I think we’re forgetting the 75% of the world that sits behind government controlled internet, like I’m seeing here in Indonesia this week, and previously elsewhere in Asia.
But even for the western world, having an internet where no parts are controlled by any government, big company, or any type of group whatsoever makes so many current mainstream internet systems irrelevant and outdated on day 1 of safe launch.
Compared to the safe network 100% uncensored, free, and not to mention decentralized versions, the following things will be irrelevant:
YouTube
Netflix
Dropbox
AWS for web page hosting
GCP for web pages / blogs
wikileaks
all types of marketplaces
Reddit (doesn’t have micropayments for votes :,( )
Visa type card payments
every government currency
every blockchain currency
every blockchain project
etc etc etc
SAFE only has to disrupt one of these companies to become bigger than bitcoin.
If that’s considered small to you @monty then I’d love to learn what you use the internet for
I have read the posts here and I still don’t quite understand how SAFE will be better than the free internet. I do appreciate the concept of data storage and being able to offset costs by providing resources oneself; I joined because I will use this feature.
One of the criticisms of the internet in general is that it facilitates the dissemination of pornography and makes it easy for terrorists to share information. Social Media sites are beginning to censor material because they have been used by evil people to subvert others to their warped world view. I don’t see how a totally uncensored network could avoid being used for evil or criminal purposes.
When you have to choose between a totally censored and a totally uncensored internet, what do you choose?
If you are more for the latter, the SAFE network should be really interesting for you.
If you are more for the first I understand that SAFE doesn’t really sound interesting, on the contrary…
And maybe you could convince your friends more by replacing network by sex for a comparison they seem to be interested in Like Data Center = brothel, encrypted = condom, etc…
Well tbh it won’t. You buy kitchen knives or matches at many department stores and I’m fairly certain some pretty terrible things have happened as a result of their existence yet no one really questions them…
The US dollar is the primary source of funding for terrorist related activities…
The list is literally ad naseum if you want to really break it down but I’m sure you catch my drift.
Now bring along a network that can remove all national barriers and freely allow 6 billion + people to innovate, communicate and exchange ideas and ways of working better together and you’ll agree I’m sure the world moves forward at a stunning pace
It’s one of those things where you learn and understand what is offered by SAFE and in turn consider the negatives you think it may add and decide where you stand as a human being and accordingly whether you wish to be a supporter, nefarious elements or not.
Everybody makes up their own mind there, it’s ok having either point of view, the world is certainly bigger than any one of us, myself included
You say that as if there is an existing free Internet. SAFEnetwork will create a free Internet. What we have now is not free in numerous ways, several mentioned above. For example:
70% of Internet traffic is now owned by Facebook and Google (and growing)
mass surveillance and censorship by governments is routine and growing rapidly across the world, including in so called free democracies six as the UK, Australia etc
criminal networks and governments are using social media for all manner of nefarious purposes, including authoritarian control of electorates and elections, cyber warfare etc
Many more examples, all of which will be addressed to a significant degree by the upcoming free Internet, known to you and me as SAFEnetwork
@monty, I think it is a reasonable point, but I think it is a case of having the vision to see where it leads. There are similar ongoing discussions about how pointless Bitcoin is, when we already have fiat currency, banks, etc. Yet, cryptocurrencies are now worth around $200bn collectively.
So, the first argument I would make is for Safecoin. It is what got me involved initially, as the idea of fully anonymous, super fast, super cheap/free, scalable, transactions is a big deal. If Safe Net could only deliver Safecoin, it would still be up there with the direct Bitcoin competition such as Dash, Monero, etc, which are already valued at multi-billion market caps.
However, Safecoin is only really the oil that lubricates the network. What can be achieved by the network itself is actually far more interesting, even if the market hasn’t quite woken up to it yet.
Having a decentralised, secure, autonomous, censorship resistance, routing and data network is a huge deal. It may be difficult to explain to the non-technical, but this goes to the core of how traditional web (clear net) applications and their infrastructure is architected. Clear net applications have a patch work of hardware and software dependencies, each of which has security risks and maintenance costs, along with limitations which make blockchains seem radical.
Safe Net makes applications like Safecoin possible - simple even - by design. It makes data storage a simple commodity - no need to choose a hosting company (probably in the cloud - Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc). It makes network security (firewalls, authorisation/authentication, physical hardware security) largely obsolete. It allows users to own and dictate access to their data, whether created by themselves or by third party applications, in an unrestricted way. In short, this is utterly fundamental stuff; it provides a secure platform to build the next generation of distributed applications.
