't understand why we would do that. In my limited view, if data is the resource then safecoin is "backed" by the amount public data stored on the SAFE network. The more public data stored and reliably available, the stronger and more stable the value of safecoin. I think capping the number of safecoin hides that relationship and creates other problems with artificial solutions (like running out safecoin and trying to recycle them). But I'm not an economist, so we might want another opinion.

The network could calculate an inflation based on number of active accounts I think. Then more users means more safecoin. If we expand population we automatically expand the safecoin base by that amount. Maybe this is also correct. 

[David Brunell]

I don't see how giving MaidSafe resources away is going to solve any third-world problems.  Anyone who has access to a computer can already get several GB of free storage from a number of companies.  It seems to me that user interface hardware and communications infrastructure is what is most needed in these under-served communities.

I think giving anything away for free will ultimately reduce the efficiency of the network, but why not set aside a certain fraction of the MaidSafe company profits (from the 1% fee) for safecoin/POR vouchers to be distributed to needy communities?  You could put someone in charge of insuring that the freebies aren't being handed out to well-to-do individuals or companies.  Also, when I think about the roughly 1 TB of data under my control, 99% of the value is contained in less than a GB of that.  Perhaps a small amount of storage for free as a reward for running a node and improving the connectivity of the network is in order.  One of my criticisms of the current Bitcoin protocol is that people who run a full node but do not mine are helping the network but receive no reward.

To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/maidsafe-development/CAP8xkoSd0f9EDO5YO8kQKEQ62otZ4-TVOXw6A_qad6i8h_zGcg%40mail.gmail.com.

[David Irvine]

On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 10:31 PM, David Brunell <quant...@gmail.com> wrote:

I don't see how giving MaidSafe resources away is going to solve any third-world problems.  Anyone who has access to a computer can already get several GB of free storage from a number of companies.  It seems to me that user interface hardware and communications infrastructure is what is most needed in these under-served communities.

I agree, but a caveat maybe, just maybe giving everyone access will increase the amount of human knowledge. Maybe the payment is making us all more informed, or maybe curing a disease etc. 

Just a thought (I am not really debating the crux of your point) 

[David Yamanaka]

One possible solution to the pay vaults for storage over time could be paying for data served, rather than stored. I'd be surprised if you guys hadn't considered that so I'm curious as to the reasoning to not use that metric.

This has become more talked about recently. It's not as simple to measure (requires extra fields in the record holders of chunks, these are held in PmidManagers). Of course mining attempts could be carried out on get attempts (data served). Hmm may be onto something here Chris.  I wonder if we use data stored as the rate of attempts to mine and data served as the actual mine attempt. This feels quite correct! Any thoughts anyone ?

Yes, this sounds like a possible solution. If the vault is doing the work, they should get paid.

On the topic of capping the number of safecoins, I can't understand why we would do that. In my limited view, if data is the resource then safecoin is "backed" by the amount public data stored on the SAFE network. The more public data stored and reliably available, the stronger and more stable the value of safecoin. I think capping the number of safecoin hides that relationship and creates other problems with artificial solutions (like running out safecoin and trying to recycle them). But I'm not an economist, so we might want another opinion.

The network could calculate an inflation based on number of active accounts I think. Then more users means more safecoin. If we expand population we automatically expand the safecoin base by that amount. Maybe this is also correct. 

This is inline with population growth inflation. It makes sense to me.

For my own clarity, I think it's important to differrentiate between cloud storage and the SAFE network.

To me, the SAFE network is not just for storage. Google has already out-gunned us in that market.
Anyone can self-encrypt their own files before uploading to their free cloud storage.
 
The SAFE network "can" become the New Internet 2.0 (big pill to swallow, I know)

Current Reasons
1. It has its own built-in private currency system (safecoin).
2. It has its own built-in private storage system (Vault system w/POR).

Future Reasons
3. It will have its own email/msg system. (Communications)
4. It will have its own web hosting applications. (Instead of WWW, we will have SAFE)
5. It will have free access through mesh networking. (No more ISP gatekeepers)

Why would anyone put a "public" website on a "private" network?
Same reason people want Bitcoin, freedom from control, manipulation, and oppression.

"If you build it, they will come..."

[David Irvine]

On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 1:37 AM, David Yamanaka <drey...@gmail.com> wrote:

For my own clarity, I think it's important to differrentiate between cloud storage and the SAFE network.

To me, the SAFE network is not just for storage. Google has already out-gunned us in that market.
Anyone can self-encrypt their own files before uploading to their free cloud storage.
 
The SAFE network "can" become the New Internet 2.0 (big pill to swallow, I know)

Absolutely, this is vital and the message that needs to get our. This is the decentralized Internet. 

[Christophe Aguettaz]

On Friday, March 28, 2014 2:37:24 AM UTC+1, David Yamanaka wrote:

One possible solution to the pay vaults for storage over time could be paying for data served, rather than stored. I'd be surprised if you guys hadn't considered that so I'm curious as to the reasoning to not use that metric.

This has become more talked about recently. It's not as simple to measure (requires extra fields in the record holders of chunks, these are held in PmidManagers). Of course mining attempts could be carried out on get attempts (data served). Hmm may be onto something here Chris.  I wonder if we use data stored as the rate of attempts to mine and data served as the actual mine attempt. This feels quite correct! Any thoughts anyone ?

Yes, this sounds like a possible solution. If the vault is doing the work, they should get paid.

Seconded. I was actually wondering how to prevent the following abuse:
- Vaults store data normally, and respond to checks comming from DataManagers in a correct and timely fashion
- However, they artificially inflate their response time on GET requests to avoid being the picked uploader and save on bandwidth.
This would work because data is downloaded from the first vault to respond, but it adversely affects the network.

Mining on GETs counterbalances this by giving an incentive to be the first uploader.

For my own clarity, I think it's important to differrentiate between cloud storage and the SAFE network.

To me, the SAFE network is not just for storage. Google has already out-gunned us in that market.
Anyone can self-encrypt their own files before uploading to their free cloud storage.
 

Also, note that Spideroak is currently offering unlimited cloud storage for 125$/year, and they do client-side encryption.
Granted, that's a limited offer, but it's interesting that a for-profit company judged it commercially feasible to impose no upload limit. Also, it seems there's no upload limit on most of their pro plans. They're probably counting on the evolution of storage cost and user restraint to make it work.

Well their system is much more restrictive than MaidSafe, and nowhere near as open, so it might be less subject to abuse. We'll have to wait and see whether the unlimited plans last.

[David Irvine]

I did a blog post on this idea to try and gather more feedback. It may help us to crack this one. I think there is a lot of value in looking a bit deeper at what we can achieve and how.  http://metaquestions.me/2014/04/02/project-safe-is-this-the-fair-business-model-at-last/ I hope it inspires more comments as I think we are not too far away from something amazing here. I know I am optimistic though :-)

[Daniel William Morgan]

Thanks for getting this out into a bit more detail, David. Optimism is good! 

I think what might help this idea of 'free access' succeed is if we are rude for a minute and think of types of users:

1) Miners with plenty of resources to share

2) Users who get access for free or cheap, but don't use an inordinate amount of resources. This user might run a small vault, but not much larger than what they themselves use in the network.

