MaidSafe IPO on Mastercoin

[toast]

Profits from mining poola are already decentralized, physical control over the hardware always gives power unless it is a pos variant.

Also what you are saying about VMs doesn't make sense givem that theoretically every mining algorithm is only profitable on specialized hardware

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk

[luckybit]

I will make a prediction and you can all wait to see if it comes true.

The first killer app for MaidSafe will be a decentralized autonomous cloud mining app.

They'll probably make us use our Safe tokens to buy shares and then mine whatever we want from the cloud. The mining operation would scale up dramatically faster. It could host our wallets in the cloud, connect to our Bitcoin address for payout. It could mine anything and do it as hosted mining.

This app alone would guarantee the success of Safecoin in my opinion. If enough of these sorts of decentralized apps exist then they'll replace mining pools pretty quickly, as well as the highly centralized mining cartel as we currently know it.

So I'll be the first to predict that MaidSafe will disrupt the whole Proof of Work culture and community. If it's easy enough to build apps maybe some Bitshares related apps would be really cool because MaidSafe seems to do everything Ethereum is intending to do.
 

Enlighten us why do you think so?

When I asked you to enlighten us, I meant - tell us more about 'The first killer app for MaidSafe will be a decentralized autonomous cloud mining app' and why/how 'They'll probably make us use our Safe tokens to buy shares and then mine whatever we want from the cloud.'

That is just something I predict will be made because that's the most obvious killer app. Mining could be decentralized, there would be no need for mining pools, but on the other hand the infrastructure for mining will still be centralized. What mining in the cloud does is it decentralizes the profits which is exactly what we all really mean when we talk about decentralization.

Hosted mining attempts to accomplish this but they have to charge some kind of hosting fee. MaidSafe would allow you to mine anything from cryptocurrency, to protein folding, to SETI at home. The people hosting would get paid in Safecoins while the people who get the payouts could get paid in whatever cryptocoin they want.

So this would mean we could set up a cloud mining decentralized autonomous application, let any of us mine anything(BOINC, SETI, any altcoin, anything scientific) and set the payout to be in Bitshares for example.

We would have no risk of the cloud mining decentralized autonomous application getting hacked because there is no central server. It cannot be DDOSed.

All of this would be possible through virtualization. A virtual machine could simulate any hardware you want to mine with. You could mine with anything provided that you have the underlying computing power and virtual machine to do it.

So in some ways it's got the potential to bring a golden age of mining but in other ways it could result in some sort of centralization. What do you think will happen? I'm not the only one who can speculate on this because you have good ideas as well.

 

[Empirical1]

Empirical1, you dream will come true only if we all have optical fiber connection to the internet and make sure the hard disk industry is able to handle the IO that is 1000times faster than we are having now.

Bytemaster doesn't seem to think there will be that much storage demand above what individuals can reciprocate from their own storage, and I don't have much else to go on.  If that's the case the market could be a lot smaller than Dropbox and there won't be much SafeCoin transactional volume (Which 'Power of Volume' shares that I see as part of the future, partly derive there value from.)

So I would suggest they create a storage market/exchange.  where the space you provide gets automatically sold 'at the market', (A $/BTC price but paid paid in SafeCoins) you can either get back 98% of the sale price or use it to get  98% of the space you provided on the MaidSafe Network. So that way you'd have MASSIVE transactional SafeCoin demand and also generate 1/2% dividends for Safecoin holders for every bit of storage that is used on the network.  (It would still be free to users except for the fact that you only get to use 98% of the space you provide on the network. I doubt people would miss 1/2% of that space so it would be a fair trade-off & make SafeCoins very valuable, I think.)

  Thanks. I have a very limited understanding of the technical requirements of my ideas. As a result I'm used to most of them being impractical or not do-able.  (They often have much more basic (economic) flaws than that, I just like to put them out there.)

[sfinder]

Empirical1, you dream will come true only if we all have optical fiber connection to the internet and make sure the hard disk industry is able to handle the IO that is 1000times faster than we are having now.

Bytemaster doesn't seem to think there will be that much storage demand above what individuals can reciprocate from their own storage, and I don't have much else to go on.  If that's the case the market could be a lot smaller than Dropbox and there won't be much SafeCoin transactional volume (Which 'Power of Volume' shares that I see as part of the future, partly derive there value from.)

