Funding for MaidSafe company - update

Regarding the users to aim at for launch - yes those groups (farmers, publishers, consumers) are the users, but I don’t think they are right target for the MVP demographic. Basically everything needs to be in place before those guys will wake up and that’s hard and risky. Picture targeting people like you guys, people who understand the idea, have development skills and want this thing built. They are the open source community and they consist of…

  • individuals (enthusiasts - everyone on this forum)
  • academics (PHD projects etc)
  • companies (want to improve their systems by using new tech - like that German GDPR client firm)
  • other projects which can build on the SAFENet once it is in place and working (@aboynejames project for example)

This is not a large group but they are easy to target because they are like most of your staff, they are the same demographic. They will become the core development team which MaidSafe staff will be peers of.

With them taking on much of the intellectual and labour burden off MaidSafe’s hands leaves MaidSafe with the role of repo managers / project managers which should be more scalable.

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The big problem there is number of connections per socket (1) and running out of sockets, TCP is old school that was and never was designed for p2p at scale. There are a lot of other things as per the post. UpNP will still be used though. We don’t have hole punch right now but will at some time, it is not in the critical path. We did the tests, they were great but we are not investing time to impl that before launch (most likely, unless we find project slack or big issues with folk connecting).

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These are though still folk that need 3 in place. It is just a sub section of users. Don’t get me wrong we do not want to build all the apps, or even any if we can get away with it and will support others where we can. We are providing the infrastructure which is mostly to allow 1 & 2 above, but helping the 2 category get their own 3 category (consumers). The balance is fine and we could debate it for eternity, it is a valid debate and one that should roll through the project. What can we do without? this is a question even we have got terribly wrong many times. Some parts are just not possible, like publicly accessible testnets with no safecoin, safecoin with no data et. They are all destined to fail.

the how much do we do in the producer category is a valid and continual question, too little, we fail, too much we run out of cash at best etc. The community is key in this part and they just need a few more tools to be able to shine and build for the future properly. When that happens we clarify the API properly with safecoin) then we will have much better visibility of that part. We may move to maintenance and less improvements or we may go even bigger if needed. We will soon see though.

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Okay, good stuff. More power to you. I’m going to move my attention over to this nice thread to see if I can be more positively contructive rather than negatively so (both valuable but the former is more fun :slight_smile: )

https://forum.autonomi.community/t/current-unsolved-safe-questions/

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IMO, there is no ‘perhaps’ regarding their over-optimism back then … however, if they hadn’t been so optimistic and had realized how long it was going to take … then we wouldn’t be here today having this conversation and there would be no Maidsafe. So personally, I’m quite happy that they were so incredibly optimistic. I do believe that they have learned the reality of the overall proposition quite well by this point, so expect that, even though they don’t talk about timelines, they probably have a pretty decent sense of where it all is … and so they have my trust that they’ll get the job done.

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Just stay away from Mr. inbetween :slight_smile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Qk9o_ZeR7s

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:sparkles::sparkles: :tophat: :musical_keyboard: :postal_horn: :trumpet: :speaker: :dancer: :dancing_women: :sparkles::sparkles:

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An illustration of this just now…
https://twitter.com/yeastplume/status/1125783058613981185

This is around $300k donated anonymously from some early adopter because they felt like it.

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I’m suspicious of that. Never heard of them. And their websites down.

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That’s the Commodore logo. Edit: never mind, that just means that this Yeastplume has experience.

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Yeast-plume is the lead dev of the open source, donation funded, Grin project.

I think Grin is a good example of the direction I was proposing for MaidSafe. MaidSafe is currently a fairly classic corporate enterprise with some crowdfunding tacked on. They open source their code so the community does have the option of collaborating but so far that hasn’t really happened. I was suggesting that a different tack might help. We got into a long discussion about resource allocation and so on. Grin is a pure FLOSS project and the contributors donate their time and ask for financial donations to keep going. They have really struggled to get funding but never-the-less delivered a working design and implementation on their own time and at their own risk. They are now starting to get more funding as the crowd can use what they have built and believes in them - well at least some crypto-wealthy do as demonstrated by the above tweet.