3) Users of no benefit to the network (My rough estimate is this is less than half)

What each of these groups would benefit from is visibility into their own usage. "We're all in this together, guys!" But I think this could come from the application level. 

Application developers should have some idea about the benevolence of their application's users, and be able to program incentives (points, discounts, etc) into their applications that offer points to users approaching 'miner/vault lord' status, a word of gratitude towards the 'keepers of the flame', and nothing very special at all to the bottom 20%. 

If Application X's users are good Safenet citizens, and Application Y's users watch HD video all day and don't run vaults, Application X should receive a greater reward (perhaps in the form of Safecoin). 

If we think of the available bandwidth and disk space in the network as the amount of water coming down a river, and every client/person downstream requires some of it to do what they do, then it behooves each client to not only watch their own consumption, but to monitor that of others on the network. A blend of safecoin and good old fashioned guilt tripping should ensure that those increasing the flow of resources are rewarded, those who cannot contribute can still quench their thirst, and those who leech on the resources of others in a damaging way don't make a dent in the overall supply. Once valuable data becomes stored in safenet, this question of 'What am I giving back for the benefit I get?' -- will become more apparent. 

When it comes round to 'Donate to Wikipedia' month, I think about the hundreds (thousands?) of articles I've read, my impact on their servers, and what that's worth to me. Wikipedia knows that the average visitor from San Francisco costs $2 a year in server costs, but donates $2.06 -- would Safenet have that sort of aggregate data to make application decisions around? Is this outside of the scope of the possible?  Will there be a way to anonymously quantify an application or user's storage or am I completely misunderstanding? 

Anyway -- lots of rambling, would love to know your thoughts. 

Daniel 

@danielmorgan

[David Irvine]

On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 8:16 AM, Daniel William Morgan <themor...@gmail.com> wrote:

Anyway -- lots of rambling, would love to know your thoughts. 

All good, I think much of this is covered. The important issue you touch on, I believe is the proof of resource. At the moment is only covers data really. I think this should improve with time to include types of data, cpu power as well as many other consideration. 

It may well be that seimal papers etc. deserve more payment etc. So there may be a future where we all have safecon (or can easily get it) and as we browse the network each page of info costs us .00000000000001 of a safecoin or similar. If a page is more expensive then we get a warning. This could also apply to programs, so could purchase a program by paying the download/unlock fee in safecoin automatically. In all cases 10% goes to the application developers.

I think the premis we put forward is a good start, for sure it should extend and I am not sure another currency is required to do it. I think safecoins rules can and should change over time in regard to these things. That will take quiet a mechanism to ensure fairness of any alteration to mining or payments etc. It can be done though. 

[Mark Hughes]

-------- Original message --------
From: Daniel William Morgan <themor...@gmail.com>
Date: 02/04/2014 08:16 (GMT+00:00)
To: maidsafe-d...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [maidsafe-development] Re: Very much extreme brainstorming, free everything for everyone!

> What each of these groups would benefit from is visibility into their own usage.

I really like this idea. We can see the power and value of providing users with feedback increasingly on the web and outside. 

Examples online promote and reward social behaviors:

- Facebook/twitter: likes, "shared by", retweets

- Reddit/stackexchange: upvotes/downvotes/karma points/trophies

Examples offline:

- Utility bills showing your usage compared to average users in your area. 

- more?

If we can use these ideas within SAFE for different user types, and developers, it could be very helpful. 

Anyone know or able to dig up research or articles on the different ways of doing this?

I wonder if it might be worth tying to interest one of the duo who created stackexchange too. They know a lot about this stuff and one sounds (from reading his blog) like someone who might be interested in a radical innovative value oriented project - that's us right? ;-). I'll sit on this question for now until we've considered Daniel's suggestions further. 

Mark

[David Irvine]

On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 9:18 AM, Mark Hughes <mrh...@markhughes.com> wrote:

Examples online promote and reward social behaviors:

- Facebook/twitter: likes, "shared by", retweets

- Reddit/stackexchange: upvotes/downvotes/karma points/trophies

Examples offline:

- Utility bills showing your usage compared to average users in your area. 

- more?

If we can use these ideas within SAFE for different user types, and developers, it could be very helpful. 

Absolutely. I think we can introduce apps that take payment for up-votes etc. these would be tiny payments in many cases. Such things could lead to voting mechanisms etc. Sharing anonymised useful information is a great thing to look towards as well, where people get credits for doing so and others pay to look. All in tiny payments ($0.00001 type).

So we could do loads of interesting things with all these capabilities.  There are also many other ways devs could create revenue I imagine. 

[David Yamanaka]

Great blog David.
 
Deep, deep, deep discussion on this one.
You covered several topics so I'll just give some highlights.

The free lunch & Is it something for nothing?

Public data is shared by the community. It should be free and unlimited. The potential benefit far outweigh the costs.
Private data only benefits a few users. If resources are getting cheaper, they should have no problem paying for their own private storage.
I agree hard drives have gotten cheaper. But my ISP and electricity bill has not. I has gotten more expensive with higher bandwith and electricity demands.

Pay contributors directly & How much do you earn?

100% Agree.
I love the idea of my computer working for me. I prefer the term "Vault Farmer" instead of miner.
I already dedicated an external drive for Vault Farming, and plan to add more farms (external drives) as time goes on.
These external drives are like plots of farm land, where others can "plant" data. The SAFE network pays me safecoin for using my farm land.

Pay developers on measured value & Let the network measure the value

If this kind of automatic revenue system works, it would be a brilliant new way for open source business models.
Coming for a Business System Analyst background, I support whatever works. Let's throw it out there and see what happens.
Also agree with the "additional advantages" more speed is definitely preferred.
If data is classified between public and private, why not have public data treated with (network wide POR), and private data on the (token based POR) model?
This would mean private data is much slower, but it also means resources are more dedicated for public data, right?

A problem we need to solve in any case & Fall back position

Old unused data is a reality, and should be archived/cleaned. My solution was to prioritize public over private. But I support the project either way.

The reason I believe storage will not exceed demand is because production supply follows demand. Example: 10 years ago, most software only required X amount of MB hard drive space. Now they require X amount of GB of space. Naturally, companies produced larger hard drives to meet that demand. Eventually, there will be apps requiring X amount of TB drive space, GB bandwith, and consume a lot more electricity. I hope I'm wrong about this trend. Maybe we will discover free energy?

Anything can happen :)

[David Yamanaka]

On Wednesday, April 2, 2014 3:50:09 AM UTC-6, David Yamanaka wrote:

Great blog David.
 
Deep, deep, deep discussion on this one.
You covered several topics so I'll just give some highlights.

One thing, I forgot to mention.

A large corporation with 1000TB+ of client data pays to host that data on their own servers.
Imagine if the SAFE Network gave unlimited "private" storage to that company and many others.
They no longer have to pay maintenance fees, network admins, and even reduce their power consumption.
Why wouldn't they dump it onto our network?

Both a wolf and deer drink from the same public river. Both benefit from public access.
But the wolf is not responsible for the deer's survival, and vice versa. They maintain their own biology, which is private.

