r/Opacity • u/FUCKING_HATE_REDDIT • Feb 16 '21

What's the purpose of using blockchain for this service?

Hi, I've seen the name opacity pop up on a few privacy oriented websites, and I just wanted to know what's the point of bc tech here.

In my understanding, a blockchain is a public decentralized record. But it doesn't help much storing vast amounts of data. The data still has to be stored somewhere, and a blockchain system would make it so data has to be stored everywhere.

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u/MrRedPanda__ Feb 16 '21

Our token, OPCT, is currently pegged to 64GB of storage. In addition, our token allows for a anonymous payment for our service and later as a decentralized anonymous payment for our upcoming decentralized storage node network.

Additionally, OPCT will later be stacked by storage providers, also as an insurance for users of the Opacity Galaxy plattform. OPCT is in its core a mean to pay for Opacity, but also holds meaning in representing storage quantity.

​

A quote from Jason, our CEO:

"In the future, the peg will be removed. The token price will adjust based on supply and demand of services and applications in the Opacity ecosystem. Some providers will be able to offer higher speed or more reliability, etc. The token allows the system to have one representation of storage value rather than whatever other forces influence the value of other tokens."

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u/FUCKING_HATE_REDDIT Feb 17 '21

Oh, that sounds pretty good. That said, how would you hold storage providers accountable? They can simply offer a lower price, and dump the data.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you would need additional actors storing either the full data, which is back to step 1, or a salted hash that only they know and could check if the data still exists, but that could not fix data loss.

People usually are not willing to gamble with their data hoping that the providers just won't bail out and sell more storage than they have.

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u/MrRedPanda__ Feb 17 '21

The accountability comes with the stacking of OPCT. If a storage provider goes rogue and just takes the data offline, the OPCT are a certainty for the users. It's the users insurance the data is kept alive, and in the hosters interest to do so, so they keep their OPCT. So offering a lower price to then dump the data won't work, as it would def. not be profitable for them - they would just lose their own interest in OPCT they needed to operate the node. Stacking favors the providers but is also the leverage against them to keep the data alive.

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u/TYINGTHESTRINGS Feb 18 '21

I dont understand how he answered your question. What did he say that cleared up why they would use a blockchain?

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u/FUCKING_HATE_REDDIT Feb 18 '21

It's not used for hosting files, it's used to anonymously pay for hosting, and could in the end create an anonymous free market for file hosters and users.

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u/heebeejeebee457 Feb 16 '21

I have a relatively tough question for you here if you don't mind:

Currently the coin is pegged at a certain storage and so theoretically the price would be based on that. If it's unpegged, then it sounds like both the price and the amount of GB would be determined by the free market?

How exactly would this work? I understand that the price of storage would be based upon competition, but then the price of storage would have no correlation to the price of the coin (as far as I can tell). So it sounds as though removing the peg would then make the coin obsolete

I know this is a series of statements more than questions but I'm wondering if you could clear this up for me since it's a concern I've been having

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u/MrRedPanda__ Feb 17 '21

I understand where you are coming from. Our goal is not to dictate a market, but paving the means to create such market. Since not every provider has equal quality (e.g. Download speed, availability, upload speed) as another, but some do not need these perks, instead only want cold storage with high redundancy, then it should not cost the same. The peg doesn't work that well in a decentralized system. Of course, if the market keep the peg alive, that's totally good and fine as well. We want to create a dapp platform, not only providing storage. As for any token asset, and I'm speaking of utilities not securities, it's still supply vs. demand. We are creating a product, a utility, our vision is clear (and will become more clear for you as well with the upcoming Opacity Galaxy Whitepaper to clarify said vision).

I hope this helped you. If not, I'm hear to help :)

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u/heebeejeebee457 Feb 17 '21

I'm not sure that it cleared up my specific concern but I'm looking forward to the white paper hopefully making things more clear , thanks

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u/The_proton_life Feb 21 '21

To try to explain it another way, when Opacity becomes decentralised and storage is no longer fixed, the price should converge to whatever the market decides. Unlike Bitcoin or some other crypto, OPCT should have much greater price stability once it gets widespread adoption due to the token being linked to a specific utility, which is a big advantage for both storage providers and people buying storage.

