Introduce yourself

Note: Non-Intro Posts Will Be Deleted!

We think this topic works best as a list of introductions without replies or discussions, so please only post your intro here - if you want to say hi or discuss anything, please use a PM or start a new topic.


First Intro

My name is David Hedqvist and I have been interested in Bitcoin since learning about it in 2011. I have been active as a moderator on bitcoin.stackexchange.com and in the Scandinavian section of bitcointalk.org. I also run a Swedish site about bitcoin on www.bitcoin.se. My dayjob is as a software developer, mostly programming in C#.

I am really eager to follow the progress of MaidSafe and to see if it can deliver on its promises. If it does, there is no doubt in my mind that it will be a huge success, and Iā€™ll try to help out where I can to make it so.

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I am David Irvine @dirvine and have been working on MaidSafe for many years now.

I started life as a mechanical Engineer, then went on to Electronic engineering finally as a graduate Engineer for a computer company (Thorn EMI). From there went on to consult with many large corporate clients and become involved in network design as well as integration of networks etc. Spent many years in different countries working on large scale networks, mostly as lead designer and demanding to be hands on with the installers. Returned to Scotland in 1996 and started an IT support company, later on designing a new server based system (eboxit).

After a few years realised this would not work as a business in Scotland and also that servers were actually the problem, so started on a path to remove servers from our Internet, This involved a few years of pondering, delivering yachts between IT contracts. Late in 2005 it all started to make sense, I built some demo systems to prove the ideas. In Feb 2006 MaidSafe started.

MaidSafe has required us to tackle many issues including self authentication, self encryption and of course an autonomous network. This has proven to be very much more work that envisaged with us writing our own transport system and DHT, only later realising traditional DHTā€™s were not up to the job. So we designed a faster and more accurate DHT.

Each of these advances were probably business opportunities in their own right, but we were chasing a much larger goal. So with a small team and many months and years of discussion, testing and continuously rewriting algorithms we ended up with a system that works. Introducing the crypto currency has the ability to make this network much more capable and efficient.

Getting here has been tough, but being here is amazing. None of us thought the sacrifices we would make would be so high, but none of us ever forgot the obligation we had to make this happen. It is not over, but we have covered all the parts we had to and are very confident all that is left is test and tweak. The design patterns are all very solid now.

This project is only possible with a large community of backers, builders and designers and that was a vital part of the story. That part is now fixing itself.

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Iā€™m Wesley Green. Iā€™ve been interested in computers since age 9 when I built my first computer from spare parts of a family friend. Soon thereafter I got into the hacking scene. I started a degree in CyberSecurity at Stevens Institute of Technology but had my financial aid taken away just over halfway through - finance related, not grades.

I ā€œtook some time offā€ to make some money to go back but found it more profitable to keep the job I got than finish my degree. Working as an electrician takes up the vast majority of my time, but I try my best to remember my roots and be involved in projects like Bitcoin and Maidsafe that have world-changing implications.

I look forward to helping out this project in any ways that I can with my limited amount of free time available.

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Iā€™m Ben (Benjamin Bollen). Iā€™ve always held a strong belief that in order to solve problems, you first need to make a serious effort to understand everything about the problem. Following this belief I have spent the last ten years studying nature (Iā€™m a theoretical physicist). Past August (2013) I made a decision to test what Iā€™ve learnt so far and apply these new ideas to actually solving real world problems.

To this effort Iā€™m working to build a prototype of a long-held dream, a tool for augmented intelligence, under project name Seetale. Realising this still remains a big challenge (and I will in the foreseeable future run out of university funding :wink: ) I am functionally dividing the project into ā€˜smallerā€™ independent projects (so far Intertricity and We The Artists).

(re)Discovering MaidSafe three months ago was a gift from heaven. It can boost several of my projects, so currently I have developed a high personal stake in making this technology work - and wrapping my own head around it first ! ( which is not always easy :smile: )

So Iā€™m incredibly lucky to find such an incredible community to push for a new world. Happy to be here !

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Iā€™m David Yamanaka. I am a Business Systems Analyst or BSA. Personally, I donā€™t care for titles but that is what my programmer friend said when I couldnā€™t figure out my role in the company. My old boss said I was the oil in the engine, making all the gears work. Not sure if that was a compliment or not?