[Mark Hughes]

Comments on the blog:

The loop is incomplete - DavidI: you are not clear on where you see the value of SafeCoin arising - you mention developers having the option to charge. Is that your proposal? If so, we must ask if it is sufficient in the long term, and how we can bootstrap it. 

The will be some value simply through people's perception (as in speculators / as in bitcoin) at least to kick it off, but that is risky, and may not be sustainable, because other coins will no doubt be developed to provide highly optimised solutions to real world use cases, which will sideline coins which have no real world function, or are sufficiently less suitable. So there has to be something unique about SafeCoin IMO. What is it? 

> Can this be gamed?

1. Rewarding apps on merit: We need to prevent those with power (money) from being able to use that power to distort the market of merit (e.g. advertising etc). Can we? How? 

> Additional advantages for application developers

Yes, the software as a service has finally arrived, and without all the disadvantages that plagued it since it was first mooted. We can go through all its old marketing material and use it for SAFE, pointing out how this version actually works! 

Now to read DavidY's comments... 

Mark

--

My Services & Blog:

http://theWebalyst.com 

Sent from mobile - apols for autoccorrrct & brevit ;-)

-------- Original message --------
From: David Yamanaka <drey...@gmail.com>
Date: 02/04/2014 10:50 (GMT+00:00)
To: maidsafe-d...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [maidsafe-development] Re: Very much extreme brainstorming, free everything for everyone!

Great blog David.
 
Deep, deep, deep discussion on this one.
You covered several topics so I'll just give some highlights.

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[Mark Hughes]

-------- Original message --------
From: David Yamanaka <drey...@gmail.com>
Date: 02/04/2014 10:50 (GMT+00:00)
To: maidsafe-d...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [maidsafe-development] Re: Very much extreme brainstorming, free everything for everyone!

> Great blog David.

Yes! 

The free lunch & Is it something for nothing?

>> Public data is shared by the community. It should be free and unlimited. The potential benefit far outweigh the costs. Private data only benefits a few users. If resources are getting cheaper, they should have no problem paying for their own private storage.
> I agree hard drives have gotten cheaper. But my ISP and electricity bill has not. I has gotten more expensive with higher bandwith and electricity demands.

I'm not against separating along public/private but not sure it makes sense. It ignores:

- the immense value of free private secure storage for end users, which is value for the network since it will be nothing without mass appeal to *these* users. Solution: first xxxGB private data in free?

- the split between commercial and non-commercial public data. E.g. Wikipedia v Facebook, or Oracle's website etc. Do we want Oracle riding free while Nelson in Kalunda village pays to store his private woring notes on curing cancer?

I think we need something more nuanced, but am not sure that will be efficient for the network.

Pay contributors directly & How much do you earn?

> 100% Agree.
> I love the idea of my computer working for me. I prefer the term "Vault Farmer" instead of miner. I already dedicated an external drive for Vault Farming, and plan to add more farms (external drives) as time goes on.
> These external drives are like plots of farm land, where others can "plant" data. The SAFE network pays me safecoin for using my farm land.

I agree with DY that how we present this is as important as how it works, because humans and our psychology are part of the SAFE ecosystem. 

One thought is to have "free farmers" ("free" is attractive) who learn, when they read the small print that they actually get paid (now very attractive!), and a second grade "pro-farmers" (perhaps plantation owners, though I think this is too white western colonial for a world system!) who everyone knows are putting far more in and get paid at higher rates. 

The latter grade is achieved when running above network average. 

Seen this way each grade can both understand why the other gets what they do (free stuff and some earning v 

Pay developers on measured value & Let the network measure the value

If this kind of automatic revenue system works, it would be a brilliant new way for open source business models.
Coming for a Business System Analyst background, I support whatever works. Let's throw it out there and see what happens.
Also agree with the "additional advantages" more speed is definitely preferred.
If data is classified between public and private, why not have public data treated with (network wide POR), and private data on the (token based POR) model?
This would mean private data is much slower, but it also means resources are more dedicated for public data, right?

A problem we need to solve in any case & Fall back position

Old unused data is a reality, and should be archived/cleaned. My solution was to prioritize public over private. But I support the project either way.

The reason I believe storage will not exceed demand is because production supply follows demand. Example: 10 years ago, most software only required X amount of MB hard drive space. Now they require X amount of GB of space. Naturally, companies produced larger hard drives to meet that demand. Eventually, there will be apps requiring X amount of TB drive space, GB bandwith, and consume a lot more electricity. I hope I'm wrong about this trend. Maybe we will discover free energy?

Anything can happen :)

[Mark Hughes]

Last email fired prematurely! This one completes... 

-------- Original message -------- From: David Yamanaka Date: 02/04/2014 10:50 (GMT+00:00) To: maidsafe-d...@googlegroups.comSubject: Re: [maidsafe-development] Re: Very much extreme brainstorming, free everything for everyone! 

> Great blog David.

Yes! 

The free lunch & Is it something for nothing?

>> Public data is shared by the community. It should be free and unlimited. The potential benefit far outweigh the costs. Private data only benefits a few users. If resources are getting cheaper, they should have no problem paying for their own private storage. 
> I agree hard drives have gotten cheaper. But my ISP and electricity bill has not. I has gotten more expensive with higher bandwith and electricity demands.

I'm not against separating along public/private but not sure it makes sense. It ignores:

- the immense value of free private secure storage for end users, which is value for the network since it will be nothing without mass appeal to *these* users. Solution: first xxxGB private data in free?

- the split between commercial and non-commercial public data. E.g. Wikipedia v Facebook, or Oracle's website etc. Do we want Oracle riding free while Nelson in Kalunda village pays to store his private woring notes on curing cancer?

I think we need something more nuanced, but am not sure that will be efficient for the network.

Pay contributors directly & How much do you earn?

> 100% Agree.
> I love the idea of my computer working for me. I prefer the term "Vault Farmer" instead of miner. I already dedicated an external drive for Vault Farming, and plan to add more farms (external drives) as time goes on.
> These external drives are like plots of farm land, where others can "plant" data. The SAFE network pays me safecoin for using my farm land.

I agree with DY that how we present this is as important as how it works, because humans and our psychology are part of the SAFE ecosystem. 

One thought is to have "free farmers" ("free" is attractive) who learn, when they read the small print that they actually get paid (now very attractive!), and a second grade "pro-farmers" (perhaps plantation owners, though I think this is too white western colonial for a world system!) who everyone knows are putting far more in and get paid at higher rates. 

The latter grade is achieved when running above network average. 

Seen this way each grade can both understand why the other gets what they do (free stuff and some earning versus doing the grunt work    for commercial reward). My intention is to avoid the little guy thinking "hey, those guys get paid higher rates than me, so I'm not going to share, I'll just free ride to punish them".

A problem we need to solve in any case & Fall back position

[snip]

> The reason I believe storage will not exceed demand is because production supply follows demand. Example: 10 years ago, most software only required X amount of MB hard drive space. Now they require X amount of GB of space. Naturally, companies produced larger hard drives to meet that demand. Eventually, there will be apps requiring X amount of TB drive space, GB bandwith, and consume a lot more electricity. I hope I'm wrong about this trend. Maybe we will discover free energy? 

