MaidSafe IPO on Mastercoin

[toast]

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

[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?

[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?

[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.



 

[bytemaster]

Bitcloud is starting to get closer to the solution... sadly none of these providers has learned from my own research into the space.

Bitcloud is getting closer...   One day when I have more time I will come back to this problem.

[bitbro]

Here is an interesting blog which highlights many of the issues.
http://bitcloudproject.org/blog/?p=80

They are going to rely on the free market to come up with the solution rather than putting an arbitrary token into the system. So in the MaidSafe network you must use Safecoin which means they have to get the incentive structure right or everyone loses. Bitcloud is going to do things a bit different and let everyone set up grids, and then set their own terms.

I think Bitcloud is in a position to watch the mistakes MaidSafe is bound to make, learn from those mistakes, and correct them for their own Platform.

So I would say the Bitshares community should form a partnership with Bitcloud. Bitcloud originally was supposed to be a Bitshares community DAC called WeTube. If they could be convinced to give a favorable relationship to the Bitshares community then the Bitshares community could have Bitcloud as an alternative to MaidSafe.

The problem is Bitcloud is going to take a long time to develop. Apparently it took the MaidSafe team almost a decade to develop it and I can believe that. Freenet has been in development since 2000 or so and never became much of a success.

+ ten


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[luckybit]

Here is an interesting blog which highlights many of the issues.
http://bitcloudproject.org/blog/?p=80

Currency Agnostic Alternative

The solution we provide with Bitcloud is radically the contrary: we allow FULL FREE MARKET, and let nodes organize in the form of grids. If you want bandwidth, you either create a grid of nodes with your own resources, or better, demand it in a free market. Grids are free to offer you their prices and features, and Bitcloud will be in charge of ensuring that the contract is fulfilled! Grids provide 100% of their offered bandwidth solely to provide you (the publisher or webmaster) the quality of service you demanded.

Finally and not less important, even residential users are allowed in Bitcloud, and they can create private and or public grids for free by donating part of their connections, for human reasons. We estimate that a lot of grids on Bitcloud are going to be free. People creating illegal grids will not affect the entire network.

We also avoid Sybil attacks (as we are going to explain in another post) simply because the nodes of a grid are in control of what they provide, how and to whom, so they can ban malicious participants in a way that only humans can do. A token system is going to be full of spam and quality will be lower just because it is a fully automated system that cannot be moderated by actual humans. More on the next post.

They are going to rely on the free market to come up with the solution rather than putting an arbitrary token into the system. So in the MaidSafe network you must use Safecoin which means they have to get the incentive structure right or everyone loses. Bitcloud is going to do things a bit different and let everyone set up grids, and then set their own terms.

I think Bitcloud is in a position to watch the mistakes MaidSafe is bound to make, learn from those mistakes, and correct them for their own Platform.

So I would say the Bitshares community should form a partnership with Bitcloud. Bitcloud originally was supposed to be a Bitshares community DAC called WeTube. If they could be convinced to give a favorable relationship to the Bitshares community then the Bitshares community could have Bitcloud as an alternative to MaidSafe.

The problem is Bitcloud is going to take a long time to develop. Apparently it took the MaidSafe team almost a decade to develop it and I can believe that. Freenet has been in development since 2000 or so and never became much of a success.

I don't know how Bitcloud intends to filter for illegal/immoral content. I recommended to the MaidSafe team that they can only really add a moderation system for public shares (like Reddit) so that the spam and malicious content can be pushed down to the fringe. If it's not a public share people wont have to see it and wont know about it.

[luckybit]

One business model I can think of right now is you could put all of PoW mining into the MaidSafe cloud as an app. And not just any kind of mining but you could do actually beneficial Proof of Work in the cloud such as BOINC.

Tokens would determine access so that is what would be for sale. It's a lot like how Mastercoins would become access tokens for the Mastercoin network.

The real interesting thing is this MaidSafe network will change mining forever. Today you have DigitalOcean and similar services which people use to mine with. On MaidSafe you'd have the same thing only it would be ridiculous, where for 1 Safecoin you might be able to mine for a month with 1000 CPUs.

The result is over time mining will be centralized around cloud mining. That is just what I think would happen. As for the bandwidth that is the one component which I can't speculate on what will happen.

[luckybit]

“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.”

One with his right mind would think this is the case. Reading the paper though it seems that farmers/miners will receive Safecoins as mining reward for  providing the space… who and how much and for what reasons will be looking to buy safecoins is something not totally clear yet.

 In other words the craziness to use price fixing in their IPO is just the first of crazy/stupid ideas they have in mind. The second and bigger one seems to be to disconnect the supply of safecoins from the demand for them… All in all I am pretty happy to have dropped 0 money on this IPO as this thingy is going to 0 pretty soon, if those guys do not wake up.

You've got it wrong.

For example what if you run out of hard drives so you can't farm, how will you get more resources?

If you have bandwidth you could give that and get storage. If you have processing power you can get storage. If you don't have one of these resources then you'll have no choice but to buy the Safecoins. Most people aren't going the have data centers in their home and most people aren't ISPs. Farming is going to become heavily centralized and quick forcing most people to buy Safecoins. I'm not convinced it will be able to remain decentralized on the farming end and that is really the only problem with the idea but it will definitely be disruptive and better than what we have by far.

The issue is they are looking at it backwards.   You want to sell downloads, not storage space.   A movie is stored once and downloaded 100000 times.   99% of users need 0 storage space, but consume significant bandwidth.   