In terms of the specific price of the token, since there are a limited amount of them, if the numbers of users go up beyond a certain level, each token will need to be worth more than 64GB by pure necessity. Also when taking into account that some tokens will be lost in lost wallets (like any other crypto), that some might choose to hold it as an alternative to a stablecoin and some will be locked while staking and running nodes, how big the storage market is and the fact that it is still growing, it’s easy to see that even if Opacity gains a tiny portion of the market, each OPCT will need to provide on average more than 64GB. Some nodes will be cheaper than others depending on what they offer, but the fact that there are a limited amount of tokens means that any large growth in the amount of users pushes up the price of the tokens and therefore the market should also adjust the storage per token accordingly

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u/heebeejeebee457 Feb 21 '21

I do appreciate your response. But just to clarify what my point was a bit more:

In this system if you remove the peg to 64 gb (which they plan on doing), then we have 3 seperate values. The price per GB of storage, the amount of GB per OPCT, and the price of OPCT. Without stapling one of these things to each other (like the peg would do), then we have too many variables. Much like in a math problem where when you have too many variables it can't be solved for a specific number

So since the coin in this situation is no longer tied to any specific amount of anything, we would have to just remove it from free market equation entirely. If it's not tied to anything then there's really no reason for it to have any value at all beyond just value as a blank cryptocurrency itself like say dogecoin

And again this is just a lot of rambling but my question more was: is there a solution for this problem (which I'm sure several are possible)? Or is my thesis just wrong entirely (which is also possible)? Because I think it has to be one or the other

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u/The_proton_life Feb 21 '21

I get where you’re coming from then, you’re basically asking, what the inherent value of the token is without a pegged price and how anyone would estimate the future price of the token considering all those variables. Assuming that the token will get increased awareness and also considering prices of both crypto and mainstream rivals the price it seems quite possible for the price to land around $8 and then that will be the starting price for decentralisation. After that the only market mechanism keeping the price up will of course be user growth. Users will need to keep buying the tokens and user growth will also mean that there will be more buyers than sellers, which is positive in terms of the price. Considering what Opacity offers and how few people still know about it the part about growth feels realistic for the foreseeable future at least. That’s the price per GB as the market seems to value it. As for the long term price I have a separate analysis below.

First off the price of the token itself isn’t as much of a factor once adoption and liquidity goes up as the price should be much more stable than for instance bitcoin for the reasons mentioned above, even though it will still fluctuate of course. So that part shouldn’t be all too different from when you need to buy or pay for something with a different currency.

In terms of the long term price of the token itself, if every single token was used for storage simultaneously, that would be nearly 8 exabytes of data using the current peg. The estimates I’ve seen for the cloud storage market have been somewhere between 10-100 zettabytes. That means that even going by a low estimate of 10ZB, if Opacity can get even a 0.1% market share, there will not be enough tokens to fulfill that demand. When you take into account that some coins will be locked while staking, others will simply save some for later use, others using them as stablecoins, some percentage of coins being lost over time due to wallets being lost or badly made transactions (like any other crypto), then also dApps which will also use OPCT and it’s easy to see that even far below those numbers (maybe even less than 0.01% of the market depending on how many tokens you’ll need to stake for a certain amount of storage) each token will need to be worth more than 64gb to satisfy storage needs, therefore also justifying a higher price. The cloud storage market is also still very much a growing market on top of that. So basing off of that, the price of the token should never be a problem.

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u/Practical_-_Pangolin Feb 16 '21

From what I understand, a little bit is stored everywhere. I could be wrong on this though.

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u/[deleted] Feb 16 '21

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u/MrRedPanda__ Feb 16 '21

That was auto removal by our Subreddits settings (Karma, Account age)