I've always seen this as the other way around. Back in the eighties I foolishly said to a much brighter software developer colleague "soon computers will have vastly more disk and memory space than we'll ever be able to use". He, quite correctly pointed out that software expands to use the resources available, and this may be one reason he ended up head of cloud services at Netflix, and me enjoying life off-grid grid on a boat! :-)

What he saw, and I immediately realised was correct, is that computing resources mean we can build more powerful tools, leveraging computer power to human productivity (e.g. higher level languages that generate less efficient code, but increase developer productivity).

Aside: After the Snowden backlash began towards cloud services I cheekily asked him on twitter, if he thought it would seriously damage commercial cloud services. He said no. I wonder who will be right on this one! :-)

Of course it isn't a simple either/or, about which follows what. It's both, so we need to consider things from both (all?) perspectives. 

Message complete this time :-)

Mark

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-------- Original message --------
From: David Yamanaka <drey...@gmail.com>
Date: 02/04/2014 10:50 (GMT+00:00)
To: maidsafe-d...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [maidsafe-development] Re: Very much extreme brainstorming, free everything for everyone!

Great blog David.
 

Deep, deep, deep discussion on this one.
You covered several topics so I'll just give some highlights.

The free lunch & Is it something for nothing?

Public data is shared by the community. It should be free and unlimited. The potential benefit far outweigh the costs.
Private data only benefits a few users. If resources are getting cheaper, they should have no problem paying for their own private storage.
I agree hard drives have gotten cheaper. But my ISP and electricity bill has not. I has gotten more expensive with higher bandwith and electricity demands.

Pay contributors directly & How much do you earn?

100% Agree.
I love the idea of my computer working for me. I prefer the term "Vault Farmer" instead of miner.
I already dedicated an external drive for Vault Farming, and plan to add more farms (external drives) as time goes on.
These external drives are like plots of farm land, where others can "plant" data. The SAFE network pays me safecoin for using my farm land.

Pay developers on measured value & Let the network measure the value

If this kind of automatic revenue system works, it would be a brilliant new way for open source business models.
Coming for a Business System Analyst background, I support whatever works. Let's throw it out there and see what happens.
Also agree with the "additional advantages" more speed is definitely preferred.
If data is classified between public and private, why not have public data treated with (network wide POR), and private data on the (token based POR) model?
This would mean private data is much slower, but it also means resources are more dedicated for public data, right?

A problem we need to solve in any case & Fall back position

Old unused data is a reality, and should be archived/cleaned. My solution was to prioritize public over private. But I support the project either way.

The reason I believe storage will not exceed demand is because production supply follows demand. Example: 10 years ago, most software only required X amount of MB hard drive space. Now they require X amount of GB of space. Naturally, companies produced larger hard drives to meet that demand. Eventually, there will be apps requiring X amount of TB drive space, GB bandwith, and consume a lot more electricity. I hope I'm wrong about this trend. Maybe we will discover free energy?

Anything can happen :)

[David Irvine]

On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 1:36 PM, Mark Hughes <mrh...@markhughes.com> wrote:

The loop is incomplete - DavidI: you are not clear on where you see the value of SafeCoin arising - you mention developers having the option to charge. Is that your proposal? If so, we must ask if it is sufficient in the long term, and how we can bootstrap it. 

The will be some value simply through people's perception (as in speculators / as in bitcoin) at least to kick it off, but that is risky, and may not be sustainable, because other coins will no doubt be developed to provide highly optimised solutions to real world use cases, which will sideline coins which have no real world function, or are sufficiently less suitable. So there has to be something unique about SafeCoin IMO. What is it? 

Ah I should have made that more clear. The value of safecoin will be set by the market via trade for goods and services. It should have no bearing on costs of resources, unless the whole thing fails and it becomes a resource cost.  An initial sale of some safecoin will set the initial value and from there trade will keep the value set.

[Mark Hughes]

-------- Original message --------
From: David Irvine <david....@maidsafe.net>
Date: 02/04/2014 14:31 (GMT+00:00)
To: maidsafe-d...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [maidsafe-development] Re: Very much extreme brainstorming, free everything for everyone!

That's not answering my question, which obviously isn't clear either! :-)

I understand SafeCoin can be traded, but it has no function, no unique purpose, unless the are things people want, and must use it to buy. So my question was looking for clarity about the goods and services.

You said the needed to be a loop. My question is, how and on what, do people (miners, users, developers) spend SafeCoin, in order for it to get back into the network, and subsequently paid to miners? 

Is this solely via charges made by app developers to their app users?

Note, we need to be careful that app developers don't just charge users in fiat currency (potentially easier for both?), and leave MaidSafe with a impossibly large enforcement problem. For this to work, it needs to be easier for the developer-app-user combo to operate in SafeCoin than in fiat currency. 

Mark

--

David Irvine

maidsafe.net 
twitter: @metaquestions

blog:  http://metaquestions.me

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[David Irvine]

On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 2:46 PM, Mark Hughes <mrh...@markhughes.com> wrote:

You said the needed to be a loop. My question is, how and on what, do people (miners, users, developers) spend SafeCoin, in order for it to get back into the network, and subsequently paid to miners?

Ah got it. I see the miners as mining for a very long time (I think we should use farmers for this term, although the community know miners).  This is likely 10 years or so. I think then we should really look at increasing the quantity algorithmically of safecoin at a rate as defined by population growth etc. Or we use a more sophisticated calculation with infinity as the upper bound (i.e. never get to full distribution, but increase complexity). If we add that with recycled safecoin via several methods then I think we can win this one. 

if the farming was calculated on a Gompertz type function then perhaps this can even be implemented day one (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gompertz_curve) as long as we gor the rate correct or indeed allow dynamic calculation.  We could then choose to allow further increases in number of coin or have the network adjust the mining rate. This assumes increase in coin value in the outside world. This can also allow the network to increase reward if space gets low etc. 

Not ignoring the possibility of commercial developers paying a % fee and that amount of safecoin being recycled in the network for mining etc. I think as a community we can come up with many safecoin recycle mechanisms. There is always the possibility of amining fee for use of the network. So if we did implement a scheme where folk can charge for access to data, then a % is charged and recycled automatically, this is a pretty nice mechanism again as it is calculable and can be related to value of data store up front. 

My feeling is these parts are not as tough to calculate really. I hear you about fiat etc. We have a plan for enforcement. We are in talks with CODA about a scheme here for all app developers to make use of. 

On another note, we have had a very exciting conversation (first of many) with an early Kazaa / Skype founder member who loves the whole thing. On rewarding contributors they had to rely on folk wanting the network to work (the higher specced skype nodes that relayed etc. or seed type kazaa nodes). This approach was successful and a similar at kazaa, the fact we reward via cash I think takes this a step further. This can be a hugely successful opportunity I think, Best of all this one is a real community effort and reward mechanism. 

[Mark Hughes]

David, 

I feel unsatisfied by this - it's still vague in respect of what I'm after so would like us to try and clarify this. 

