I saw this just posted on BitcoinTalk amid all the negative fud. Hope the poster doesn’t mind it reposted here as I think it relevant and nicely explained.
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Re: [ANN] IPO of MaidSafe: Entering the Future of the Decentralized Internet
Today at 12:19:34 PM
#2319
Quote from: wrxbuzz on Today at 08:34:20 AM
Quote from: zeeman on February 02, 2017, 10:08:50 PM
TEST 12 is live, you can now run a Vault from home if you have enough bandwidth. You can always connect to the network as a Client and upload data and more.
Enjoy!@!
You have endless tests in alpha test, when will you go into beta test? next year? And can we see real safecoin in 2020? It is miserable to wait for so long time.
Alpha is just Alpha. It lets you connect to nodes (Vaults) in a datacenter controlled by Maidsafe. They will sell this technology to companies as well (business to business). See it as a local SAFE Network. Maidsafe can’t read your data on Alpha 1. Same for local SAFE Networks, when a company has 25.000 computers on a network in 3 countries, a local SAFE Network would make things very secure. All data is encrypted locally on the user’s computer. So even when a hacker breaks in to the network, they need to get into the machine of an employee to install a keylogger an steal data. This is quite a big barrier and probably way more secure than what companies do these days.
About the real SAFE Network: They could move to Alpha 2 and let people run Vaults from home, but the issue is with “data integrity”. Your account is made up of personal files and when they’re gone after several days you probably won’t like it (your wallet will be a personal file as well!) Cheesy. That is currently a big problem with Freenet, Usenet and BitTorrent. Maidsafe said that they want to fix this before they move to BETA status. The solution is “datachain” probably with “archive nodes”. The datachain contains a list of all hashes of all files on the network. The archive nodes are paid to store as much data as they can. So they make it so secure that even after a complete global internet blackout the network could still reboot with all data recovered.
Implementing “Disjoint Groups” took over 3 months. it was a really big refactor of Routing. But it does makes things way more secure. The lower quote is true now, if an attacker controls 10% of all nodes they have only a 0.43% change to intercept a message from a certain group. This was 70% with the old routing.
Quote
The group messages do not provide a high level of protection against attacks on the network, even under the additional assumptions that routes are disjoint and that a quorum of the individual messages need to be intercepted. Assume that an attacker controls 10% of all nodes in the network, and group size is 8 and quorum size is 5. Consider a section message sent via 10 hops.
In that scenario, the chance to intercept any given group request is 71%. With the section-to-section hops proposed here, it will be just 0.43%. Further adjusting the section size and quorum size parameters, this can be reduced to a negligible number, making this kind of attack virtually impossible.
This is typically Maidsafe: they see a good solution to make things better, they work hard and test test test and even more test before they release. They did yesterday with TEST 12 and the network is very stable.
So, long story short: For BETA we’'ll need “Datachain” and “Node age” for both security reasons and data integrity. When they fix that (won’t be again 3 months I hope Tongue) they will really kick ass as a fully P2P, fully encrypted, fully decentralized network.