So I would suggest they create a storage market/exchange.  where the space you provide gets automatically sold 'at the market', (A $/BTC price but paid paid in SafeCoins) you can either get back 98% of the sale price or use it to get  98% of the space you provided on the MaidSafe Network. So that way you'd have MASSIVE transactional SafeCoin demand and also generate 1/2% dividends for Safecoin holders for every bit of storage that is used on the network.  (It would still be free to users except for the fact that you only get to use 98% of the space you provide on the network. I doubt people would miss 1/2% of that space so it would be a fair trade-off & make SafeCoins very valuable, I think.)

[Empirical1]

The way MaidSafe's economic model appears to work is we had an IPO where we bought Safecoins which are credit tokens. These tokens were a presale of Proof of Resource allocation.

Proof of Resource for storage space would be a situation where the farmer gives a certain amount of storage space to the network and they would be paid in Safecoins from people who don't have any storage space to give. People who don't have Safecoins will have to give to receive and by reciprocity they would have double the storage space (I think this is how it's supposed to work).

If you have Safecoins then you likely have a lifetime supply of storage space. Everyone else will have to provide storage space to the network in order to receive storage space. As a result these Safecoins will become the main way that people buy storage space.

Here is the quote from the whitepaper to back up what I'm saying
https://github.com/maidsafe/Whitepapers/blob/master/Project-Safe.md

5. Economic System With Two Types Of Token

P.O.R is proposed in order to facilitate the exchange of storage space on the SAFE network. However, as it doesn't have a predictable cap number, it may not be considered a genuine virtual currency. To provide a more robust form of exchange, MaidSafe proposes a token system that is totally independent of P.O.R, called safecoin. Safecoin will have a predicatable cap and will be injected into network using the storage space related mining procedure.

A bridge (converting rate) between P.O.R and safecoin can be established by the market solely. With third party upper layer broker applications, it will be possible to use safecoin to buy P.O.R or vice versa (user_A gives safecoin to user_B in exchange for user_B's P.O.R). It is expected that the per unit value of P.O.R will keep decreasing, while the per unit value of safecoin will continue to rise. In this way, it will be possible to buy more and more P.O.R with one safecoin. Safecoin will only be stored in the Maid Account wallet, this can only be updated by the Maid Manager group.

The value one safecoin represents will be recognised by all peers across the network and outside the network. If the economic system works as intended, safecoin will become a ‘virtual currency’ with the SAFE network being used to complete all transactions. Meanwhile, P.O.R will solely be used for exchanging space allowance among users.

I think I understand the above. Is what I describe below similar to how it should work? ... 

Very simple example:  (I know they issued more coins and they don't use 'terrors' I'm just trying to understand the model.)

MaidSafe issue a 1000 SafeCoins - Storage is priced in another currency but payable in Safecoins.

For every Terabyte of space (or divisions thereof) you commit to MaidSafe you get  1 'Terror' which you can exchange for a  terabyte of storage on the MaidSafe network or you can sell it at the market price. The price people (who want to use more space than they provide) are willing to pay for 1 Terabyte of MaidSafe Storage.

In the first month, people are willing to pay $1 per MaidSafe 'Terror', however the community is small and new, so there is only demand for 1000 additional 'Terrors'. (demand from people who want to use more space than they provide) Given only 1000 SafeCoins exist, each SafeCoin should be worth at least $1.

In the 2nd month, people realise how cool MaidSafe is and the community expands five-fold, as the community is bigger there is both more additional space for sale as well as more demand from people who need additional space. So the market price for a terror may still stay fairly stable at $1 per 'Terror'. However with the 5x bigger user base, that demand may equal 5000 additional 'Terrors'. As there are still only 1000 SafeCoins, but at least $5000 of new demand, each SafeCoin should be worth at least $5.

So the more popular MaidSafe becomes &/or the more people hoard SafeCoins, the more valuable each SafeCoin will become even if the price people are willing to pay for additional storage (in $/BTC terms) stays the same or decreases over time. Is that kind of how their business model works?

Yes this is an accurate description. The more people who discover MaidSafe the more valuable Safecoins will become.

I don't think there is a limit to how much people will pay for storage. I would say people will pay whatever is the cheapest.