You seem to be saying the ways SafeCoin can be given value are:

a) in its own right, in the real world (similar to bitcoin), independent of its usefulness my relation to SAFE

b) as a fee (commission on app revenue) charged to developers of apps which generated revenue for the developer

c) as a fee charged for use of network services (to developers, to users of MaidSafe apps) - I'm not sure how this fits with "free for everyone", or if you have services in mind

d) for lots of things it will be easy for us to think up - well let's think some up if it's so easy, or it starts to look a bit like snake oil don't you think? 

Are the above correct? Anything I've missed? 

Do you see what I'm after? Broad brush is good up to a point, it's important, and particularly for brainstorming which I know is your focus just now. I am though concerned about the lack of concrete ideas for us to evaluate and refine in this critical aspect of the ecosystem. 

Mark

--

My Services & Blog:

http://theWebalyst.com 

Sent from mobile - apols for autoccorrrct & brevit ;-)

-------- Original message --------
From: David Irvine <david....@maidsafe.net>
Date: 02/04/2014 15:05 (GMT+00:00)
To: maidsafe-d...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [maidsafe-development] Re: Very much extreme brainstorming, free everything for everyone!

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[David Yamanaka]

On Wednesday, April 2, 2014 7:21:38 AM UTC-6, Mark Hughes wrote:

Last email fired prematurely! This one completes... 

I'm not against separating along public/private but not sure it makes sense. It ignores:

- the immense value of free private secure storage for end users, which is value for the network since it will be nothing without mass appeal to *these* users. Solution: first xxxGB private data in free?

If we assume "free private storage" is the main appeal for mass adoption, then we have already lost to corporate monopoly. They already provide this service. Anyone can self encrypt before uploading to cloud storage. The SAFE Network offers a free "decentralized internet." This is the main appeal for mass adoption. We still offer, free xxxGB private storage as an amenity.
 

- the split between commercial and non-commercial public data. E.g. Wikipedia v Facebook, or Oracle's website etc. Do we want Oracle riding free while Nelson in Kalunda village pays to store his private woring notes on curing cancer?

How would the SAFE network distinguish between commercial and non-commercial?
As soon as Nelson discovers the cure, he can to post it publicly without storage limitations. Or he can even post his theories publicly.

I've always seen this as the other way around. Back in the eighties I foolishly said to a much brighter software developer colleague "soon computers will have vastly more disk and memory space than we'll ever be able to use". He, quite correctly pointed out that software expands to use the resources available, and this may be one reason he ended up head of cloud services at Netflix, and me enjoying life off-grid grid on a boat! :-)

Your friend is correct, about software expanding to use max resources available. However, the way production works is based on demand. Toyota Motor Corp makes X amount of cars each year, based on their potential sales calculation. They could easily produce more cars than is needed, but they don't. Same thing happens with hard drives. Companies could produce drives in excess of 4TB. But they won't until demand hits critical levels where it becomes profitable to do so. Just like Bitcoin with GPUs, when the SAFE network reaches adoption, there will be a surge in hard drive demand. Price levels will spike, and then you see many new hard drives hit the market with space beyond 4TB.

[David Irvine]

On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 3:42 PM, Mark Hughes <mrh...@markhughes.com> wrote:

David, 

I feel unsatisfied by this - it's still vague in respect of what I'm after so would like us to try and clarify this. 

Sorry Mark, fundamentally I mean treat our miners (farmers) as bitcoin miners, let them provide all the resource in payment for safecoin. 

You seem to be saying the ways SafeCoin can be given value are:

a) in its own right, in the real world (similar to bitcoin), independent of its usefulness my relation to SAFE

Yes 

b) as a fee (commission on app revenue) charged to developers of apps which generated revenue for the developer

I really mean turn app developers into farmers in this case. They drive adoption by their effort and get safecoin in return. They have no real effect on value though, that is all market. 

c) as a fee charged for use of network services (to developers, to users of MaidSafe apps) - I'm not sure how this fits with "free for everyone", or if you have services in mind

I mean by this these are all options, I don't see devs getting charged, but instead earning. I see there may be some apps that can implement paid view type services or pay to vote type services. I do not think the network should implement any of that though, it's for the app developers to decide on it. 

d) for lots of things it will be easy for us to think up - well let's think some up if it's so easy, or it starts to look a bit like snake oil don't you think? 

I am not sure, perhaps I have mentioned to many options for the future and it's mixed in with the current model That is pay miners, pay app developers and the rest is for developers to implement.  

Are the above correct? Anything I've missed? 

Maybe something I have not conveyed well enough perhaps. 

Do you see what I'm after? Broad brush is good up to a point, it's important, and particularly for brainstorming which I know is your focus just now. I am though concerned about the lack of concrete ideas for us to evaluate and refine in this critical aspect of the ecosystem. 

Yes I try to not broad brush our part, the current implementation. That is covered by the mining algorithm and papers. The broad brush is meant for what's possible in the future. The number of services and models are huge, I just mentioned some as examples and should have been more clear about that. 

I do think this will all evolve over time, but never in any manner that denies or forces payment to anyone at the network level. So fundamental services will always be free, I do think there will be many commercial models too. These may include paywalls etc. 

If everyone in the world had safecoin then there are options for global payments for services that are calculated in line with network services, but I see that as decades away and maybe in a resource based society model where cash is a calculation of value of services. I let myself drift there ocassionally and should not. 

It's a sign of too many meetings and not enough time to consider what I write as well as I should perhaps/ 

[Mark Hughes]

Hi David, 

Thanks for persevering. You've pretty well shot away all the ways I speculated might cause people to see value in acquiring SafeCoin, except item a) i.e. as a rival to bitcoin and other crypto currencies. 

To rely on a) makes no sense to me. For miners to see value in receiving SafeCoin, there must be things that can be bought for it that are not more easily available with other currencies. 

People hold bitcoin for convenience to buy stuff, for special transactions (either easier, our quicker than other methods), to speculate, as a value store, and for laundering. There is stuff you can only do with bitcoin ATM. 

SafeCoin is in no position to compete in these areas, and if it is our intention that these are its USP, we need to design for this, but we're not. 

I don't advise that approach, because any such currency is vulnerable, including bitcoin, because bitcoin's strengths are not grounded in anything unique to bitcoin. Bitcoin's strengths are its widespread adoption and it's trusted brand. Yet it has severe weaknesses, or at least limitations, which could prove fatal, or at least very damaging. 

If SafeCoin is just another crypto currency, and not even designed to beat other crypto currencies, and it's only USP is "you can earn it by selling resources to SAFE (mining)" but you can't buy anything with it except bitcoin et al,  then I think we have a problem, a fatal Achilles heel. 

In this scenario why will people hold it? Only for speculation, which means its a bubble built on nothing, and unless it becomes a premier crypto-currency, it will probably crash with disastrous effects on SAFE. 

If there are things people need and can only be bought with SafeCoin, the problem goes away, and if these are things that return SafeCoin to the network, the loop is closed and we can have a balanced SafeCoin economy, which means we can have long term stability, and SAFE becomes sustainable. 

Without this, SafeCoin value can grow for a time, because of speculation, leading people to hold it rather than convert to bitcoin or real world goods. But at some point this bursts like a speculative bubble. 

If too many people are speculative hoarders, and right now it looks like we haven't put forward *any* other reasons for SafeCoin having value, a price crash will be inevitable and overnight, commercial mining will become uneconomic. We seem to be gambling that by that time we won't need those miners, and that SAFE will withstand the shock of losing all it's commercial miners very rapidly. 