I stumbled into the SAFE Project while trying to solve the scalability of public ledgers. After reading David Irvineā€™s articles, I joined the dev list to help the project become a reality. It has already come a long way, and we still have many more miles to go. But I wouldnā€™t miss this ride for anything!

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My name is Russell and Iā€™m a commercial and feature editor in Los Angeles, CA. I most frequently work on national commercial spots but work on a feature or two a year. I try to sneak in some artsy music videos and short films when I can. I have a background in programming as I studied it through middle school and high school but shifted over to film and editing as it seemed to have the potential to marry the technical with the creative.

Iā€™m fascinated by new methods of media distribution that help get content creators a larger piece of their well-deserved pie, and less to the gatekeepers. I am completely against piracy philosophically and believe that artists should be able to determine the value of their own products.

I am fascinated by the Bitcoin protocol as a system of programmable value that can one day help streamline the payment of entertainment. And MaidSafe seems to be the platform to extend this even further (in even more important ways), as it distributes the bandwidth weight over the network, something that the entertainment industry desperately needs for streaming of high-quality material without massive server costs.

Iā€™m also intrigued by this as a system for backing up huge projects. Editing projects get massive, between the source material and working material. Between 1TB and 15TB for everything. Usually 200GB to 2TB for the working files that are used frequently. Multiply that by 10-20 projects going at once and things get big, fast. So finding new ways to have accessible backups of that is huge.

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Iā€™m Mark Hughes / happybeing / theWebalyst and am very old, well old enough to have used Microsoft ROM basic in a single board computer I built from a kit and housed a cardboard box, later upgraded to a wooden fruit box sturdy enough for a full height 5.25" floppy drive, and other goodies, which I had to design myself - hand etching the pcbs, wrote a simple DOS, all self taught cos we were the first back then!

Studying physics didnā€™t get me near the job I wanted, but all that hobbying soon landed me the best first job in the world, if you donā€™t count my first job building radar magnetrons while sneaking off to play with the brand new company mainframe :slight_smile: until I landed at a premier design & development house in Cambridge with lots of bright people, much brighter than me, designing digital bits to go in all sorts of different fascinating gizmos, from mass market, to top secret, to technical wizardryā€¦ later migrating to writing software for the same very varied range of multi-disciplinary projects.

As if that wasnā€™t the luck of the devil, when I got too costly to be allowed to do the interesting stuff, I crowbarred myself into a startup software company that created ground breaking visualisation software for investigation and analysis. It grew from five to 150 and put this clever, superbly easy to use software in the hands of cops and spooks (I know), the world over, in the days before most police didnā€™t have a PC (the computer that is) in the office, and had to buy one just to use our cool software. We found it necessary to use dongles to stop the police pirating the stuff!

All the while I was doing other cool stuff writing and selling my own and othersā€™ software and hardware from magazine pages and later over the internet, and eventually the web. I always loved creating tools for myself first, then packaging them for others, things like Agile HTML Editor which I still like if I ever delve into raw HTML.

These days Iā€™m semi-retired but still very busy with fixing up my new off-grid narrowboat home, and just being.

Iā€™m also an idealist, keyboard activist, philosopher (oh, qualified counsellor slipped in there somewhere), and very concerned about the concentration of power in corporations and a wealthy elite that is destroying our society, planet and civilisation. The problem as I see it is that they subvert rather than foster human values, by placing profit and financial gain as goals for a few rather than as a means to a better world for all.

In this vein Iā€™m a fan of physicist David Bohm, as David Irvine is of Richard Feynman. The former said science needs to change its mindset or it will continue to create more problems while trying to solve the ones weā€™ve already created. I think he was right. He explained this to colleagues but most didnā€™t get it then, and still havenā€™t got it yet. This is available on YouTube (link below), and even though this is from 1989, science has not yet recognised this and is still working with an out of date broken world view. Highly recommended - Bohm is a pleasure to listen to as he explains quantum mechanics for lay people, the paradoxes, theories of perception, and how a simple shift in scientific perspective can explain it all, and also will help us save our civilisation.