I’m sure this will get blank expressions from those who don’t work in the IT sector, but this is a big deal. Maybe end users won’t really notice or care, by and large. It will be the applications that sell it to end users and Safe Net may just be listed as a dependency (that you install once). Applications like Safecoin will start to permeate through, but it is just the beginning - the platform will start to be used more and more and in many ways that we haven’t thought about yet.
Let’s put it this way. What if a government made it mandatory for you to vote for their preferred political party or you’d be shot? And they used the internet to monitor your political preferences? Thing is some governments do that. What if a government made it mandatory for you to worship a certain God in a certain way or you would be executed? And they used the internet to monitor your religious preferences and expressions? Thing is some countries do that.
It might seem laughable to defend the right to view porn but it’s not. It’s not anymore trivial than the right to draw a cartoon of Muhamad or the right to object to Communism or Capitalism if one so chooses. Good and evil are very subjective terms and if “evil people” are starting to “subvert others to their warped world view” then it is either because those people see the good in what they are saying and that they are not so evil or there is a failure in education and critical thinking going on somewhere. Remember people always see themselves as the hero of their own story. Which means if you’re labeling someone ELSE as evil they’re quite possibly labeling YOU as an evil monster as well. That kind of mentality doesn’t help anyone.
From a technical standpoint having an uncensorable internet doesn’t mean you can’t add filters and live in your own pleasant little bubble of self delusion. It just means you can’t force OTHERS not to post whatever else they want on the net nor can you stop people from seeking out and connecting as they see fit or forming their own little filter bubbles. In short it means like attracts like and if you end up swamped with terrorist propaganda and child porn it’s likely your own fault for looking it up and not filtering it out.
A big point missing in this thread is that he’s only looking at SAFE from the uploader’s side,
but also, on the consumer side of the internet equation, SAFE is amazing, and provides things that you simply cant get on the regular internet.
If you can just open SAFE browser and immediately see EVERYTHING 0.o in a completely unfiltered way, why would you, as a consumer, ever even think of going back to regular YouTube (which blocks all sorts of videos every day no matter what part of the world you live in), or regular Netflix, or regular Google, or any regular internet service that blocks or filters results in any way at all? It’s like the “big boy” internet where the world finally realizes that its people are grown up enough to have the parental controls off
on SAFE you can just go and see EVERYTHING that possibly exists in the universe… for free
how could that NOT change the entire world?? 0.o forever
Here in Germany ISP’s primary offerings are Internetaccess and Bandwith. For them Storage is more of an afterthought.I guess that will be the same in most other countries.
Maidsafe is working to replace cenralized storage for the Internet and assumes internetaccess and bandwidth to be present/sufficient.
For optimizing Internetacces and Bandwidth there are some interesting network initiatives like Freifunk in Germany, Guifi in Catalonia(Spain) and Serval in Australia. They have only local scope however and they can only optimize bandwith use and the process of contacting one or more ISPs. At the end of the day nearly everything in these networks enters the Internet over some ISP.
It will be impractical to try to get rid of ISP’s altogether. For true World Wide access a satellite and/or fiber infrastructure will be needed for the foreseeable future.
Thank you everyone for your responses. I posted the topic because I had been thinking about it for some time and since there wasn’t much news I thought I’ll ask the community.
It would be difficult to reply to everyone but I believe it will be helpful to summarise the replies:
So why is it a big deal?
Because Safecoin. It represents anonymous, no fees, fast transactions of value (those features alone are valuable and I confess I had always seen Safecoin in its utility perspective, as in it will be used to pay to store, hence valuable) - so obviously there’s the fact that it would be the only acceptable mode of payment if one wants to use Safe net (which adds to its value) - lastly, as it will be farmable via a normal laptop, many people will be drawn in by that (imagine an article “10 Ways To Make Money Online - Number 3 Will Shock you!” with number 3 being “Run A Vault For Safe”) - as people start running vaults, they learn more and start using the Safe Net also - it’s rather interesting that such a normal feature of being mineable by the average Joe has now become a rare quality in a coin.
Web Hosting - Pay once, no monthly payments - as user base increases, the number of sites and apps catering to them will increase - which will help attract more users - I don’t know how the technicals will work: most of the data silos in present version of internet allow users to feed them data for free which the companies consume to improve their services - would a YouTube on Safe really work if a user has to pay to upload cat videos or just random song videos?