This is why in believe we need more reasons for people to hold SafeCoin than because the price is rising due to network growth. We need people to want to hold it because it's needed to buy useful services on the network, and to complete the loop some of that currency needs to be returned to the network through payments direct to the network (for services), or in commission paid by developers on fees they charge their users. This enables network income and outgoings to balance, and creates an inherent stability, not dependent on commercial growth without price shocks. 

Right now I have no idea what someone can use SafeCoin for, other than speculation. I can think of things, but they all either seem to have been discarded, or we're trying to discard them. 

David. Do you believe we can succeed without SafeCoin being the only way to buy certain services?

If so, why!? 

If not, what do you envisage these services will be, and who will be buying them? 

Mark

--

My Services & Blog:

http://theWebalyst.com 

Sent from mobile - apols for autoccorrrct & brevit ;-)

-------- Original message --------
From: David Irvine <david....@maidsafe.net>
Date: 02/04/2014 18:52 (GMT+00:00)
To: maidsafe-d...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [maidsafe-development] Re: Very much extreme brainstorming, free everything for everyone!

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[David Irvine]

On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 8:12 PM, Mark Hughes <mrh...@markhughes.com> wrote:

David. Do you believe we can succeed without SafeCoin being the only way to buy certain services?

If so, why!? 

I think this is the key point Mark. I feel safecoin will be a value transfer like bitcoin, but much more. The strength will be in it's ability to be tied in with data services. If the SAFE network was able to show many uses for safecoin then it adds to the whole eco system. So the examples of safecoin being a transfer of votes, likes, reading content etc. are all the mechanisms I see for safecoin. the (foreseeable) value though is a market driven thing if you look at how much is a safecoin worth in dollars etc. 

I would hope that we can have people who live, earn and develop using purely safecoin. The amount each action is rewarded in safecoin will alter with $ cost until a saturation point, at that time I see people living on it completely. 

So yes in some ways a bitcoin competitor in the early days, but as an enabler to a plethora of digital services seems obvious. These services will include contracts for work outside the digital realm, like smart property type devices etc. but that is all much later. 

Initially a mechanism to pay miners is great, then as apps develop we should see much more interesting ways safecoin is used. I think it is a matter of application availability and market opportunities that will be the fine balance we need to make. 

In essence safecoin should be the only way to purchase these services on the SAFE network, although exchanges will happen. The re-cycling is the killer app in this case and I think the search for that type of application is important. 

In terms of crypto purchases, I think very soon all bitcoin outlets will be able to convert any cryptocurrency. the Master protocol guys are closing this gap quickly. bitcoin will break the water for all crypto currencies in terms of exchange I think and safecoin will slot in there nicely. When speed, efficiency and anonymity are required then safecoin is great. 

[Mark Hughes]

-------- Original message --------
From: David Irvine <david....@maidsafe.net>
Date: 02/04/2014 21:23 (GMT+00:00)
To: maidsafe-d...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [maidsafe-development] Re: Very much extreme brainstorming, free everything for everyone!

On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 8:12 PM, Mark Hughes <mrh...@markhughes.com> wrote:

David. Do you believe we can succeed without SafeCoin being the only way to buy certain services?

If so, why!? 

> I think this is the key point Mark. I feel safecoin will be a value transfer like bitcoin, but much more. The strength will be in it's ability to be tied in with data services. If the SAFE network was able to show many uses for safecoin then it adds to the whole eco system. 

> So the examples of safecoin being a transfer of votes, likes, reading content etc. are all the mechanisms I see for safecoin. the (foreseeable) value though is a market driven thing if you look at how much is a safecoin worth in dollars etc. 

OK, some examples, good. This is what I'm looking for. Without the, you won't have your tie in, and fate I painted awaits. 

This is so important that I think we need to have a credible set of examples which are feasible and consistent with the other things we're brainstorming. 

[snip]

> In essence safecoin should be the only way to purchase these services on the SAFE network, although exchanges will happen. The re-cycling is the killer app in this case and I think the search for that type of application is important. 

Agreed then, but this won't happen unless we make it happen, and if we rely on coercion the task will be unmanageable, so we need to at least make this the easiest way, if not the only, way to charge for SAFE apps. 

> When speed, efficiency and anonymity are required then safecoin is great. 

Is this so? Is there an implementation spec or whitepaper? 

Mark

[David Irvine]

On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 9:56 PM, Mark Hughes <mrh...@markhughes.com> wrote:

OK, some examples, good. This is what I'm looking for. Without the, you won't have your tie in, and fate I painted awaits. 

This is so important that I think we need to have a credible set of examples which are feasible and consistent with the other things we're brainstorming. 

I think we can create several threads for each example, but I do not think we can foresee what developers will do and make available. I have some ideas, but this community is way more than me for sure. I am glad about that.  

[snip]

> In essence safecoin should be the only way to purchase these services on the SAFE network, although exchanges will happen. The re-cycling is the killer app in this case and I think the search for that type of application is important. 

Agreed then, but this won't happen unless we make it happen, and if we rely on coercion the task will be unmanageable, so we need to at least make this the easiest way, if not the only, way to charge for SAFE apps. 

I agree, I also think safecoin will be the only way as time goes by. This is where I think a very strong community will help, if the first app was a voting system then this would be much easier.  

> When speed, efficiency and anonymity are required then safecoin is great. 

Is this so? Is there an implementation spec or whitepaper? 

Not so much, I can try and explain more in another blog post. Essentially as safecoins are in themselves digital assets, then the transfer will be a network atomic digitally signed update to a coin. Each coin will have previous owner who signs the current owner. This means that to prove coins you will have to give the addresses to a person, they can confirm you own the coin. To transfer it you (the current owner) can become the previous owner and sign the new owner. In this way we preserve anonymity, but importantly the process of the signature si fast, therefor signing over a coin will be anonymised to reveal only the previous owner and fast as each coin (bit of data) is signed and stored (via a PUT request signed by the current owner). In that way we do not wait for a chain of hash proofs. The transaction is very fast and amortised across the network.

Copy of a coin is useless as only connected nodes can confirm a coin by asking the network for it. This prevents double spend (why atomic transactions are important), which is the key issue in  crypto currency. Any differences are easily resolved as each coin will have a transaction number (increment ++trans_num). 

there is a good bit more., I will try and do a full paper on this.  Essentially it is a very fast anonymous and simple operation. If a node is internet connected it can also tie in with the bitcoin blockchain allowing currency conversion between crypto currencies. It is likley this is the case for outlets who whish to confirm transacitons. 

Each coin is splittable 10^8 and each part is contained in a single (in terms of address) network location, so change is very fast as well. 

We will do a full and detailed  paper, but think of safecoin as a digitally signed atomically updated piece of data. The type is specific to allow transaction handling rules are enforced, but apart from that it is as safe as data itself. This is the distributed block chain mechanism which is not simple as their is no chain :-) I hope that helps a bit, don't stop if it does not, it's important for everyone to fully get as much as possible regarding these things.  