The way MaidSafe will take over the industry is they'll be able to provide all the resources cheaper than anywhere else. No one will be able to provide as much storage for as cheap as them. Once people figure this out the demand will grow exponentially.

For example think of all the corporations right now which offer dropbox like service or digital ocean like service? Every single one of them will either have to buy Safecoins or be replaced by a decentralized application. Amazon's entire cloud computing business will be immediately obsolete. They will have to buy Safecoins or be replaced by a decentralized application.

So I predict that the demand for Safecoins will come not from people like us but from big businesses with established companies who will not know how to compete. Google may have to buy Safecoins because they will not be able to offer the same kind of service at some point.

Google makes it's money from ads, but the decentralized Google application running on MaidSafe wouldn't need any ads and if it did have ads it could pay the profit from that out as dividends to its shareholders. Google will have to buy Safecoins just to stay in business over the long term.

So it's like the situation with domain names sorta where all the corporations in the world will be caught be surprised. They'll see that decentralized corporations can be run and beat them in the area of resources. What else can they do except buy Safecoins?

They can mine Safecoins. These big corporations will also make up the majority of the farmers. So it will be big corporations doing most of the farming and most of the buying/trading.

Bytemaster doesn't seem to think there will be that much storage demand above what individuals can reciprocate from their own storage, and I don't have much else to go on.  If that's the case the market could be a lot smaller than Dropbox and there won't be much SafeCoin transactional volume (Which 'Power of Volume' shares that I see as part of the future, partly derive there value from.)

So I would suggest they create a storage market/exchange.  where the space you provide gets automatically sold 'at the market', (A $/BTC price but paid paid in SafeCoins) you can either get back 98% of the sale price or use it to get  98% of the space you provided on the MaidSafe Network. So that way you'd have MASSIVE transactional SafeCoin demand and also generate 1/2% dividends for Safecoin holders for every bit of storage that is used on the network.  (It would still be free to users except for the fact that you only get to use 98% of the space you provide on the network. I doubt people would miss 1/2% of that space so it would be a fair trade-off & make SafeCoins very valuable, I think.)

[tonyk]

I will make a prediction and you can all wait to see if it comes true.

The first killer app for MaidSafe will be a decentralized autonomous cloud mining app.

They'll probably make us use our Safe tokens to buy shares and then mine whatever we want from the cloud. The mining operation would scale up dramatically faster. It could host our wallets in the cloud, connect to our Bitcoin address for payout. It could mine anything and do it as hosted mining.

This app alone would guarantee the success of Safecoin in my opinion. If enough of these sorts of decentralized apps exist then they'll replace mining pools pretty quickly, as well as the highly centralized mining cartel as we currently know it.

So I'll be the first to predict that MaidSafe will disrupt the whole Proof of Work culture and community. If it's easy enough to build apps maybe some Bitshares related apps would be really cool because MaidSafe seems to do everything Ethereum is intending to do.
 

Enlighten us why do you think so?

When I asked you to enlighten us, I meant - tell us more about 'The first killer app for MaidSafe will be a decentralized autonomous cloud mining app' and why/how 'They'll probably make us use our Safe tokens to buy shares and then mine whatever we want from the cloud.'

[luckybit]

It's not like storing your coins in Gox. Read the whitepaper please.

https://github.com/maidsafe/Whitepapers/blob/master/Project-Safe.md

Your harddrive is more likely to fail than the entire MaidSafe network. It's safer to keep your data on MaidSafe than to store it locally. Additionally it could solve the blockchain bloat problem as well.

More opinions stated as fact by luckybit.  Are you done hyping blackcoin and have moved on to safecoins?

Statistics, probability, if you replicate your drive onto several drives then they'd all have to fail for you to lose your information. It reduces the risk of you losing your information to store it offsite. But if you'd rather think I'm making it up, don't listen to me.

Blackcoin when I mentioned the marketing plan was less than 5000 satoshi and now it's 30,000 satoshi weeks later. Now everyone is copying their innovation with multipools. What they were first to do is make Proof of Stake into something which can be mined and that solved the main problem holding back Proof of Stake from replacing Proof of Work coins like Litecoin.

Storing your coins on gox means using a service that if it goes away/breaks you lose your only out.  Same thing with storing everything on this network.