Safety of Data - people, services and IOT devices will use Safe to store data securely. I recently created a paper wallet and I thought it was just awesome that I could create wallets while offline - I’m really really scared of malwares and keyloggers and the fact that Safe Net would require me to log into Authenticator while online just scares me. I’ve searched the form for a discussion on that but they were very vague. Why would I save my bitcoin keys on my Safe net account if I have to login while online and risk my account being hacked and data being stolen? Hope someone can clarify how Safe will prevent account hacking through keyloggers etc.
Safe Net will be the world’s first Autonomous, Decentralised, Self-Sustaining Data Network. That is pretty cool. There’s a lot of other projects working on the same thing though, let’s see how the journey goes. My first post kind of hinted at the apathy of people towards privacy and security of their data. A lot of people consider files in their gmail account pretty safe actually. Same with all the pictures on Instagram and Facebook. They can access them wherever they are, they can store as much as they want and none of them have lost any picture. To them that’s pretty safe. And they can control their privacy settings to control who sees their pictures (I know, I know) but I accept the several posters view point that there do exist a lot of people who are aware of their privacy being invaded, their movements being tracked and that if an ultra easy way to interact with an autonomous data network can be created - they will use it. I guess some people (like my friends) have to see it to get it.
Anonymity - there will be good and bad that comes with it obviously, but it adds value to network.
Uncensorable? It will allow, for instance, some whistleblower in China to disclose some damning info - and China will be unable to do anything about it? The Great Firewall will be breached? Sounds a little too much frankly - if it is ‘truly’ uncensorable - than I guess Safe Net is just one sex tape leak away from general public awareness lol - but I think many nations would attack Safe Net as its existence will be untolerable to them - and it’s reasonable to assume that with immense resources at their disposal, they will find a way to block Safe Net within their borders - I’m interested in knowing if community members actually think no one will be able to censor or block safe - is it really possible?
Dark Markets and Safe Markets - Argument is Safe offers more anonymity than Tor - so the dark markets would be better off hosted on Safe - that has value - and also, many people buying legal things, sometimes prefer complete anonymity so they would be better off at Safe too - I have used Tor, I didn’t have to log in to anything to use it and individual sites operated with separate account logins - Safe on the other hand requires me logging into the authenticator and any keylogger can steal that info. Every time I read about someone’s Bitcoins being hacked, I’m reminded of just how risky it is to have sensitive info online - I would love to store my private keys on Safe but until I am convinced it’s safe to do so (match the safety levels that cold storage like hardware wallets or paper wallet provide) why should I do so? Same goes for anonymity and operations of dark markets - if people can just hack an account and access all messages, email, files uploaded etc. that will dampen the migration of dark markets to Safe.
I think it’s very interesting that no one mentioned Smart Contracts - do people not see Safe Net as an autonomous network that will allow for smart contracts or whatever the value proposition of Ethereum, Neo, EOS is? To me they’re all platforms for decentralized smart contracts - would Safe Net be considered their competitor? Or are decentralized applications = Smart contracts
Anyways, thank you everyone for your responses. As far as I’m concerned Maidsafe team is attempting something that will be really difficult to pull off. Governments may tolerate existence of fancy nerd money called Bitcoin, but if people in the world can access any information on the Safe Net - like in my country, I’ve noticed that using the pretext of banning porn, many websites that attacked or talked ill about Islam or the ideological framework of the country have been banned too - Governments would rather curate the information available to people than allow access to wild and scary informtion - that would be seen a bigger threat than bitcoin for sure. So that alone has me convinced that if Safe can truly be uncensorable than that is a really really big deal. I confess I don’t believe that is possible, governments like China and North Korea don’t believe in access to all sorts of info - my government and various other countries use pretext of “porn is immoral and bad for kids” to filter information deemed too dangerous - so several dozen nations with billions of dollars would just not let Safe Net exist within their borders, I’ve always believed that so I guess unconsciously I used to think Safe Net will provide anonymity where governments tolerate it.
Perhaps people on this forum, being more technically able, trust on the technical woodoo going into Safe Net that it will just be uncensorable - I have the opinion that China alone is powerful enough to crush Safe Net if Safe Net becomes bothersome.
So yeah, if Safe Net does prove to be ultra resistant and simply unquashable, unfilterable, uncensorable - with the countries of the world taking extreme measures to kill it but unable to do so - that no matter how hard they try, governments cannot block it inside their country - and the only alternative is to have no internet or localised north koreanish internet - then yeah, that makes it bigger than bitcoin, if not in market cap than sheer awesomeness of it. I would like to dream that is possible, but it’s rational to assume that governments of the world will find ways to block and censor it.
This just ran across my Diaspora feed. It occurs to me this might be ANOTHER reason SAFE will be important: ensuring that open source software can remain open source despite big corporate trade deals.