[trak...@gmail.com]

> I did a blog post on this idea to try and gather more feedback. It may help us to crack this one. I think there is a lot of value in looking a bit deeper at what we can achieve and how.  http://metaquestions.me/2014/04/02/project-safe-is-this-the-fair-business-model-at-last/ I hope it inspires more comments as I think we are not too far away from something amazing here. I know I am optimistic though :-)

David, I wanted to reply to this blog post point directly.

I think it is an amazing idea to be able to reward developers who have a popular download. I thought this may be too open to abuse, but your blog highlights potential solutions to this.

I would worry about people creating scripts which generate new accounts (perhaps even distributed botnets), then hit the pages. However, if the network caches popular requests and these don't contribute to the payment, I can see how this could be avoided. It could be a fine line to tune between a popular app and a spammed app though.

Importantly, rewarding open source software development would be a wonderful thing though. The appeal of binaries to monopolise/seek rent on the software could be countered by such an approach. Open source software is already a preference for many, but sustaining the business model isn't easy and this would help enormously.

Regarding the free access part though; the circuit still doesn't quite complete for me. Instead of having two parties - a buyer and a seller (of storage) - we have three parties - a buyer, a seller and a user.

To explain, if a vault sells storage and users buy storage, the loop is closed. The buyer needs Safecoin to buy storage and the seller has a market for Safecoin (as there are future buyers).

If the users do not need to buy storage, what value is being exchanged in order to give Safecoin direct utility value? The storage providers may be given Safecoin by the SAFE network, but where is the demand for Safecoins to be *spent*? If users don't need them to buy storage and the network is the supplier, rather than the consumer of Safecoins, there doesn't seem to be a direct utility market for Safecoins.

Ofc, this hasn't stopped Bitcoin being successful (so far, at least!). People can accept Safecoin for their properties which lend themselves to being a good money (anonymous, fast to transact, fungible etc). However, *providing* a market which is *key* to providing storage would seem like a great way of bootstrapping a stable currency from day one.

They say that taxation (threats of jail time) provide fiat money with value. However, there is still and underlying *service* which is (should!) be provided in exchange for said taxation. If you have a voluntary service, you cut out the threats/jail time, but still complete the loop between buyers and sellers.

I'm still under the impression that giving access for free would be bad for the network, unless this loop can be closed. Allowing the market to drive down the cost as much as possible, with altruism then filling the gap, would seem like a more sustainable position. Maybe giving away *some* free storage would fit with this, but when there are underlying costs, there needs to be a way to pay for these for it to be sustainable.

[David Irvine]

On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 1:20 PM, <trak...@gmail.com> wrote:

Regarding the free access part though; the circuit still doesn't quite complete for me. Instead of having two parties - a buyer and a seller (of storage) - we have three parties - a buyer, a seller and a user.

Excellent mail, I think this is similar to Marks well made points and my sluggish and incoherent answers. This is one of my weaknesses, it takes me ages to describe what I see. 

I think of the whole system like this: 

We have Farmers (miners/vaults)

We have Builders (app developers)

We have users, these users use the services, but importantly provide most of the raw materials the builders require. The users themselves for a separate marketplace as well, producing and consuming information. So users become, providers and consumers (communities/Bloggers/info providers etc.) with each other providing another eco system of information generation and checking (consumers can show valued in the info people build). Many of their activity will be on the things the Builders have provided.

the users perform another important function and that is increasing the value of safecoin in the marketplace. Just like bitcoin in many ways.

The builders will, in the future build things on top of the raw materials, so say e.g. word processors,  accounting systems, knowledge manipulation devices (research based tools)  etc. The builders can be compensated for this activity. This part seems easy. 

Further in the future, (now safecoin is ubiquitous and everyone has some) The can be builders who build new forms of data that require paid access, regardless of how it was retrieved.   Maybe these are high quality research or something, but the payment is incredibly tiny. It's a model that cannot be ignored I think. So take this option a little further:

1: A band record a song and release it, making it widely available, free of charge. 

2: A file studio release a movie. again as above.

We have some great options here. Every access of the chunks carries a tiny (I mean tiny in these cases, millionths of a cent or similar, so a large movie may cost .5 cents to watch or something).  Instant payment of expensive to produce information, documentaries, studies and good entertainment gets a home and business model. Band->people (paid) no middleman, decentralisation)

Or, these same people have to create (Build) and app that allows people to like the content (above data in the app layer). Each like constitutes a payment. This may a model that can be made network wide, but initially it seems this would require absorbing the infor via a Builders application, so still avoidable ?

People could overdraft themselves and create many id's to watch or consume entertainment etc. but that's a PITA, but if people charge too much it's not. 

I think scratching ideas like this with such a system could be pretty amazing, I feel I have not started to even try and understand the possibilities here. 

[trak...@gmail.com]

On Thursday, 3 April 2014 15:11:30 UTC+1, David Irvine wrote:
>
> Excellent mail, I think this is similar to Marks well made points and my sluggish and incoherent answers. This is one of my weaknesses, it takes me ages to describe what I see. 
>
>
>
>
> I think of the whole system like this: 
>
>
> We have Farmers (miners/vaults)
> We have Builders (app developers)
>
>
> We have users, these users use the services, but importantly provide most of the raw materials the builders require. The users themselves for a separate marketplace as well, producing and consuming information. So users become, providers and consumers (communities/Bloggers/info providers etc.) with each other providing another eco system of information generation and checking (consumers can show valued in the info people build). Many of their activity will be on the things the Builders have provided.
>
>
>
>
> the users perform another important function and that is increasing the value of safecoin in the marketplace. Just like bitcoin in many ways.
>

Interesting. I like the thought that users contribute to the wealth of information, hence increase the value of the network. In this respect, they are providers and consumers, rather than just the latter. I agree too.

>
>
>
> The builders will, in the future build things on top of the raw materials, so say e.g. word processors,  accounting systems, knowledge manipulation devices (research based tools)  etc. The builders can be compensated for this activity. This part seems easy. 
>
>
>
>
> Further in the future, (now safecoin is ubiquitous and everyone has some) The can be builders who build new forms of data that require paid access, regardless of how it was retrieved.   Maybe these are high quality research or something, but the payment is incredibly tiny. It's a model that cannot be ignored I think. So take this option a little further:
>
>
> 1: A band record a song and release it, making it widely available, free of charge. 
> 2: A file studio release a movie. again as above.
>
>
>
>
> We have some great options here. Every access of the chunks carries a tiny (I mean tiny in these cases, millionths of a cent or similar, so a large movie may cost .5 cents to watch or something).  Instant payment of expensive to produce information, documentaries, studies and good entertainment gets a home and business model. Band->people (paid) no middleman, decentralisation)
>
>
>
>
> Or, these same people have to create (Build) and app that allows people to like the content (above data in the app layer). Each like constitutes a payment. This may a model that can be made network wide, but initially it seems this would require absorbing the infor via a Builders application, so still avoidable ?
>
>
>
>
> People could overdraft themselves and create many id's to watch or consume entertainment etc. but that's a PITA, but if people charge too much it's not. 
>
>
>
>
> I think scratching ideas like this with such a system could be pretty amazing, I feel I have not started to even try and understand the possibilities here. 
>

I think these are very good and relevant points.