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Time to bring in a known VC that understands and is aligned with the vision of the company. There are several of them these days. Several blockchain related ventures raised hundreds of millions of dollars in private rounds (not to mention non-public private ICO rounds as well). Good to have a noted VC on board whose vision is aligned with the company. That would be the best bet, in my opinion. Sometimes you need this to bring the company to succeed at corporate level.

may not be bad to start with VC companies looking at inrupt as SAFE and inrupt go hand in hand. The vision, in my mind, should surrounded around providing a secure and decentralized data storage framework/solution (huge market for it) and focusing on bottlenecks of competing technologies. I, personally, would not try to sell the pitch “new internet” - that will/may come with it but decentralized storage alone will have huge takers. New internet pitch brings in questions around adoption etc. I think SAFE team should project the business plan in solution stacks where decentralized storage solution can work separately from the ‘new internet’ solution. Decentralized storage is multi trillion market alone!. Just my 2 cents : )

and governments will not be opposed to it either - as every govt needs secure storage - even to protect their own data.

Also, if there is censorship etc, and authorities want to shut down SAFE/new internet down, (without getting into the debate of possible/not possible), if SAFE’s decentralized storage solution can be implemented independently, it will survive and will be fruitful to long time investors/holders in this venture like me who bought at .40-.75. This is something that notable VCs will be looking at as well.

You may want to start with Tim Draper. He is a long time bitcoin supporter and I would be surprised if he has not heard of SAFE network. It may very well be that he is not aware that SAFE team is looking for additional funding. A news of big VC will bring immediate attention to this project as well.

Another avenue may be to explore partnerships with well funded companies like Blockstream and Blockstack. These are companies that truly believe in decentralization. They are also not nearly as money minded as many others. A partnership with them to become the preferred decentralized storage solution for them will be awesome - and they will provide funding too to complete the project. A win-win. And vision may be aligned as well. I would certainly explore VCs interested in inrupt as well, as mentioned earlier.

Grin, I believe, is a test bed for new technologies coming to bitcoin. Most core developers proposing solutions and contributing to grin are developing on bitcoin but may want to be testing everything on Grin first before bringing it on to Bitcoin. and most VCs probably know it hence haven’t backed grin so much. Just my personal opinion.

I’m not convinced storage alone is enough to get people excited. Cloud storage is dirt cheap and getting cheaper, and while SAFE may be more secure and decentralised, existing solutions are often ‘secure enough’ for most business. Then it becomes a matter of performance and convenience, which is where the big cloud players excel.

I think it needs to be a storage-plus offering, although I agree that going straight in with ‘the new internet’ would be premature.

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Agreed. But any new technology needs to be pitched as solution to pitfalls of the current ones. Cloud storage is centralized and a hacker’s paradise. Something that SAFE is solving for with a novel approach.
I would even go an extent further. SAFE should also look at the model that some of these out of the box mining companies are using. Imagine if SAFE could develop a plug and play storage drive that would have all software installed and shipped to a user. All the user needs to do is simply plug it in a wall socket and earn SAFEcoins automatically. To view the SAFECOIN balance, simply Download an App from Iphone/android app store that would map the device to the specific user via some product ID on the storage device.

Everyone can plug a device into a wall. Alternatively, SAFE team can partner with an existing mining device company that provides plug and play mining devices and add SAFE as a coin that the user could earn on it. This is what we need for adoption.
Storage plus offering sounds good too :).

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A plug and play storage drive would certainly be a good start, so long as people make enough to cover their costs. TBH I’m not that familiar with cryptos and haven’t seen an out of the box mining company rig, but I know Sia developed their own ASIC for mining Siacoin and promptly had it copied by Bitmain.

IMHO the application layer with an easy to use API and preferably one or two really professional apps will also be needed as a minimum to get people interested.

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There are new companies popping up with plug and play mining devices. These have a decent CPU/memory as well. I recently ordered one and am yet to receive : )

No software downloads, nothing. Just plug into a wall socket, select the coin you want to mine on the App and the device does everything. The device comes preinstalled with all software. All software updates are also handled directly via the App - just click and it updates the device.

Once the SAFE network is in beta or close to launch, it will be great to have one of these plug and play device companies to also enlist SAFE as a coin on the App. It will help adoption overnight and make storage available on 1000s of devices. Certainly, as awareness grows, people will earn SAFE coin directly via their computers etc as well. The above plug and play model is just a simple way to bring in the folks who are not fully familiar with infrastructure/softwares needed to be able to earn Safecoin.

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Storage alone no, but storage which is kept forever with No monthly fees- yes :wink: On Sia and Storj contracts are time-based, if you forget to renew your information is “bye bye Miss American Pie” :smiley: The thought of this causes my brain to explode…
this-makes-the-brain-explode-com-17607504

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