Gox is a centralized service. Your computer is centralized because it's all in one location.
So if your computer is compromised or if your hard drive fails then all of your Bitcoins are lost.

There is no way for you to know in advance when your hard drive will fail. It could fail today and your Bitcoins will be lost. You could also get hacked at any time. So there are benefits to storing your wallet in the cloud.

I never suggested I'd store all my data on "a harddrive".  That is not how dropbox works.

What if Dropbox the company decides not to let you access your data? Human beings decide access control with Dropbox. MaidSafe is a decentralized autonomous network which does not have human beings determining who can access their files.

Why would anyone prefer to use Dropbox? Why depend on Dropbox to secure your data when you can depend on a decentralized autonomous network?

No one really has any clue how robust SAFE will be, including you.

Saying no one knows how robust it will be is just FUD.

Sure it's possible that no one will farm it, but that is like saying Bitcoin miners could decide they don't want to get paid anymore. It's goes against game theory and while it is possible it's highly unlikely.

If people follow their greed as they usually do, MaidSafe will be robust. If you don't think so then you can earn a lot of Safecoins yourself.

There is a good chance it'll run smoothly and never break.  However, we don't know that and I'm not going to be the guinea.  If it lets me mirror my data locally across machines, then perhap I will use it.

It can have bugs, it's a risk, you don't have to put your most important private data on there while it's in the test phase. From what I've seen of the code and the design I don't see any possibility of data leakage. So the worst that could happen is somehow your key doesn't work and no one, (not even you) can access the data. It's all self encrypted so it's probably more secure than Dropbox actually.

IMO Maidensafe has been great at hyping. 

Just because it's hyped it doesn't mean it's not justified. Bitshares was hyped when people were buying Protoshares and Angelshares. Just because a technology is hyped it doesn't mean it's not real. Now it's time to test it out over the next month and if it does what we hope it does then it's extremely important.

Their whitepaper... talk of datacenters consuming too much power.  So... what is their solution ?  People leave their desktop/laptops on to pick up pennies serving files over the network ?     Neat stuff, but seems overly hyped to me.

I don't think most people will be doing that but you never know.

I'm more interested in a TOR like network with a higher capacity than TOR.  Give our Chinese friends more solutions to a free internet !

I don't think you understand how MaidSafe works. There are no IP addresses so what would Tor be needed for? If you have MaidSafe there would be no reason to require Tor. A decentralized application could provide a VPN service which would be better than Tor.

If costs of resources go down, it doesn't follow that value of safecoin will go up "because you can buy more resources".  You'll be able to buy more resources with any currency.   So I guess the value of every currency will go up ?

Buying power is what matters. If you can get more with less then whatever you have is somehow more valuable. So if 1 Safecoin can get you more resources over time which grows exponentially, then 1 Safecoin is worth more than it was when you couldn't get as much resources for it. The dollar used to be backed by gold, and fiat currencies could be redeemed for silver. 1 Safecoin is backed by computing resources and the amount of computing resources that 1 Safecoin can buy should increase, also it's capped, which means it's deflationary once the 4.3 billion coins are distributed.

I'm not an economist, so if I'm wrong maybe CWEvans can correct any misconceptions I have on it. I do not deliberately present my opinions as facts.
 

I have no clue how Maidensafe can be more disruptive than Bitcoin.  Bitcoin brought capabilities we didn't have.  Maidensafe just gives me another way to store files and use the internet anonymously.  Sorry man, but that stuff already exists.

I suggest you read the whitepaper again. Study it a bit more.

Because right now you don't even know what MaidSafe is and you're going to be embarrassed about this post once you figure it out.

[gamey]

It's not like storing your coins in Gox. Read the whitepaper please.

https://github.com/maidsafe/Whitepapers/blob/master/Project-Safe.md

Your harddrive is more likely to fail than the entire MaidSafe network. It's safer to keep your data on MaidSafe than to store it locally. Additionally it could solve the blockchain bloat problem as well.

More opinions stated as fact by luckybit.  Are you done hyping blackcoin and have moved on to safecoins?

Storing your coins on gox means using a service that if it goes away/breaks you lose your only out.  Same thing with storing everything on this network.

I never suggested I'd store all my data on "a harddrive".  That is not how dropbox works.

