Just my opinion on the BARE minimum for REAL levels of adoption of the safe network, let's discuss

I was responding to someone over in Matrix with the following, which I’ve always wanted to post here but was too lazy so finally here is just my opinion on the topic:

personally i feel that at the bare minimum in order to achieve actual use, it would require, a flashy marketed hardware device set-top box that you would be able to buy in any electronics store, where all the shilly language on the box is along the lines of “just plug in and start earning money”

this set-top box would basically just be a sort of stand alone RAID device witjh hot-swappable (upgradable) HDD bays, with the firmware running a Safe network vault, which would need to be able to update itself from the network so that it requires zero user interaction

the user would access everything from the web browser on whatever device they use, the coins they earn from that device providing storage (farming), the Safe mail app, messaging app, Safe sites, storage app, and everything else

to me if this all doesnt happen within like a year after launch, then the safe network will most likely end up like Tor/i2p has over the past decade, a very tiny fraction of each countries privacy concious people being the only ones to do the effort to install and use it

no matter how amazing everything the safe network is doing is… the braindead population wont care less unless they see a rainbox colored box in walmart with “buy this get free money” spattered all over it.

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I get what your saying.
Remember bfl?
Their btc asic was sold in walmart. I seriously doubt anyone who bought one made any money unless they hodled like crazy.
Hopefully once were in the wild, the team will work on such a device, or more likely someone else will do it if theres money to be made.

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And there are a number of topics for farming hardware

This person is designing what was asked for

Some other topics to look though

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You underestimate human greed … Tor has no currency, the SAFE network has :wink: People are getting up every day and going to work for money… If you have already computer, why not turn it on to make money for you?

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I believe it will rather be: Apps first, hardware second. It starts with the availability of key apps we use every day such as email, messaging, and discussion fora. The quality and integration must be on par with e.g. gmail. (Unique apps will certainly help too.) To drive down cost or offset cost of using safenet, people will need to be encouraged to host a node on whatever hardware they have. Automatic installers, or container images that run on almost any hardware will help. Some people may start thinking about dedicated hardware. That hardware will probably have a worse price performance ratio, but look nice and be truly plug and play. (But I find it unlikely that people will be bragging about their safenet adoption and hardware.) So my guess is that the bare minimum will be apps enabling seamless and effortless transition from today’s internet to safenet by working on both. This does off course assume that the experience using safenet won’t be much worse than that on today’s internet. Latency for instance. Cost may be less of an issue. People are already paying for VPN.

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Actually I mentioned this last week at the meetup. An idea of running vaults on a nodl. Better to team up with people already providing and building hardware for utilities.

A fully featured box is better.

They might not be the only ones. teaming up with all of them would be good.

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Yeah there’s lots of ways it can play out successfully

While it would be best for decentralization if every user ran a small vault at home I don’t think this is how it will pan out. There will be a smaller group of business person/investor type that set up more medium sized home ops. The majority of users will just buy some safecoin and use the product like a customer rather then someone deeply involved in making it happen on the business side.

The big use case is not a new thing like a crypto miner you can plug in and make money. The thing you can sell to everyone is using the network.

I think a hardware device with guaranteed ‘forever’ cloud backup is the winner.

I want my files on my local device, but I also want them safely backed up offsite somewhere

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that’s why I am saying people will be like um ya so this is like an external hard drive but someone else is gonna use it so I can get coins to use their external hard drive? WTF mang why don’t I just use my own? Now I realize the equation is more complicated then that…but that’s how every day Walmart fat guy is gonna see it. I think running nodes will be a smaller group that understands the complexities a bit better.

This is the reason why I think this device could have 2 or 3 functions:

  • a simple local disk
  • a safe client to store data in the safe network
  • optionally a vault (to allow farming)

When plugged to a pc it would be like an external drive, but data stored on this device would be duplicated on its local disk and in the safe network. This way the local disk would be like a cache to the safe network:

  • to improve read / write performance
  • to have a backup of user data in case the whole network crashes.

The third function is optional because user may not want to connect it permanently.

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I don’t believe any special hardware will be needed to jump start adoption. The speed of the network will be a critical factor, but if it is similar to torrent speed (as I believe it will be for large files), then all of the global file sharing will come to safe. People won’t have to store their media library on their hard drives anymore if they can stream everything in existence … and importantly the forever storage aspect of Safe will crush all torrents because they have a limited lifespan for less popular files.

Tor (possibly due to the fact that most tor users aren’t nodes) will not be nearly as secure as Safe either (RIP silk road). It’s quite likely than many outproxies on Tor are owned and run by government agencies and that they can use these over time to locate sites on the network.

So speed, anonymity, and crypto make Safe a huge winner down the track - no special hardware needed.

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torrents rely on generous people that want to give me free porn. Ok I will take it but that does not seem like it would be as reliable or as high quality if that came form people like um making a bit of money for sharing :stuck_out_tongue:

Geneous ppl, and ppl who inject nasty things into your downloads.
That said, i never got anything nasty from downloading torrents, or did not realise i had.