Ethereum's Swarm (p2p storage) and Whisper (p2p messaging)

At the Ethereum meetup right now with where Vitalik is going over the roadmap for the group. A lot of it is super technical and I only understood like 1/4 of what is being discussed. I wish @dirvine was here… lol.

Anyways, he mentioned that they’re developing a p2p storage solution called Swarm and a p2p messaging solution called Whisper… both of which have off blockchain solutions to implement them.

Specifically regarding Swarm (from Home | ethereum.org)

Swarm is currently a concept-stage file storage and transmission protocol specifically targeted toward static web content hosting. Every piece of content in Swarm will be stored in the P2P network and will be addressable by its hash. The intent is for Whisper, Swarm and the Ethereum Protocol to be implemented together and accessible from the EtherBrowser to serve as a backbone for nearly any kind of application that theoretically can be decentralized. For example, a decentralized messaging system that enables users to send 140-character messages instantly and asynchronously to their subscribers will use Ethereum as a name registry mapping human-readable account usernames to the public key-based identities recognized by the system since you certainly do not want to be sending: decentralized-blast@cd2a3d9f938e13cd947ec05abc7fe734df8dd826. This type of decentralized messaging service will employ Whisper for sending messages, and Swarm for storing the static content that constitutes its HTML/JS/CSS webpage.

More info: Secret Sharing and Erasure Coding: A Guide for the Aspiring Dropbox Decentralizer | Ethereum Foundation Blog

@dallyshalla is also here so I’m sure he’s got comments of his own.

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That quote sounds like a summary of discussions from this forum. But they have respectable talents on their team so it’s most likely a case of “great minds think alike” :slight_smile:

  1. Why would I use Ethereum for that and pay for their “fuel”? Maybe it’ll work “better”, but it can’t be cheaper (if MaidSafe takes the “freebie” route for up to X MB/GB). However that also deincentivizes farmers, so for 100GB in that case it should pay more to farm for Ethereum than for MaidSafe (which is what I said in one of earlier posts, that farmers will run multiple farm software on the same h/w and lean toward farming platform that pays better).

  2. I already have between 5-10 browsers (FF, Opera, MS IE, 2 Chrome’s, and few more browsers on mobile devices) on my system. I’ll probably install the MaidSafe Browser. Now Ethereum is coming up with Ethereum browser. Does this make sense to anyone?
    It’s funny how few years ago we were hearing stories about browser based apps and how OS will be made obsolete. Instead we have 50 browser-based apps (that’s what most mobile apps are).
    It doesn’t seem like the victor will be some MS type company (Ethereum) that will dominate.
    These technologies (MaidSafe, Ethereum) will have to be integrated in major browsers to be successful and I don’t expect any company will rush to integrate Ethereum since they’re reminding me more and more of Google (want to do everything - what’s next - EtherAds?).
    If this turns into a situation where I have to start a different browser for different site, I’ll either pick one (e.g. “Safe Browser”) or stick to the one I use now so that I don’t have to switch and start a bunch of browsers.

By the way, VB’s earlier post on erasure coding was discussed on this forum here:
https://safenetforum.org/t/vitalik-praises-erasure-coding/1235

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I just found out more information about Swarm and Whisper on GitHub.

Looks like they are trying to reinvent MaidSafe-Routing and MaidSafe-RUDP.

Well Maidsafe have got an 8 year head start.

I wish these folks luck, but it’s very hard to do and may be wasteful to try too much all at once. We have been very focussed on this side of things and there is a ton of work as we know. For Ethereum though, they could learn a lot as we have a ton of resources code and repositories of simulations over years. So that would help them out.

Personally I would prefer they get a datum point and implement it solidly and then work from there. This kind of thing needs very focussed concentration and effort. If they ask for help I will if I have time, but best to implement the contract stuff they are talking about and see how it all works out. Many different approaches is good, but minimum for me is Privacy Security and Freedom, so never know your users and never leak information of any kind if possible.

Lets see if they have some ideas we can use and vice versa, it will only help I imagine, I cannot see it hinder, not the launch anyway, we are too far down that road. They say imitation is the greatest flattery though, so if this is a copy of rUDP and Routing then fantastic. Perhaps rUDP2 which will head for boost would be something they get some of their funds and devs behind and help out with, it would be very welcomed I think.

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I find it very odd. Ethereum had a plan back in January and I thought it sounded great. They hit problems because they hadn’t thought through how to do a crowdsale and it took them six months to solve them. They did the crowdsale on the basis of the original plan - at least I didnt’ see any big difference in the white paper - but with an unlimited funding round and no attempt to justify value.

All of a sudden the project has grown two new limbs, both of which as we know and @dirvine points out, are massively challenging problems.

Maybe they have lots of developers to call on, and lots of bitcoin to spend, but I’m so glad to be a part of MaidSafe and to have left Ethereum well alone. I really love their ideas and plans from January and think they should focus on delivering that first.

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Isn’t Ethereum closer to implement storage than Maidsafe is to implement coin?

Looks like they are getting into something…

Swarm seems to be ready, they have data deduplication, mutable data, appendable data:

And Whisper has transformed into Waku:

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