I would think that with this new parameter, where farmers get the 50% utilization rewards, I wouldn’t be surprise to see solution providers setting up their own 3Nodes on the TFGrid, then paying in TFT for their use cases and charging customers in fiat money.
This coupled with the stable coin to TFT bot I talked about, would be a good model for businesses on the TF ecosystem, I think.
I like the overall idea, but I think that this might be a solution that is too complex to implement.
I would add this: in the current tokenomics and utilization pricing, if TFT price market goes up, the users have more utilization/purchasing power on the grid.
So if it’s stable or going up, it’s good for users. If TFT market price goes down, it affects the users’ utilization/purchasing power. Just as Drew stated in a reply above.
This in a way misses the main point of the Threefold as whole project. The idea is to decentralise it as more as possible, and that to my understanding is every household to have a node in the house. Also what’s the value in the solution providers using their own nodes? Why would they want to get their services through Threefold. I might be missing something here. I’m not against solution providers at all, I think they are very good for the network, but I don’t think they should be the core.
Well said! Every household should have a 3Node in their house. I agree the idea is to decentralize further the grid.
Basically what I said is that solution providers can also be farmers. They offer solutions on the grid to users and users can pay in fiat or TFT, depending on the model of the solution provider.
As @michaelww said here above, GreenEdge is doing this.
Since farmers can deploy workloads and have access to the 50% revenue from utilization, it invites solution providers to also host on the grid, thus to become farmers. A farmer with a direct link to utilization, i.e. their own 3Nodes generating revenues from the solution they offer as solution provider, will be much more careful with the hardware, uptime and proper bandwidth. And if something happens to a workload, they can have quicker acces to the 3nodes, since they themselves farm. This is a good thing from the user’s perspective I would think. If the farmer is also a solution provider, it gives a direct incentive to get the hardware running properly. If there is an issue with a user’s workload, they would want to get it fixed quickly as part of their revenues depend from it.
Why would a solution provider use the TF Grid: The TFGrid and Zero-OS offer a solid framework to deploy workloads easily. Building weblets and other dapps can be done easily on top of the open-source code.
Solution providers can also deploy on the grid and not be farmers. In the new model we are proposing, they can have partnerships with farmers and share the utilization revenues. They don’t have to pass through the approval of ThreeFold for the 50% discount. They can host themselves or have partnerships with farms. This give way more possibilities for decentralization in a very concrete manner. All done in smart contracts, farmers, solution providers and users could decide what type of associations they want.
Imagine an association of farmers and solution providers, who share the revenues from utilization by using smart contracts for the transactions, and they deploy different architectures using each other’s farms and solutions. So a farmer 1 in city A could partner with farmer 2 in city B, and they would offer solutions on the TFGrid. They could have, by design, redundancy and resilience between the farms (e.g. synced VMs in each farm hosting solutions). It could be a partnership between a solution provider and several farms, etc.
This could be extended to many farmers and solution providers forming solution provider hives of redundancy and resilience. All those examples represent direct work from independent actors on the TF ecosystem: users, farmers and solution providers building the grid. I think this new direction offers more decentralization and more possibilities to the community members.
I highly recommend treading lightly as it really sounds like you’ve been given some seriously bad information about the chain of events that occurred.
I also encourage everyone else to cut Mike some slack, he’s regurgitating what he was told at this point. But we like Mike, Zonaris is the grid usage, and green edge is quite literally the spine of the grid. Let’s leave Mike out of it. I don’t think he meant to step on that landmine.
We have to move on at this point guys, forward together
Hi @michaelww, thanks a lot for you input. I highly welcome you into this subject, since your the only active solution provider currently.
I know Green Edge, Zonaris and you very well. I spend a lot of time with Luis setting up all your farms / nodes and fixing all the problems at the time. And I highly support what you do, I’m always available to help (you can check that with Luis).
While you have a good point with your reply, as Drew stated you clearly have not received all information of the chain of events that happened around Foldit. This might surprise you, but we (Foldit) support every improvement that has been suggested about solution providers. In what form is debatable of course, and should be debated as a community.
Our problem is with how everything transpired (publicly and in private messages). Foldit has really not been treated by the rules, and has been opportunistically shut down. This will be denied but we can show you how this transpired. For this I will create a new forum post, since the subject has been shutdown by @scott by closing the active forum thread. Also not to disturb this discussion too much, since there is good progress being made. So please go on … ! I know, maybe my post here was not appropriate.