I’ve yet to see another project with a similar scope to Safe Net on this front. I’m aware of some blockchain managed storage solutions (e.g. Storj, Sia), along with those with DHTs (e.g. IPFS) and alternatives like ZeroNet (download a site to view locally), but Maidsafe is implementing technology way beyond these, IMO. With Safe Net we aren’t just dealing with files, we are working with structured data types, which can have fine grained permissions; it is a relatively low level solution.
Moreover, the autonomous/self-healing nature, to guarantee access in all but total catastrophe is fairly unique. The network itself is constantly moving data around, in order to keep the requisite data redundancy. This may be to new or old nodes/vaults. The caching mechanism also allows data to be moved closer to where it is needed temporarily, to improve performance and alleviate damage from DDoS style attacks.
However, I think the use cases for having Safe Net available to application developers is just as important. This isn’t just about users uploading stuff to store/share, it is about their applications themselves having a persistent, highly available, online storage facility, which they need zero involvement with. This is what I mean when I say storage becomes a commodity - availability is assumed and self managed, just like local storage on a device would be. The critical difference being how this data can then be shared, combined, integrated with other applications and users to form something new and interesting.
To think of it another way - imagine applications just become the tools to transform data, without ever owning that data. You may use a ‘tool’ to transform the data one way, then another ‘tool’ to transform it another. Compare this with most modern applications, which assume ownership and control of the data too. This has pretty big implications, especially when you start adding compute to nodes - autonomous tools, which operate on your data, on your command. This is a totally different architecture to how the current common client/server architecture operates and it fully separates the concerns of an application and the data it transforms or generates. This is only possible with the type of network Safe Net will become and it really excites me.
I think you are on the right track with the bit you have in bold there. Any number of agent applications (tools in the above) can be used to mutate data in different ways, depending on different events. However, I think this is quite a different approach to the mechanisms that Etherum et al use. Instead of having every node on the network run a script when an event occurs (like Ethereum), In contrast, Safe Net would instead leverage agents transforming data when it is possible for them to do so (such as when they are added as a signatory), leveraging the common data storage. These agents could be chained together, allowing them to mutate a stream of data in sequence.
There are pros/cons of this. As the network isn’t running the agents internally (at least until compute capability is added), there is a chance that an operation isn’t completed (the main con). However, it also means that each agent can be managed externally to the network, could be written in any programming language and could be relatively efficient (not ran on every network node, but just by the agent owner). If the agents are operated by the parties completing a step, then this makes a certain amount of sense and they can also keep their keys secret (which isn’t possible when ‘the network’ must use them to complete an operation).
So, I suppose it depends what is understood to be a smart contract; a sequence of multi-signature operations to mutate some data in a specific way certainly seems to fit the bill, but it is quite different from what people are used to with Ethereum, as I understand it.
Yes, there is a lot of potential value here and the Maidsafe devs are bullish on delivery. Short of filtering all traffic that is not recognisable - at the risk of lots of false positives - it could be very hard to filter Safe Net traffic. It would certainly be far harder than Bitcoin though, for example.
There’s one aspect I’m particularly excited about, but the fact that I haven’t heard it talked about much makes me wonder if it’s really something the SAFE network provides.
I think it introduces a solution to one problem that just about everyone faces, and that we’ve been looking for a solution to for a long time: permanent data storage.
Drives and optical disks lose data over the course of years, and the hardware to read them goes obsolete. Cloud services can go out of business with little warning, and even they can suffer data degradation if they’re not careful. But with SAFE network, I can carve the link data into a rock and pass it down to my grandchildren. If the elderly are the hardest market for a new tech market to crack, I could sell SAFE Network to them immediately as a safe place to store their family photo albums for future generations.
Right now, we divide the past into history and pre-history, based on the introduction of writing. In the future, we may well need a third category to include the wealth of information that could be stored in something like SAFE.
Of course, that’s assuming the data is actually permanent.
I guess that needs a bit of discussion.
Once a file has been published on the SafeNet, noone, not even the PRC can erase that file.
The Great Firewall can not recognize SafeNet traffic as such, as it is (afaik) plain vanilla HTTPS.
On the other hand I am sure the Great Firewall can be adapted over time, with pattern analysis or simply by setting up their own vaults, to recognize the IP adresses of long running vaults. By active monitoring of these IP adresses, the PRC can discover who in China uses Safenet .
When an IP address in China is known as a Safenet user. they can then log times and volumes of HTTPS activity and correlate that with the times and volumes of public SafeNet data they don’t like.