No one really has any clue how robust SAFE will be, including you.  There is a good chance it'll run smoothly and never break.  However, we don't know that and I'm not going to be the guinea.  If it lets me mirror my data locally across machines, then perhap I will use it.

IMO Maidensafe has been great at hyping. 

Their whitepaper... talk of datacenters consuming too much power.  So... what is their solution ?  People leave their desktop/laptops on to pick up pennies serving files over the network ?     Neat stuff, but seems overly hyped to me.

I'm more interested in a TOR like network with a higher capacity than TOR.  Give our Chinese friends more solutions to a free internet !

As the cost of resources go down the value of the Safecoin will go up because it will be able to buy more resources.

Since these resources will only be purchased with these exclusive Safe tokens, the Safecoins will gain in value as their buying power increases.

MaidSafe is going to be an even more disruptive technology than Bitcoin. In a few years we are going to look back at it like we do Bitcoin and wonder why people were willing to sell it for pennies.

If costs of resources go down, it doesn't follow that value of safecoin will go up "because you can buy more resources".  You'll be able to buy more resources with any currency.   So I guess the value of every currency will go up ?

I have no clue how Maidensafe can be more disruptive than Bitcoin.  Bitcoin brought capabilities we didn't have.  Maidensafe just gives me another way to store files and use the internet anonymously.  Sorry man, but that stuff already exists.

edit - Are you constantly high or something ?  I read more of your postings. There is absolutely 0 chance that this will make "amazon cloud immediately obsolete".  Claiming that google will have to rely on this ?!  I won't bother responding anymore.  You just mindlessly hype stuff.  You did this with blackcoin thread too.  Ignore anything you don't want to hear, repeating the same stuff.  etc etc.

[luckybit]

Dropbox uses a model where X storage is free and you only pay if you use above that and they're worth $5-10 Billon.

If MaidSafe put a CAP on how much space you could use for free on the network regardless of how much space you provide after which point you'd have to pay market price (set by buyers and sellers on an exchange) for any storage above that. Then they'd have a similar model. I think the SafeCoin concept is better than Dropbox so could potentially be a big market there.

The nice thing about dropbox is that in some ways it is less decentralized.  If the service goes down, I'll have multiple copies on various computers locally.  The only real problem is that data issues propagate to all the devices too. 

I assume maidsafe will have a local cache option, because I'd never feel safe putting all my data in a system like that.  It is like storing your coins in gox.  I'll take my chances with things I understand. 

I guess my problem is that it isn't clear if they are privacy advocates or this thing is supposed to sell itself on performance.  I don't really "get it" besides it sounds/seems cool.

It's not like storing your coins in Gox. Read the whitepaper please.

https://github.com/maidsafe/Whitepapers/blob/master/Project-Safe.md

Your harddrive is more likely to fail than the entire MaidSafe network. It's safer to keep your data on MaidSafe than to store it locally. Additionally it could solve the blockchain bloat problem as well.

[luckybit]

This whole thing relies on people providing the service to accept exclusively safecoin at a potential loss. Safecoin-the-blockchain has to add value or people will not hold its shares over better stores of value

I think it may be irrelevant whether MaidSafe users hold/sell their shares after the transaction. The value in SafeCoins isn't even derived from profit just from the MaidSafe user base (turnover) expanding.

Kind of like Power of volume shares I described here
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=4249.msg53593;boardseen#new

It's pretty exciting that while a service is in it's growth phase (Which can last years) it doesn't even need to be profitable to generate returns for shareholders. Other people don't really seem to get this yet, so I may be missing something...

Edit: Not irrelevant, in that if Maidsafe space sellers hold they will add to upward pressure on SafeCoin price but irrelevant in that the SafeCoin price will at least reflect a multiple of the turnover or daily volume regardless if they sell.

Kind of why the US does everything to keep the petrodollar. Forcing countries to transact in $ for oil, creates a large consistent demand that help give the $ some of its value.

I don't know if people have realised that forcing users of a service/product to conduct in X currency, means X currency will increase in value as volume/turnover expands. So you can become less concerned with profit but more with turnover (popularity) now that we have the power previously held by governments of denominating the transactional currency.

Information is power. Information is what will give the Safecoins value. It will all come together when you see the decentralized apps running on the network.

