Editing Permissioned resource coins (section)

=== Supply need not equal demand ===

Currently, all of our farmers have to keep their infrastructure online the entire time even when there’s no one using their services; Infrastructure needs electricity to run, and electricity costs money. A more efficient algorithm would be to periodically calculate a set of farmers who should keep their equipment online to meet future demand.

Instead of distributing contracts to farmers in order, we might instead use an algorithm to keep track of the current demand for storage space and double our expected supply. Supply would then come from farmers in order, but it would be allocated randomly in allocate_storage. Farmers who are chosen would then have an incentive to stay online which should also create enough leeway to meet any future surges in demand.

Thus, the full algorithm would resemble difficulty adjustments made in a regular blockchain. A small tweak is to have auctions, but only between farmers who were chosen for a given period. That way, there would still be some price competition, but not enough to drive prices into the ground.

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