Kevin Spacey gave a good speech relating to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0ukYf_xvgc

In short, Netflix is leading the way with a similar model. Instead of lots of investment pushed into pilots, most of which are scrapped, just so that a small percentage can be pushed into profit... you have lots of indie productions, without the huge associated overhead costs.

Most small bands would probably gnaw your arm off for a penny per view of a video. Most people watching/listening wouldn't care if it cost a penny per view, not only because it isn't much to them, but also because they want to repay the artist in some way too.

I can imagine all sorts of digitised material could benefit from this. From movies, through podcasts, through radio, through software. Ofc, there is always the point that some things take more time to turn into a block of data than others - value is always subjective - but even a basic revenue stream would be a big advancement from where we are now.

Perhaps there could be a weighting, based on what people thought something was worth too? I've no idea how it could be achieved, but I'm sure some would think pictures of dancing dogs may be funny, but ultimately cheap to make. They may also realise that a top class film or some enterprise level software is expensive to make.

Failing that, we still have crowd funding, but without many of the overheads - even the overhead of Bitcoin style mining. The less waste we have, the more value we retrieve.

Finaly, we still have the traditional models available. If funding is sufficient for blockbuster films, then they can still use the old models. However, times are changing and I suspect Netflix (the fastest growing stock last year, IIRC) are leading the way, just as (ultimately) Apple did with the music industry.

The SAFE network has the potential to provide instant, anonymous, nano payments, at the protocol level. This would take the progress that Bitcoin has made and multiply it massively.

[David Yamanaka]

+1

If anyone is familiar with movie Tron, this feels similar to the "grid" which is our version of the SAFE Network.

[Bob Marin]

What if you only charged for non-duplicated content?

If you make a distinction between duplicated and non-duplicated content and also between public and private content then you can choose which content you want to charge Safecoins for.

Types:

Public  - content that is free to propagate through the network for everybody to use  => free

Private - content that is only view-able by the vault owner     => depends if data deduplication is possible

Non-duplicated - content that is original and doesn't exist in the network(can't use data deduplication for) => the only type of content that you charge for

Duplicated - content that exist on the network and can easily be deduplicated => free

Of course you could easily set a high enough limit of, for instance 500 gigs, so that the only users who would need that kind of storage would be some kind of professionals (photographers, data scientists, programmers, filmmakers etc.)

Also, I wouldn't be surprised if these users would be more then happy to pay for storage knowing that these funds would go directly to making the network healthier and secure.

 

I this case everybody could store movies, shows, music, games etc that are popular and already exist on the SAFE network in unlimited quantities, but if you want to use it for your business storage you would have to pay with Safecoins. 

[Mark Hughes]

On 02/04/2014 22:13, David Irvine wrote:

On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 9:56 PM, Mark Hughes <mrh...@markhughes.com> wrote:

OK, some examples, good. This is what I'm looking for. Without the, you won't have your tie in, and fate I painted awaits. 

This is so important that I think we need to have a credible set of examples which are feasible and consistent with the other things we're brainstorming. 

I think we can create several threads for each example, but I do not think we can foresee what developers will do and make available. I have some ideas, but this community is way more than me for sure. I am glad about that. 

Ideas + threads sounds great. I understand that we want others to come up with ideas and let them fly. My concern is not to tie down all the possibilties, but to ensure their are viable opportunities.

[snip]

> In essence safecoin should be the only way to purchase these services on the SAFE network, although exchanges will happen. The re-cycling is the killer app in this case and I think the search for that type of application is important. 

Agreed then, but this won't happen unless we make it happen, and if we rely on coercion the task will be unmanageable, so we need to at least make this the easiest way, if not the only, way to charge for SAFE apps. 

I agree, I also think safecoin will be the only way as time goes by. This is where I think a very strong community will help, if the first app was a voting system then this would be much easier.

I don't know what you have in mind - starting to document some of these ideas (even just briefly as you have for SafeCoin below) would help me a lot, and at some point we can elaborate them within the evolving landscape (in those "threads").

 

> When speed, efficiency and anonymity are required then safecoin is great. 

Is this so? Is there an implementation spec or whitepaper? 

Not so much, I can try and explain more in another blog post. Essentially as safecoins are in themselves digital assets, then the transfer will be a network atomic digitally signed update to a coin. Each coin will have previous owner who signs the current owner. This means that to prove coins you will have to give the addresses to a person, they can confirm you own the coin. To transfer it you (the current owner) can become the previous owner and sign the new owner. In this way we preserve anonymity, but importantly the process of the signature si fast, therefor signing over a coin will be anonymised to reveal only the previous owner and fast as each coin (bit of data) is signed and stored (via a PUT request signed by the current owner). In that way we do not wait for a chain of hash proofs. The transaction is very fast and amortised across the network.

Copy of a coin is useless as only connected nodes can confirm a coin by asking the network for it. This prevents double spend (why atomic transactions are important), which is the key issue in  crypto currency. Any differences are easily resolved as each coin will have a transaction number (increment ++trans_num). 

there is a good bit more., I will try and do a full paper on this.  Essentially it is a very fast anonymous and simple operation. If a node is internet connected it can also tie in with the bitcoin blockchain allowing currency conversion between crypto currencies. It is likley this is the case for outlets who whish to confirm transacitons. 

Each coin is splittable 10^8 and each part is contained in a single (in terms of address) network location, so change is very fast as well. 

We will do a full and detailed  paper, but think of safecoin as a digitally signed atomically updated piece of data. The type is specific to allow transaction handling rules are enforced, but apart from that it is as safe as data itself. This is the distributed block chain mechanism which is not simple as their is no chain :-) I hope that helps a bit, don't stop if it does not, it's important for everyone to fully get as much as possible regarding these things.  

Ok, a paper would be good, but you have said enough for me to understand that what you have in mind could be both a real advance on bitcoin (and all the others currently out there), and tied to SAFE. So long as it flies! Thanks for this, its a great help.

Mark

[krne...@gmail.com]

On Thursday, March 27, 2014 11:09:23 PM UTC+1, Christopher Brandt wrote:

One possible solution to the pay vaults for storage over time could be paying for data served, rather than stored.

Just a quick thought related to this: If Vaults are paid to serve data then perhaps it would be benificial to have varying rates depending on how rare/old the data is. This could create a extra incentive to accommodate infrequently accessed data as the vault earns more to serve it.

[David Irvine]

On Sun, Apr 6, 2014 at 12:36 AM, <krne...@gmail.com> wrote:

Just a quick thought related to this: If Vaults are paid to serve data then perhaps it would be benificial to have varying rates depending on how rare/old the data is. This could create a extra incentive to accommodate infrequently accessed data as the vault earns more to serve it.

I agree, it may end up that way. I think we will eventually be able to allow people to add data with a wallet address built in for micro payments etc. So the person who Gets->Data pays a tiny cost to do so. The network recycles part of that cost and the publisher gets the rest. This recycle is just to further incentivise miners etc. I think it's a future thing, but could prove really substantial and allow the 1-2% increase in safecoin availability as time goes by. This is back to movies and music being made available etc. Pay the artists and the Farmers and Builders for the resources, applications and content all in one easy to use system that's automatic and requires no middle men.