Must watch David Bohm interview 1989 still way ahead of the current broken scientific world-view.

Whether or not heā€™s seen Bohmā€™s ideas, I think David Irvine gets this. Ultimately itā€™s a kind of holism: the universe being a whole that has divided into parts, which then make up larger more complex parts, rather than starting as parts that come together to make larger parts and then a whole. Bohm believed this went to the heart of physics as well as being a better mindset that would enable science to overcome its obvious limitations when trying to fix world problems.

I care deeply about nature and people (even though I often find it hard to be around them - I need a lot of space to be me), and about the world my two kids, and possibly their kids, will inherit.

Fixing the internet is dear to my heart because of all of the above, so when I came across MaidSafe through a post on Diaspora I quickly saw its potential, and began following the project. Since then, everything Iā€™ve learned about David Irvine, his ideals, the foundation, his team, the technology and what this can achieve inspires me to be involved. Iā€™m here with a variety of experience, masses of enthusiasm, if not as much patience and energy as many of you. I hope if I ruffle any feathers youā€™ll forgive me, let me know, and weā€™ll get on with what matters, which is making ā€œSAFEā€ Network a household name, as familiar as the ā€œwebā€ which it may well replace.

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Iā€™m Christophe Aguettaz. Software engineer by trade, but currently on a sabbatical. A couple of years ago, I started getting fed up with the state of the ā€˜cloudā€™ as we know it and looking for alternatives which would allow me to remain in control of my data while benefiting from the cloudā€™s ease of use and access.

I did surveys every now and then, but didnā€™t find any project that was close to being viable, and had come to the conclusion that Iā€™d probably have to craft my own solutions. If this turned out well enough, and if I managed to gather a small community around the project, I thought I could turn the thing into a platform, and maybe even a business. And then I found out someone had come to more or less the same conclusionā€¦ only, something like 20 years ago, and had actually put in the work to make this a reality.

So here I am now, hoping that MaidSafe (or something equivalent) will make it big so that I can finally use the equivalent of Gmail without handing all of my private data in plain text to third parties that canā€™t be trusted.

This seems now more urgent than ever, with globally increasing levels of Internet regulation and unwarranted surveillance. Iā€™m not an optimist, far from it, but hereā€™s to hoping that technical solutions can sometimes alleviate political problems.

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I moved 3 posts to a new topic: MaidSafe and physics experiments (split from ā€œIntroduce yourselfā€)

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Hi, My name is Willie Fleming, been involved with PCs for over 20 years after Thatcher killed engineering in Scotland and I had to reskill myself or face middleage on the dole. I was intrigued by Bitcoin and then when I heard of MaidSafe a month or so ago, I was totally bowled over. This is truly disruptive technology and can be an amazing democratising force for all of the wired world.

I am not a programmer, all I know about computers I taught myself, unfortunately C++ is not in my skillset nor is it likely to be, I hope to add value to the community as a tester, early data farmer and hopefully integrator and facilitator for folk who can program at a higher level than I can aspire to.

Very pleasedĀ  to learn that David Irvine is a fan of Richard Feynman, he is one of my all time heroes and like David, can take very complex ideas and present them in a way that is accessible to the rest of us.

I look forward to see where this technology takes us, like Scotland itself at this time, nothing is ever going to be quite the same again. Iā€™m up for the ride :slight_smile:

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Hi, Iā€™m Filipe Farinha (aka [ktorn][1]) and I have a background in computing.

Started programming when I was 11 years old, got a BSc (Hons) in Computing Studies from London South Bank University (1999), a postgraduate diploma in Artificial Intelligence from Edinburgh University (2001), and now doing a Masters in IT at the University of Saint Joseph (USJ) in Macau.

Iā€™ve started my professional experience as a trainee programmer at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in Reading, UK (1997), and have since worked for a large number of companies, mostly as a server side Java developer. I moved to Macau in 2009 and now Iā€™m working as Project Manager at USJ.

On my spare time I run a small lifestyle business, [MacauSource][2], mostly doing VPS and web hosting and a few odd jobs here and there. Currently launching a small [Maker Store][3] for the local market (and of course, working to accept cryptocurrencies as payment).