In the meantime, this is a older explanation that our real problem is with the veto of the community approved DAO vote and the lack of trust this creates. And why a ‘council’ (that executed the veto) in this case is not really a council but a curtain to what happens behind the scenes. This has clearly not been understood, why Foldit reacted the way it did, not even by Kristof (which is clear after all his reply’s, probably because his mind was busy finding money, which is important of course). Foldit is done, but if lies and misinformation are continued to be spread we have to intervene and correct these. Please remember that our issue is not with Kristof as a person, but with the person who is responsible for this situation. I work for Threefold (with lots of enthusiasm) and we’re always motivated to create full transparency, I will follow that beautiful suggestion in the new thread explaining why we did what we did.
Thanks very much indeed for all the help you’ve given Luis in the past and for the Foldit explanation and accompanying links. I really have no opinion on the way the Foldit application was handled. I obviously know little about it. My point was meant to be more general in that I support locking up future monthly farming tokens and farmers’ utilisation token earnings, and I support moving the 50% utilisation incentive from Solutions Providers to Farmers.I also agree with the points made by @Mik (above) and indeed we are currently speaking with a Solution Provider along these lines. If we’re successful we’ll add several new interesting applications to run on the Grid. Stating the obvious there’s not a whole lot of point to a TF Grid without Solutions Providers running their services on top so the more the merrier.
I agree with TFFarmer. I have no interest in trying to sell usage on my farm. More important things to do and not interested in being a Sales Rep. May move hardware to Flux if this becomes the norm.
As a general consideration, with the 50% rewards from utilization going to farmers, farmers could partner with solution providers to offer solutions and share PoU rewards:
We should be clear that this proposal is not about suggesting that farmers should become sales agent for their nodes’ capacity. That said, it does create an opportunity for any farmers who want to do so, either individually or by organizing in groups.
Rather, it’s just about including farmers in the revenue stream when capacity is utilized. That’s a very intuitive concept that was originally excluded from v3 for reasons that are no longer relevant. While farmers aren’t expected to actively sell their capacity, having an incentive tied to utilization can motivate farmers to provide a higher quality product.
While this is a bit off topic, I do want to say a couple things here. One is that the Grid has been an alpha or beta level offering for most of its existence. Yes, it took longer than expected to make it ready. But trying to push Grid capacity to market without resolving key issues like RMB stability for a consistent deployment experience, which was addressed in releases over the last six months or so, would have been a waste of limited resources.
Secondly, it’s probably not obvious how the team has been promoting the Grid for utilization, especially if you were expecting to see billboards on your local highway, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been happening. We’ve established agreements with quite a number of partners, and in some cases also put significant engineering work into helping them bring workloads to the Grid. It turns out that when it’s time for the rubber to meet the road, actually adopting a new technology is rather difficult, even for organizations that share our values and are excited about what we’ve built.
You make a great point here, and I fully agree with the points you made. Adding some months to the minimum unlock time, but keeping the maximum makes sense.
To your other question, locking, like entry price, would always be considered on a per node basis.
Fully agree here. Any farmed tokens should be spendable on Grid capacity immediately, even if it complicates thing from the engineering perspective.
When do we get the ball rolling on this?
EDIT: Added some info for proposition 1 after reading @renauter’s comment
By reading this, I would think the general consensus tends toward this:
We could make a DAO vote on this (TFT Lock Proposition 1) and let perhaps two weeks for people to vote?
An alternative would be:
That being said, from what I read here, locking until 0.1 USD isn’t favoured by the community. Also, personally I wonder if it’s “fair” market-wise to lock the farming rewards based on TFT market price.
What do you guys think?
I don’t think there is a point on even voting on option two since only one (albeit important) person backed it. Although I suppose it doesn’t cost anything to do.
Some remarks regarding the lock proposition potential implementation…
(1) Is it meant to be a progressive lock?
[each TFT amount earned at each minting period has to reach condition independently to be unlocked]
or is it meant to be a unique fixed lock?
[once condition is reached for the first time all the previous and upcoming earned TFT are unlocked “forever”]
(2) About “30% utilization for 3 months”
= there is (at least) an active contract on node that rents at least 30% of its capacity (tbd) and is older than 3 months
Is this what it means? Just to be sure I understood
The other bullets points are quiet clear 
Excellent questions
I would think the easiest to implement would be
Curious to read others on this.
EDIT: Edited the post above so it is clearer. @renauter Of course I will adjust if the community thinks otherwise.
I also think the easiest way forward is to vote for TFT Lock Proposition 1 as it seems to be the general consensus from the TF Community.
I realize that a big part of the option 1 explanation from a github post is missing from this discussion. Here are some quotes from Kristof, to summarize what has been said.
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Here are some thoughts:
10 cents is pie in the sky right now. I think the enormous amount of TFT was was recently unvested is evidence of how much will be voluntarily locked up until 10 cents.
Hi all,
Since this thread has gotten rather long and unwieldy, I’ve created a new one to get a fresh start on this topic. Please continue the discussion there: Token lock recap and next steps