Is it impossible to shut down safenet?

Updates can still be done after the network has gone live. It’s a case of modifying the software which people use to interact with the network. I suppose the sticking point (which might be what you’re considering) would come when an update is favoured which is not backwards compatible with the existing network software. This situation could still be managed, but it makes it more complicated.

Please take into account that my technical knowledge is extremely limited, and I’m giving this opinion based almost entirely on my logical reasoning…:grimacing:

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If 51% of the miners agree then a new version can be adopted.

Similar, if people agree then the network migrates to the new version. The difference really is that unlike bitcoin the new version of SAFE would by necessity have to work with the previous version, whereas bitcoin can be incompatible at the mining level. The reason is that SAFE is so widespread that it would be impossible for everyone to upgrade at the same time, and for SAFE many are not computer people. Whereas bitcoin miners have the ability to upgrade all at once and is thousands/millions times fewer operators.

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Bitcoin is constantly worked on. Changes are made to the nodes and the miners on a regular basis. It’s just that these changes usually don’t change how the network fundamentally works. But just today, another major improvement will (most likely) be locked in (https://www.xbt.eu). To be activated two days later, iirc.

As neo has said, usually a majority will have to support the changes for them to activate. Safenet will be like that. There will also be the chance of a network split, like in bitcoin.

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Ya, I think it is 336 blocks later, so like 2.3 days

Not quite. It’s easy for bitcoin to split since everyone have a copy of the same database. On Safe, the database is distributed, so it’s more like splitting a database in two in a completely random way.

Safe is quite resilient to a split. So it’s better to just fork the code and start from scratch. But that would be akin to making an altcoin. So an “altsafe” if you will :slight_smile:

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I was explaining the goals of the safenetwork to a friend. I told him it was basically impossible to stop or censor the network, once it reaches a certain amount of users. He asked me if there is a way for the government (Or anyone, really) to identify that a computer is on the Safenetwork? He said if they can determine who is using the safe network they could stop it. Anyone have any information or could point me to a post that explains some of this. My current understanding is that all the data will be encrypted before it leaves the computer and will be in packets that look like all other packets of data…

THANKS!!

You can read the basic of Safe P2P here:

About your concern, the most important part is the secure communication:

Finally all communication is crypto-secure. When two peers exchange information out of band it involves exchanging public asymmetric keys. All messages between peers (including handshake) are encrypted and signed with different nonces each time, so cannot be spoofed.

The message to the rendezvous servers includes our public key so the message they send back is encrypted. This prevents some routers/firewalls from identifying it’s a rendezvous attempt by looking at the message body and thus either mangling or discarding the packet. Such routers/firewalls seem to scan for socket addresses in the body and if it matches the ones in the router’s pool they try to figure out it’s a rendezvous/STUN attempt. With encrypted contents there is no chance of such detection, so we are safe there.

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