Also with regards to cryptocurrency, I am a [local Bitcoin trader][4] in Macau, and Iā€™m also involved with the [ABIS][5] microdonations project, along with fellow visionary and Bitcoin Foundation member Colin Gallagher.

As part of my Masters degree Iā€™m working on a project called [Grokya][6], which started as a concept back in 2006 and which I have been slowly baking in my notebooks and more recentlyĀ  with actual code.

My primary goal with Grokya is to build a decentralised and user-controlled ā€œdigital mindā€, and offer it as a viable alternative to traditional consumer profiling techniques by third-parties (i.e. Big Data). Itā€™s a first step towards my vision of the Internet of Minds (IoM), which together with the Internet of Things (IoT) can one day hopefully deliver true context-aware computing without any of the privacy issues normally associated with it.

Iā€™m very excited about MaidSafe has to offer in this regard. Looking forward to work with this community and build a better Internet!

[1]: http://twitter.com/ktorn
Ā  [2]: http://macausource.mo
Ā  [3]: https://maker.macausource.mo/store/
Ā  [4]: bitwisebank on LocalBitcoins.com - LocalBitcoins
Ā  [5]: http://abis.io
Ā  [6]: http://grokya.org

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My name is David Lasoff. I am 55 years old and live in a community near Jerusalem, Israel. I am the director of an English language program at a local university. I am teaching myself C++ now. My goal is to become proficient enough within a near-term time frame to do ā€œjuniorā€ kinds of programming tasks as a member of an applications development team ā€¦we are never too old to learn and become part of the future, an exciting future that the MaidSafe team seems quite determined to create. My attitude about farming is to simply a dedicate a machine or two, earn a little SafeCoin and become an active small farmer as part of the MaidSafe community. I will also be looking for future builder opportunities to apply my nascent, not-yet-budding ā€œblue collarā€ programming capabilities to free-to-user app development in the next few years. I have a vision for re-purposing myself and also the 50-70 year olds like me to become something akin to ā€œworker beesā€ in free-to-user network applications development. It may or may not be a new idea but itā€™s a good idea and I hope others are thinking this way too vis-a-vis creating real solutions for those adversely affected by the collapse of the old economies, etc. By assigning ā€œjuniorā€ or the simpler tasks to less-experienced programmers, the speed of which program/project managers can deliver app solutions can greatly increase, especially on a new network that aspires to replace the old internet. This need for such a ā€œblue collarā€ applications development workforce could be especially useful where the need to create myriad free applications is needed. So, I hope that I will be able to experiment with this vision for both myself and other smart middle-aged people. The MaidSafe network and what David Irvine and his team are up to frankly makes me giddy. Free-to-user applications is such a smart way to go. Iā€™m NOT exactly clear yet about how itā€™s economically viable for the MaidSafe foundation to pay developers of free applications except to say that I think it must be coming from the natural appreciation of the value of SafeCoin as the value-added proposition of the MaidSafe network becomes more and more obvious. Iā€™d be interested in hearing from people to either confirm or refute my thinking about this. The possibilities of MaidSafe, in and of itself, intrinsically increases my motivation to learn C++. I know I can do it and then weā€™ll see what happens. Anyway, I can see that programming teams can create contracts for junior programmers to do ā€œblue collarā€ work with incentives for shares in the application revenue. Programmers, both senior and junior can contract as they see fit and as they decide whatā€™s fair. I will be looking to join teams/pods/cells when my skill level is appropriate to the first step of my vision: basic competency in C++ programming with a sort of proof of concept by actually participating in one or more projects for free, just for the experience (like an ex-ternship, etc).

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My name is Pablo Guerra, have a brick and mortar collectibles store since 1998 here in Valladolid, Spain, a 300K+ city in the north, famous for Ribera de Duero wines and the city in which Miguel de Cervantes fist published his ā€œDon Quixoteā€.
My main interests are collectibles, economy, technology and the markets that unite all those three topics.

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After my topic about reasons to farm from day 1, I think itā€™s appropriate to introduce myself a little bit.

Iā€™m Melvin from The Netherlands and have been interested in Bitcoin since 2012/13.