Storage is free, what you are really selling is bandwidth and access.

Why would users store anything locally if they can store their entire virtual harddrive encrypted in the cloud and stream it? I would think most people could use at least a few hundred TB today (and that's just people who download movies like you say).

And then all the mining possibilities where people can create thousands of instances of virtual desktops with CPUs. Demand for storage space is insatiable, demand for computing is insatiable, and demand for bandwidth is insatiable.

You do have a point that bandwidth is the single biggest bottleneck but that is why we will end up using Safecoins. Anyone will be able to start a decentralized autonomous ISP of sorts and provide bandwidth. Small established ISPs are the likely candidate to accept Safecoins in exchange for providing bandwidth but we will have to see.

It's a huge gamble and it's unknown how the industry will react. If they embrace the idea then Safecoins will easily be worth a lot but if they treat it like they do Bitcoin then it will take longer as an industry will have to form around it.

[bytemaster]

The issue is they are looking at it backwards.   You want to sell downloads, not storage space.   A movie is stored once and downloaded 100000 times.   99% of users need 0 storage space, but consume significant bandwidth.   

Storage is free, what you are really selling is bandwidth and access.   

[tonyk]

“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.”

One with his right mind would think this is the case. Reading the paper though it seems that farmers/miners will receive Safecoins as mining reward for  providing the space… who and how much and for what reasons will be looking to buy safecoins is something not totally clear yet.

 In other words the craziness to use price fixing in their IPO is just the first of crazy/stupid ideas they have in mind. The second and bigger one seems to be to disconnect the supply of safecoins from the demand for them… All in all I am pretty happy to have dropped 0 money on this IPO as this thingy is going to 0 pretty soon, if those guys do not wake up.

[luckybit]

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.

Storage space is usually deflationary. Every year we can expect storage space to decrease. Safecoins are capped at 4.3 billion but unfortunately these Safecoins are not divisible. The fact that they are not divisible could be a problem and I'm not sure why it had to be designed like that but I'm guessing because it's designed to exist exclusively within MaidSafe and to track Proof of Resource.

As resources become cheaper 1 Safecoin should be able to buy more resources. That means the buying power of 1 Safecoin should increase with Moore's law and the deflationary spiral of storage space. If these premises hold then Safecoin are like indivisible shares in the resources of MaidSafe itself. Since demand for resources are insatiable, the MaidSafe model will definitely catch on and make many billions of dollars.

There are ways to improve their economic model and the crowd sale was terribly botched. Too many Safecoins are concentrated into the hands of too few, but that is generally what happens.

It's questionable whether or not Safecoins need to be mined but considering how many devices there are in the world you would need at least 1 Safecoin for every device so having around 4 billion does make sense when there are around 3 billion devices. Whether or not people get their ROI depends entirely on whether or not MaidSafe is in demand and really I cannot see how it wouldn't be.

VPNs, MegaUpload/Dropbox, VPS, Amazon, Google, Facebook, even forums such as these would all be able to run on top of MaidSafe as an app. These large corporations if they are somewhat smart would start buying Safecoins so they don't have to buy them later but knowing how they reacted to Bitcoin and other disruptive peer to peer technologies we can expect them to make fun of it or demonize it early on. We can also expect a lot of file sharing to move there and probably be the first killer apps.

[liondani]

... Sorry for posting so much  guys but I am bitshares  addicted   ...


Sent from my ALCATEL ONE TOUCH 997D using Tapatalk

[liondani]

Their marketing is interesting.  Always talk of this little town but with far flung experts in all these fields.  It sets up your interest level quite a bit. 

I won't contrast it with how Dan goes into the origin of his idea, but perhaps a bit of consideration in that area could be useful.

  I agree!

Could you elaborate?

I really think we have a better "product" than our competition ... but I think they sell it a little bit "better"(not for long)...
I think it is not so importand what we say to the people (of course it is) but much more  importand is HOW we say it. What our bodylanguage sais to the others. How much we express our Enthusiasm and feelings when we talk to others, how we sell ourselves... Some of us are better on that,some others not, no problem, just use the best of them. The real leaders use always people they are better than the leader... find them! Maybe you allready have some of them on your team but you don't exposed them yet, or enough... Brian Page is not bad at all... let them speak more... Send them alone on the next conferrence you know he will make a great job (at least it seems so). Show to the community that you are 100% dedicated on the project (code writting) and let your co workers and your work  speak for the project...You don't have time (or pretend you don't have)...  Do you think I appreciate Vitalik more because they are on every single conferrence? It is obvious when we see the founders act like that that they made it because they want to be famous,they want glory... I want founders of projects  to work for the society and not for their self... and PURE rocognition and "profits" will come , believe me. Try to hide yourself (but work) and they will find you, try to expose yourself and be forgotten before you know. Expose others.Give them oportunities.Hire talented "sellers", "evangelists" or whatever... You can  archieve whatever you want with team work, Sacrifice your self for the bitshares team and soon you rise up, inch by inch, play by play...

I think he speaks better to your spirit than me...
http://youtu.be/oSDhhZtRwFU

[bytemaster]

Their marketing is interesting.  Always talk of this little town but with far flung experts in all these fields.  It sets up your interest level quite a bit. 

I won't contrast it with how Dan goes into the origin of his idea, but perhaps a bit of consideration in that area could be useful.

  I agree!

Could you elaborate?