Treat algorand like s3
find the price of storage in this network
jam ~8k into a stateful application, then do filesystem things until someone gets mad.
Txn costs should stay reasonable.. In terms of locked funds, yeah maybe. Hopefully the cost of algorand goes down. Could use a private network too!
- ~8k block read/write
- multiblock objects [CHECK]
- named multiobject storage [CHECK]
- infinite scale [HAHA]
- self host this project on-chain and GTFO github forever plzkthx. [NOT YET]
- design the smallest possible shell script that can bootstrap this software from the chain (might need stages). [SUMMERTIME]
- appendable storage [CHECK!]
need the developer API to use this at all-- we dry-run execute the smart contract to read the data.
(.venv) fimbaz@kolombus:~/algofs$ python block.py write foon
Waiting for confirmation
11
(.venv) fimbaz@kolombus:~/algofs$ python block.py read 11
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Email. Usenet. Web. Napster. BitTorrent. These protocols and their implementations represent a kind of public digital infrastructure, available for use without ceremony; like a park bench or a fruit tree. Network and regulatory conditions define the ecosystem in which these protocols must survive if they are to remain infrastructure. Changes in these can render the infrastructure obsolete, broken, or captured (each of which failure mode is well worth further discussion).
Suppose that the algorand blockchain is public digital infrastructure performing the function of data storage and state synchronization. Might it in fact be pretty good at that? It's hard to know-- historically, challenges to digital infrastructure present themselves only at large user/time scales. Some experiment must be made and grown in order to determine the suitability of algorand for public use. As the system scales, its qualities will be shown by its availablity to deliver utility while avoiding being broken, captured, or obsoleted.
Before developing implementations and protocols atop Algorand, we want to understand what algorand might be good at, and how the environment might signal that goodness to us. The price of data storage in the network is interesting in this regard. Network consensus parameters as of August '21 give the minimum balance that must be maintained for an account to control the largest possible stateful application as .4 Algos; around 60 cents. We can store around 5k of data in that application. So for a deposit of around ten cents per kilobyte, a user is promised indefinite data durability, dozens of replicas, access via a public-facing API, and the ability to prove ownership of that data. The user can also involve that data in consensus computations, but it's not clear today what benefit that will provide. Probably some, right?
Something else too-- something I'm not sure how to say. I feel like at least some cryptocurrencies can be priced according to the cost of running them, and that the correct price for a very good cryptocurrency might be very low, given fixed transaction fees.
Like, suppose I want to run a decentralized anonymous forum via a dApp. The dApp needs to store lots of data on-chain, so it is expensive to run in MainNet. Like I said, ten cents per kilobyte. But if the forum has its own dedicated blockchain, its operators can give away megabytes of storage for the 'price' of a CAPTCHA solve. With four second transaction finality, things are starting to look pretty good for all kinds of fun dApps.. web forums, craps, a space merchant clone.. reddit clones, twitter clones.. I gotta ask: why isn't this stuff up and running? I have a good answer: lack of oxygen. These fun dApp projects are like open source software: Rather than capturing value for the software creators, they tend to take private value and capture it in public: a dApp forum in a private chain you can host yourself.. who makes money off of that? But of course people do make open source software.. so why aren't there any big fun open source dApps? I think it's because dApp developers don't understand the stuff I was saying about coin prices. See, I think low coin prices are good. They think high coin prices are good-- they aim for and expect it. Which naturally means they will buy the coins they develop for. That means they want to write for mainnet, where cost of use is highest. That means they want to keep data and coordination off-chain.. which seems like a shame. It seems like so little has been done with 'pure' distributed state consensus applications. Granted even very simple applications are pretty hard to write.. but that's what makes it fun!!
OR
The best non-fungible tokens of all were the friends we made along the way.
OR These days, a unit of cryptocurrency is treated like a share in a company.. but that's not the nature of the fundamental value of a unit of cryptocurrency. A share in a company entitles its holder to some of the dividends accrued on the capital owned collectively by shareholders. A unit of cryptocurrency entitles its holder to access to some of the capital owned collectively by token holders, in the form of data and compute. Granted, a blockchain doesn't give very /much/ data or compute.. but that's how it is. If your blockchain isn't powered by unicorn farts, its value is the value of the compute and data storage guarantees it can make, and network tokens can (at best) represent some share of this value. Any other value on-chain will be with respect to this original value, e.g. checkmates derived on the chain, conversations recorded, votes tallied, battleships sunk, poker hands played.
After all, just like the fundamental source of value of fiat currency is its ability to pay taxes, the fundamental source of value of a cryptocurrency is its ability to pay transaction fees, which fees have the singular purpose of durably mutating data in a public consensus network.
I think things don't get really interesting until we can do full consensual homomorphic computing, but just like some folks hung around the www when it was all cgi-bin, some early adopters like me wanna flip this two-wheeled tricycle off the embankment.
a representation of a thing is not the thing itself (data is not physical) a link to a representation of a thing is not a representation of a thing (links don't guarantee availability.)