Yes, that's 1 example. Take Germany, if they catch you downloading some torrents they offer you a 800 euro "settlement" so you wont be brought to court. People are scared to use P2P in that country. And a lot of people hate the big power of Facebook, Google, and the others. They want their have their own "decentralized Youtube" and social media. So if SAFE works the way it's intended people use Apps on their phones without even noticing it's a P2P technology.
Now will people need to buy safecoins to download data from the network? Or just to store data?
If free to download, people may use it in lieu of downloading torrents. The issue then is if anyone would
be willing to pay (in safecoins) to just give away files... what is their incentive?
Downloading from the network will always be free. You only need to pay when you want an account, register a domain or PUT (upload) data to the network. On BitTorrent nobody get's paid for anything. On SAFE everybody who delivers chunks to the network get's paid. That's the trick, when you deliver chunks out of your Vault to the network, like the real chunks your address in XOR is close to, you Farm some safecoin. These coins are created for you when you Farm. If someone uploads data to the network, they have to pay. The coins are then "un-owned" again so free for future farmers to Farm them again. So coins are recycled when someone uploads to the network. So this is it:
- Run a Vault (be a "seeder" on the network) and the network pays you. That's a great incentive
- Run the Client to upload data to the network and you pay the network
- Run the Client to upload "dynamic data" and you pay the network a bit more
- Run the Client and register a domain name and you pay the network
due to an incentive for running a Vault, a lot of people will. It's like getting Bitcoins for being a seeder on BitTorrent. And each mb. has at least 3 to 5 seeders. So for a 2000 mb. file we have like 10.000 nodes storing and delivering chunks in the hope to make some money.
So you never pay someone directly for storing data. The network does. And as a user you pay the network (give up the coins so someone else can farm them later on). But as a user you can use Safecoin for whatever you like. Tip someone, pay someone etc. Safecoin transactions are expected to take less than a second. Including all the confirmations.