This whole thing relies on people providing the service to accept exclusively safecoin at a potential loss. Safecoin-the-blockchain has to add value or people will not hold its shares over better stores of value

Safecoins are backed by the resources of the MaidSafe decentralized autonomous network. It's value will grow as the cost of storage, computation, and bandwidth go down. It's not a decentralized Dropbox any more than Bitcoin is a decentralized currency.

MaidSafe is a platform more like Ethereum. You can build decentralized applications on top of it. As resources get cheaper your Safecoins gain more value. So today it's going or less than a dollar because people don't know what it is and don't understand the economics of it yet. I just figured out the economic model hidden in the whitepaper.

It's not a model which comes natural to people. It's a bit abstract which is why people are wondering how the tokens will increase in value. The way it will increase in value is that it's backed by information, so the more people who develop apps and use the network the more valuable these tokens will become. This value can grow exponentially as well, so I cannot even try to calculate how valuable it is.

I can say that each Safecoin should be worth at least $2-3 at the minimum. So it makes sense to hold onto them because if even the smallest amount of people use the MaidSafe network its worth at least that much. I expect it to be worth much more though because the ease of writing killer apps will attract millions of people to it.

It's not like Bitcoin. Bitcoin is something people feel like they had to risk their money to use. MaidSafe is something everyone wants and it actually can be made both easy and more secure. Every industry that makes money from advertisements, from collecting information, processing information, providing bandwidth, all are set to be disrupted.

I encourage everyone to take a closer look at the whitepaper. Once you understand that it's the resources that give value to every currency then Proof of Resource makes sense (it's like barter) and Safecoin makes sense.

The way MaidSafe's economic model appears to work is we had an IPO where we bought Safecoins which are credit tokens. These tokens were a presale of Proof of Resource allocation.

Proof of Resource for storage space would be a situation where the farmer gives a certain amount of storage space to the network and they would be paid in Safecoins from people who don't have any storage space to give. People who don't have Safecoins will have to give to receive and by reciprocity they would have double the storage space (I think this is how it's supposed to work).

If you have Safecoins then you likely have a lifetime supply of storage space. Everyone else will have to provide storage space to the network in order to receive storage space. As a result these Safecoins will become the main way that people buy storage space.

Here is the quote from the whitepaper to back up what I'm saying
https://github.com/maidsafe/Whitepapers/blob/master/Project-Safe.md

5. Economic System With Two Types Of Token

P.O.R is proposed in order to facilitate the exchange of storage space on the SAFE network. However, as it doesn't have a predictable cap number, it may not be considered a genuine virtual currency. To provide a more robust form of exchange, MaidSafe proposes a token system that is totally independent of P.O.R, called safecoin. Safecoin will have a predicatable cap and will be injected into network using the storage space related mining procedure.

A bridge (converting rate) between P.O.R and safecoin can be established by the market solely. With third party upper layer broker applications, it will be possible to use safecoin to buy P.O.R or vice versa (user_A gives safecoin to user_B in exchange for user_B's P.O.R). It is expected that the per unit value of P.O.R will keep decreasing, while the per unit value of safecoin will continue to rise. In this way, it will be possible to buy more and more P.O.R with one safecoin. Safecoin will only be stored in the Maid Account wallet, this can only be updated by the Maid Manager group.

The value one safecoin represents will be recognised by all peers across the network and outside the network. If the economic system works as intended, safecoin will become a ‘virtual currency’ with the SAFE network being used to complete all transactions. Meanwhile, P.O.R will solely be used for exchanging space allowance among users.

I think I understand the above. Is what I describe below similar to how it should work? ... 

Very simple example:  (I know they issued more coins and they don't use 'terrors' I'm just trying to understand the model.)

MaidSafe issue a 1000 SafeCoins - Storage is priced in another currency but payable in Safecoins.

For every Terabyte of space (or divisions thereof) you commit to MaidSafe you get  1 'Terror' which you can exchange for a  terabyte of storage on the MaidSafe network or you can sell it at the market price. The price people (who want to use more space than they provide) are willing to pay for 1 Terabyte of MaidSafe Storage.