The next big thing I found in the Bitcoin area was Mastercoin and I read about Maidsafe before they started connecting with the Bitcoin world. So the fact that the MaidSafe team used the Master Protocol for creating their coins made me very happy off course.

Iā€™m not very technical but iā€™m trying to follow all the topics here, and reading about Proof Of Unique Human and other new stuff is amazing. Iā€™ll be farming from day one and will try to contribute to the community as much as I can.

Good luck developers and community!

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Hi!
Iā€™m Paige and Iā€™m going to be working to organize a safe network developer hub out here in San Fransisco!
Iā€™ve been really excited about the MaidSafe technology ever since reading about it in Wired earlier this year. I met David and Nick at the Texas Bitcoin conference after watching their presentation and becoming even more excited having realized the opportunity for a new Internet was imminent and this new Internet needed useful apps (and developers to make those apps) for the network effect to be successful.

Iā€™m going to be setting up a weekly meetup to focus on facilitating local builder collaboration where thereā€™s also opportunity to present on different projects/topics. Iā€™ve already met several people at various bitcoin related events that are interested and excited about building on the safe network.

Bit of background about me:
In general, I have a lot of interest in liberating technologies with a preference for those that are decentralized and open source. Until a couple of months ago, I had been working as the community manager and in-house designer for the mesh networking startup Open Garden. I handled most of their customer support, social media, asset design, website design/maintenance, etcā€¦Ā 
I left mostly to find other opportunities. I still do contract work for them from time to time. https://opengarden.com

I currently organize the SF Bitcoin Meetup which has 1200+ members and a monthly social event attracting about 200 people. http://www.meetup.com/San-Francisco-Bitcoin-Social/

I also currently work part-time for this company called Cambrian doing UI/UX and website design. Theyā€™re at the beginning stages of building a platform for decentralized entrepreneurship (name still
unknown). I think itā€™s a perfect application to be built on top of the safe network and theyā€™ve been seriously looking into that possibility. I will continue to talk them into it. :slight_smile: http://cambrian.org/

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Hi, my name is Bruno, and iā€™m from Buenos Aires, Argentina.
My first computer was a Sinclair 1000, in the 80ā€™s. I used to encode in z-80 assembler.
Here we say ā€œMucha agua paso bajo el puente desde esos tiemposā€ (much water under the bridge from that times).
Now iā€™m working in .Net and i use SQL Server databases.
My education in IT was largely self-taught.
I believe MaidSafe like BitCoin are revolutionary ideas, and can transform this world in a better world.
Iā€™m interested in being a farmer and then develop business aplication.
I hope to use .Net and SQL Server, but if it is not possible, shall begin to learn from the beginning like as I did all my life.
Iā€™m sorry for my English, and greetings to all.

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Travis Remington from Salt Lake City USA. I became interested in the SAFE network around the time of the crowd sale, which I invested. I see the beauty and power of a decentralized network and will be farming and growing this seedling from day one. My associate and I have been collecting hardware and boosting connection speeds in preparation. Currently getting around 20 Mbps upload consistently (from multiple sites), low cost power and an endless motivation to be a part of building the future network of the world.

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Iā€™m Chadrick Mahaffey (or McFie to my Scottish brethren) from Michigan, United States. Libertarian and freedom loving at heart, the idea of SAFE gives me a lot of hope for our future. I taught myself to program way back in the days of BASIC and Iā€™ve been developing web apps for food since 2001. I have extensive experience with C# on the back-end. Iā€™ve done some work with C++ but only a little. Iā€™ve been interested in BitCoin for quite some time but have not been very involved with the community. I have a lot of side ā€œwantrepreneurā€ projects that I work on nights and weekends. Now I want to be a ā€œbuilderā€ for SAFE. If anyone wants to talk about building something specific, letā€™s chat.

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Iā€™m from china.
I canā€™t waiting safe to release

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Hi, this is Giulio http://giulioprisco.com/ @giulioprisco. Maidsafe seems a solid contender in the race to build the decentralized, anonymous user-friendly, distributed, open and free Internet that we have been preaching for a long time now. I will watch with a lot of interest.

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