What would happen to MaidSafe if the internet was turned off or somehow destroyed? Does MaidSafe rely on an internet connection to function?
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If the internet ceased to exist, the Safe network would die with it. But following a working implementation of datachains & data re-publish could in theory resurrect if a sufficiently well connected mesh-network of some kind were established between nodes.
There have been a few previous discussions on this forum around building an alternative mesh-network or similar for the Safe network in the future, so well worth a search.
I like the idea of the future Safe network incentivising infrastructure provision & bandwidth in a similar way it’ll incentivise storage resources at launch, and later processing resources.
Perhaps a lack of incentivisation is an important reason mesh networks haven’t yet developed to be generally useful or competitive.
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Could SAFE work trough CJDNS ? ( Supposing that there are sufficient CJDNS nodes )
Yes. I had brought up about this idea a year or two years ago. It is compatible because CJDNS is IP bound.
I personally believe the combination of CJDNS and Safenet increases better security. Safenet requires the first hop. That first hop is critical because it requires trust… CJDNS is about trust. The first hop knows you’re connected to safe even though safe is obscured through security by using http and tcp protocols.
The downfall is if the community use safenet within the meshnet without connecting to outside world, everybody would know who posted what… It requires more than 32 nodes, to increase anonymity. So don’t bother using cjdns for this sole reason. However, if the community doesn’t care about the case of anonymity but the case of storing data, then it’s okay.
I had been thinking about that lately as well.
Seems like if we can found a way to run servers on some sort of sustainable clean energy (like zero-point-energy) it would help. But that still relies on servers being intact. In the case on an EMP, that would still fail.
Maybe deep underground bunkers that are shielded from EMP/Solar flares?
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If EMP occurred, then you have bigger problems to worry about than the internet.
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Lets face it if the internet went down western society is wiping off the stuff that hit the fan.
Every month more and more processes are being moved over to using the internet to save time and money and allow more productivity. If the internet disappeared then we could not do enough to have what we have now. It is almost at the point were western society would start to break down.
- ordering of produce for wholesalers and retailers would be crippled because the companies just cannot handle the volume manually.
- Mobile phones are mostly dead since the mobile providers are now using internet protocols to transfer your voice packets.
- VOIP is dead so there goes many companies phone systems
- All those people who have the phone service delivered through the internet will have none.
Basically if the internet dies then most people will be losing their phones, companies cannot process the orders and many will simply close down since they cannot get the work space and pay extra employees to handle things manually. Communications die since nearly all communications use the internet somewhere in the communications path.
Basically SAFE survivability will be at the bottom of the worry list if the internet suddenly ceased to exist.
THEN for the internet to cease to exist would also likely mean that complex electronics also die. And the consequences of that is even worse.
We will be back to radio comms till we could rebuild. People will suffer and some die for lack of food etc since food retailers cannot get enough product to sell.
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Wouldn’t MESH networking be ideal in this type of scenario. Granted, you’d still need to have access to electricity in some form to even power the batteries.
Firechat is an example of a current ios/android App that uses such communication network.
Do we have it now?
Not in any way that can satisfy interstate ordering of goods etc. It would take time to setup any mesh network, then to have one that could handle business, government, banking, etc is a long time off. So what I said above is the situation for a year or two at least and is the time the worse of it will happen.
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Another thing to bear in mind is that if the internet was ‘destroyed’, it’d be re-built very quickly due to demand for it.
So any outage wouldn’t be likely to last very long, and it’s perhaps not likely enough to happen in the first place to give too much time to seeking a solution to such an unlikely problem.
However, an incentivised mesh network that competes with the existing internet infrastructure in provision of bandwidth could be very interesting irrespective of whether there’s ever a serious outage of the entire internet. It may also be a very good fit for a future Safe network.
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You could run SAFE on a network built outside the current interweb. We had BBS’s with SLIP/PPP before the public could get on the internet. We have mesh networks that could interlink, leased lines, ADSL and fibre.
You don’t need the current internet in order to have a global network. It’s only internet because people refer to that backbone as being such. BT’s 21CN could plug into another, or develop it’s own, interconnectedness with a bit of effort.
20 years ago a db admin told me the internet was like a drunken brother in law. Lot’s of fun, but nothing you could depend upon. At that time they had their own Harris switch (effectively their own telephone company) in their offices. Oh how times have changed.
You’d do just as well to ask how SAFE would function without electricity, or how the devs would function without IRN BRU.
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Sure.
And in the issue being discussed, The meshnet would possibly protect SAFE
network in the case of "end of internet " scenario.
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