In the first month, people are willing to pay $1 per MaidSafe 'Terror', however the community is small and new, so there is only demand for 1000 additional 'Terrors'. (demand from people who want to use more space than they provide) Given only 1000 SafeCoins exist, each SafeCoin should be worth at least $1.

In the 2nd month, people realise how cool MaidSafe is and the community expands five-fold, as the community is bigger there is both more additional space for sale as well as more demand from people who need additional space. So the market price for a terror may still stay fairly stable at $1 per 'Terror'. However with the 5x bigger user base, that demand may equal 5000 additional 'Terrors'. As there are still only 1000 SafeCoins, but at least $5000 of new demand, each SafeCoin should be worth at least $5.

So the more popular MaidSafe becomes &/or the more people hoard SafeCoins, the more valuable each SafeCoin will become even if the price people are willing to pay for additional storage (in $/BTC terms) stays the same or decreases over time. Is that kind of how their business model works?

Yes this is an accurate description. The more people who discover MaidSafe the more valuable Safecoins will become.

I don't think there is a limit to how much people will pay for storage. I would say people will pay whatever is the cheapest.

The way MaidSafe will take over the industry is they'll be able to provide all the resources cheaper than anywhere else. No one will be able to provide as much storage for as cheap as them. Once people figure this out the demand will grow exponentially.

For example think of all the corporations right now which offer dropbox like service or digital ocean like service? Every single one of them will either have to buy Safecoins or be replaced by a decentralized application. Amazon's entire cloud computing business will be immediately obsolete. They will have to buy Safecoins or be replaced by a decentralized application.

So I predict that the demand for Safecoins will come not from people like us but from big businesses with established companies who will not know how to compete. Google may have to buy Safecoins because they will not be able to offer the same kind of service at some point.

Google makes it's money from ads, but the decentralized Google application running on MaidSafe wouldn't need any ads and if it did have ads it could pay the profit from that out as dividends to its shareholders. Google will have to buy Safecoins just to stay in business over the long term.

So it's like the situation with domain names sorta where all the corporations in the world will be caught be surprised. They'll see that decentralized corporations can be run and beat them in the area of resources. What else can they do except buy Safecoins?

They can mine Safecoins. These big corporations will also make up the majority of the farmers. So it will be big corporations doing most of the farming and most of the buying/trading.

[luckybit]

I will make a prediction and you can all wait to see if it comes true.

The first killer app for MaidSafe will be a decentralized autonomous cloud mining app.

They'll probably make us use our Safe tokens to buy shares and then mine whatever we want from the cloud. The mining operation would scale up dramatically faster. It could host our wallets in the cloud, connect to our Bitcoin address for payout. It could mine anything and do it as hosted mining.

This app alone would guarantee the success of Safecoin in my opinion. If enough of these sorts of decentralized apps exist then they'll replace mining pools pretty quickly, as well as the highly centralized mining cartel as we currently know it.

So I'll be the first to predict that MaidSafe will disrupt the whole Proof of Work culture and community. If it's easy enough to build apps maybe some Bitshares related apps would be really cool because MaidSafe seems to do everything Ethereum is intending to do.
 

Enlighten us why do you think so?

Safecoins do have a strong economic foundation. Safecoins are backed by information.

Their economics are sound it's just they don't do a very good job explaining it.

This chart shows how Safecoins will gain value https://raw.githubusercontent.com/maidsafe/Whitepapers/master/resources/resources_graph.png

Safecoins are backed by information/resources. The most important thing in most people's lives is information, so information can easily be used to back a currency. Safecoins are capped at 4.3 billion but if you follow the trends such as Big Data then you know the world will produce information at what seems like an exponential rate.

All of that information has to be stored, secured, processed, analyzed. I'm convinced that their economic model can work. As the cost of resources go down the value of the Safecoin will go up because it will be able to buy more resources.

Since these resources will only be purchased with these exclusive Safe tokens, the Safecoins will gain in value as their buying power increases.

MaidSafe is going to be an even more disruptive technology than Bitcoin. In a few years we are going to look back at it like we do Bitcoin and wonder why people were willing to sell it for pennies.

For me, dropbox + truecrypt works fine.  I am far more interested in seeing them work on a TOR type network.  With China and their firewall, it might be a more profitable app.

Dropbox uses a model where X storage is free and you only pay if you use above that and they're worth $5-10 Billon.