SafeNet would, at the very least, need a WikiLeaks equivalent. Dangerous data should always be sent to an encrypted account and only be published some time later.
How dangerous such IP-surveillance is depends mostly on the number of at risk Safe users in a country and the number of vaults and the average duration that a vault uses a specific IP outside the country.
The danger grows when
there are few SafeNet vaults
there are few Safenet users
there are few innocent Safenet users inside the country
the average vault uses the same IP address for a long time
@dirvine: is it possible to keep your reputation as a vault if you change your IP?
If so, would it be possible to lower the reputation of vaults, the longer they keep the same IP?
Oh yeah! Viral Marketing!
I am sure many nations would like to block SafeNet. But as it is “only HTTPS” I do not think they will succeed. There are to many legitimate uses for HTTPS, even in such countries.
Otoh, as I explained above, we should make potential whistleblowers aware, that there is a very real risk of being found out, even though it will not be possible to suppress information once it has been published on the SafeNet.
BTW, TOR traffic can be recognized, so after a while SafeNet will be safer than TOR!
[edit] !I misread the Webpage I used to check TOR! TOR also uses HTPPS so the biggest Network will be the safest!
I agree that some will use it for evil purposes. Some also use cars and passenger jets to kill large numbers of people, but I suspect you like cars and jets.
I do not share your abhorrence of pornography on some website dedicated to it. I am more offended by the constant pornographic references that my children are exposed to on almost every TV show. If websites showing pornography is upsetting to you, I agree that SAFE will not address your concerns.
Terrorists passing information in secret is always going to happen with or without SAFE. ISIS has/had more than one internet magazine already, so I think that cat is out of the bag anyway. But would you really sacrifice the privacy of every person on earth, in an attempt to make it a little harder for terrorists to communicate? Is your security so much more important to you than freedom?
I don’t see how unrestricted access to air could avoid being used to speak pornographic or hateful things.
It is not the province of the air the stifle ideas. Neither is it the province of the SAFE network in facilitating communication to keep language above reproach.
The SAFE network is designed to be that same kind of neutral medium that air is. It is common to all and does not discriminate.
You make really good points and many of us have discussed and thought about this and you are correct on the part about regular people not really caring about their privacy, they just dont. In fact the opposite it usually true with people posting their whole lives to social media.
Two points on that,
there is a whole sphere of people that do care, pretty much anyone in technology e.g. large manufacturers, firms, people with patents, medical, b2b people who are liable basically, then you have anyone in the cryptocurrency sphere, governments and then you have people in countries where maybe they are spied on constantly and they need a way out and around it, think China, Russia, Eastern Block nations, Venezuela, some African and Asian countries etc so what you are left with is millions and millions of people who will be interested or the companies and softwares they are using are being used in conjunction with SAFE and they dont even know it…
SAFE offers more than just privacy. Privacy is one of a few core offerings. The fact that it is 100% completely decentralized and actually an autonomous network where people can build actualy apps on things that regular joes and janes can use so unlike Bitcoin and fin techs most people have no clue about that stuff but when I say to you and the people in your organisation I have this really cool chat app and its fully private etc now your interested especially if your organisation requires privacy and dont forget the complete integration of currency so the current web we use has no currency you could say well its the USD but really its not. SAFE has an oil or a blood in it integrated and that is SAFE. so you want to buy a song or a movie or exchange something you can do that with the very currency of the network, how easy is that it is the one and only currency on that particular network no matter who or where you are and it has several benefits so think about being an app dev or a content producer…
And all of this mumbo jumbo I am talking unlike Bitcoin and blockchain is not something that needs to be built by other people in ten years time, its being built right now and most of it already works…the work has and is being done right now.
Then adding to that even look at things like all of the current forking and scaling and basically civil war going on in bitcoin right now, well scaling is built into our network and even our concept around farming as opposed to mining is well thought so it cannot be gamed as easily as BTC.
Lots to think about, you are right in one sense but does not make it not a big deal. Cheers.
I know the Chinese government have huge resources, but I’d imagine that correlating specific data to specific vault & files when every chunk is in at least 8 places, every large file made of many chunks, often multiple files being downloaded at a time, and no IP addresses available for where each chunk came from would be practically impossible if there were a good deal of traffic on the network.
I may be wrong, but it’s certainly worth thinking hard about how anyone’s privacy / security could be compromised & seeing if it can be countered.
Any lock only buys the user time. The question is how much time and how a potential attacker might pick it? It is worth considering how SAFE might be cracked. It is not worth assuming SAFE will be cracked because governments are all powerful and can crack anything. The former is to examine evidence and science the latter is superstition and fear.
card payments
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