[closed] Poll: Should 'vault' really be dropped or be replaced with a new term? And the latter, with what term?

Community
1

Polls apparently can not be edited after five minutes.
I did not know that and that’s a shame.
I will close the poll then and call it inconclusive.

Should ‘vault’, the term maidsafe used to describe
‘a lockbox that holds other people’s personal data’ really be dropped?

And if so, what term would you like it being replaced by?

Asked shamelessly by someone who thinks he found a good replacement word for it.
Other suggestions are welcome and I’ll try adding them in the poll as soon as possible once suggested.

  • vault (remain)
  • earn (drop it altogether)
  • node
  • farm
  • station
0 voters

vault

Remain vault as it is and have vault and safe mean very different things,
where one is users secure data space
and the other is a lockbox that holds other people’s personal data.

Drop the term don’t replace it

The argument here is that there is good noun to replace vault,
but one can use the term earn for generating money.

Leave it up to the Maidsafe team

Who cares? This is subject for the core developers, not users.

node

That’s kind of what it’s called right now to which Jim Collinson has said:

But since the ‘lockbox that holds other people’s personal data’ is on a redistribution point, using the term ‘node’ makes sense.

farm

Because the term ‘farming’ has been used for earning safecoins/safetokens.

station

Idea from myself @Folaht.
When I hear the word safe I think of either banks or train stations.
And when I think of ‘node with lots of functions that also contains things and earns money’,
then I think a train station would come closest to what a ‘node’ in a safe network functions like.

Rail network / Safe network

  • You have a network of stations connected to each other / You have a network of nodes.
  • Goodies are being transported / Data is being transported.
  • People are being transported / People visit nodes.
  • Stations earns one money, at least they did for me on Railroad Tycoon. / You ‘earn’ tokens for owning a ‘station’.
  • It has all kinds of shops there and some have lockboxes. / The data will consist of safes and files and such.
2

Is it perhaps better, if the poll is concerning the noun, to just stick to nouns?

It’s perhaps slightly skewed by the “Earn — drop it all together” option being in there.

For clarity, the proposal from MaidSafe is Node with verbs being the first to be surfaced as the priority in the UX.

5 Likes
3

I think the majority are happy with the new lexicon. Node makes sense in a backend context and safe makes sense to the front end as a user. It looks like the front end bleeds into the api but this is perfectly understandable because it is more abstracted and a direct relation to what the front end user will be experiencing. People that plan on running a professional rig/farm that may be working with the CLI and low level stuff will be more familiar with node. I guess I don’t see the real problem besides it maybe being some difference in meaning amongst different languages?

8 Likes
4

You can have a safe on the Network, but you can run a node of the Network. Right?

3 Likes
5

A node is synonymous with vertex, as in it’s a ‘knot’ in a network.
How do you run a knot?

6

You can pay tokens to have your own safe for storing stuff. You can earn tokens by running a node. Safes physically reside on nodes, but the farmers, or node operators, don’t know what (parts of) safes reside on their nodes. Right?

7

The inner workings you describe is correct, but calling them nodes I think is confusing.

8

Agreed. The mixing of parts of speech in the poll is confusing. The issues at play here seem to be: terminology and audience.

Terminology should answer two questions:

  • What is it? I.e. a noun like Safe vs. node vs. vault.
  • What does it do/can you do with it? I.e. a verb like earn vs farm.

Secondly, the terminology should be well-suited to the relevant audience: Non-technical Consumers (these are people who stay on the frontend, hobby earn/farm, and mostly use Safe dApps) vs. Technical Producers (these are people who dabble on the backend, they code/develop and earn/farm at scale)

What is it?

  • Safe seems friendly for frontend uses targeting Non-Technical Consumers.
  • Node seems to be more appropriate for Technical Producers.
  • One could argue that Vault could take the place of Node, but why brand (i.e. use a non-generic term on) the backend?

What does it do/can you do with it?

  • Earn might be more easily digestible for Non-Technical Consumers although I do think “farm” presents interesting branding opportunities on the frontend.
  • Farm might be more appropriate for Technical Producers.
2 Likes
9

Do you really think only a handful of people will remain on the backend?
There’s money to be made in safe farming and when there’s money to be earned, everyone jumps in.

10

I would vote node but I did not because what I really want is a vote ‘Leave it up to MaidSafe’.

No problems with brainstorming but a) people on the internet will use the word that suits them best anyway b) maidsafe have done a lot of thinking on this and I believe they have unique insights that allow them to make a suitable decision.

5 Likes
11

If Safe is to be successful this must be true. What percentage of the world’s population is technical? Very small. Just as it is with the present internet, most people will just consume and may hobby earn through things like e-commerce, gaming, etc. Only a small percentage of the population is technically skilled enough to produce value at scale by providing data centers, coding and deploying applications, etc.

Another way to think of this is, how many people engaged in the bitcoin network actually produce value (I.e. programming, mining, wallet creation, etc.) vs. just consume (I.e. trading, investing, e-commerce, etc.?

12

And polls apparently can not be changed after five minutes.
I just tried.
I did not know that and it’s a shame.
I will close the poll then and call it inconclusive.

2 Likes