If MaidSafe put a CAP on how much space you could use for free on the network regardless of how much space you provide after which point you'd have to pay market price (set by buyers and sellers on an exchange) for any storage above that. Then they'd have a similar model. I think the SafeCoin concept is better than Dropbox so could potentially be a big market there.

Assume it's all free at first, that's still only storage. Computation and bandwidth for sure will not be free.

Since Safecoins are backed by CPU and Bandwidth resources as well, it's a stroke of genius marketing to make storage free. Gmail did the same thing and it worked. Give everyone free storage space for as long as possible and there is no way for Gmail, Dropbox, Megaupload or anything to compete. They will not be able to compete with free.

There might be some tweaks to make here and there but I think the overall strategy is a good one.

[gamey]

Dropbox uses a model where X storage is free and you only pay if you use above that and they're worth $5-10 Billon.

If MaidSafe put a CAP on how much space you could use for free on the network regardless of how much space you provide after which point you'd have to pay market price (set by buyers and sellers on an exchange) for any storage above that. Then they'd have a similar model. I think the SafeCoin concept is better than Dropbox so could potentially be a big market there.

The nice thing about dropbox is that in some ways it is less decentralized.  If the service goes down, I'll have multiple copies on various computers locally.  The only real problem is that data issues propagate to all the devices too. 

I assume maidsafe will have a local cache option, because I'd never feel safe putting all my data in a system like that.  It is like storing your coins in gox.  I'll take my chances with things I understand. 

I guess my problem is that it isn't clear if they are privacy advocates or this thing is supposed to sell itself on performance.  I don't really "get it" besides it sounds/seems cool.

[Empirical1]

For me, dropbox + truecrypt works fine.  I am far more interested in seeing them work on a TOR type network.  With China and their firewall, it might be a more profitable app.

Dropbox uses a model where X storage is free and you only pay if you use above that and they're worth $5-10 Billon.

If MaidSafe put a CAP on how much space you could use for free on the network regardless of how much space you provide after which point you'd have to pay market price (set by buyers and sellers on an exchange) for any storage above that. Then they'd have a similar model. I think the SafeCoin concept is better than Dropbox so could potentially be a big market there.

[gamey]

I'm guessing here, but I'd guess the motivations for people to put their computer in this network will have little to do with the reality of the economics and more to do with pure geekery joy.

I'd like to see a chart with how many people need your data while online for it to be available and various speeds etc.  I forget how various RAIDs work so I really have no clue about requirements for redundancy, but seems to me there are a lot of unknowns and that a certain % of people are just gonna hit the edge case where >X% of their storage providers quit and invalidate the user's whole data store.    What is X% ?

I guess redundancy isn't really the issue because space isn't a premium.  Like bytemaster said it is the bandwidth.  Maybe with enough redundancy we'll be able to saturate a consumer grade internet connection using this.. 

For me, dropbox + truecrypt works fine.  I am far more interested in seeing them work on a TOR type network.  With China and their firewall, it might be a more profitable app.

[Empirical1]

This whole thing relies on people providing the service to accept exclusively safecoin at a potential loss. Safecoin-the-blockchain has to add value or people will not hold its shares over better stores of value

I think it may be irrelevant whether MaidSafe users hold/sell their shares after the transaction. The value in SafeCoins isn't even derived from profit just from the MaidSafe user base (turnover) expanding.

Kind of like Power of volume shares I described here
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=4249.msg53593;boardseen#new

It's pretty exciting that while a service is in it's growth phase (Which can last years) it doesn't even need to be profitable to generate returns for shareholders. Other people don't really seem to get this yet, so I may be missing something...

Edit: Not irrelevant, in that if Maidsafe space sellers hold they will add to upward pressure on SafeCoin price but irrelevant in that the SafeCoin price will at least reflect a multiple of the turnover or daily volume regardless if they sell.

Kind of why the US does everything to keep the petrodollar. Forcing countries to transact in $ for oil, creates a large consistent demand that help give the $ some of its value.

I don't know if people have realised that forcing users of a service/product to conduct in X currency, means X currency will increase in value as volume/turnover expands. So you can become less concerned with profit but more with turnover (popularity) now that we have the power previously held by governments of denominating the transactional currency.