MaidSafe mentioned in Computing.co.uk

Fyi…@dirvine had an interview with John Leonard from Computing magazine and here is the first of hopefully a number of articles around SAFE. The site receives an estimated 185,000 unique visitors per month so gets a decent amount of traffic. Moving forward we will be working toward a SAFE specific article.

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The SAFE Network has its own crypto-currency SafeCoin, which users (or Farmers) earn by donating unused storage capacity to the network. Blockchain technologies store the tokens that are the basis of the whole system.

Not a very strong article for the SAFE Network and Maidsafe when it doesn’t make it clear that the network/the cryptocurrency isn’t built on blockchain technology.

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Maybe someone should correct this as the 1st comment (not me) - no comments yet. :smile:

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I’ve found that journalists and investors use phrases like ‘blockchain’ to describe distributed/decentralised networks. This is of course technically incorrect, but people always like to categorise fields of business. I’ll add this to the comments at the end of the article.

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Nick, that’s a very kind way if describing a basic error :wink:

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For me, one of the most important aspects of the project is that it isn’t build on the holy blockchain. The SAFE Network simply didn’t belong in the article so I i don’t understand why Maidsafe(David) accepted the interview when/if the journalist told he was writing an article about blockchain technology.

P.S.

Is it possible and common to proofread an article a journalist writes, especially when it’s for your company or project?

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Most of the time you don’t know what the journalists angle is before, or during an interview. Most of the time we find out at the same time as the reader, when the article is published. I have only once been given the opportunity to proof read an article MaidSafe were in. I totally understand why journalists don’t do this, they are very busy people working to publishing deadlines and have to be mindful that companies will always want the article to be framed in the most positive way.

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As @nicklambert said, not at all common (unless you are either very famous/important or the journalist has (for some very odd reason) a lot of time. Oh, or if you paid for the article of course. Mediating your message means losing control over it, therefore pragmatism in communication is very important, but won´t save you from misplacement and bad journalism.

The good news is: even though to you it seem very important that SAFE is non-blockchain tech, to the avarage users the confusion is quite irrelevant. He*she will store SAFE right next to Internet 2.0, revolution and Bitcoin. (For now) that´s good :wink:

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The author here.

As you rightly indicate, we do not allow organisations to preview copy before it is published - in fact that is one of the big no-nos of journalism. Believe me, a lot of companies try - especially ones with big PR departments - and it’s a constant battle to push them back (and risk not getting an interview next time around). We do get things wrong of course, and we always offer a right of reply in the comments section, and if something is seriously incorrect due to author’s error we will change it and indicate the reason why. In this case I don’t think this is central to the description of what SAFE is aiming to do (plus, importantly, I sourced the “blockchain” info directly from a quote by David Irvine).

By the way, if I were SAFE I would ride the blockchain bandwagon for all it’s worth while it’s still rolling, even if it’s to set yourself up as an alternative!

Anyway, I look forward to the launch (any firm dates by the way?) at which point I will look to put something more substantive together.

All the best

John

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Thanks for taking the time to comment here @JPL. I will stay in touch with you as with hit major development milestones with the next one being in the early Feb timeframe where we are anticipating enabling users to connect from home to our droplet network. We look forward to helping you with your New Years resolution and showing you MaidSafe’s take on blockchain technology.

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This is a very precise prediction, thanks for this. But I don’t see any code related to safecoin management in the repository and one month seems very short to implement it. Without safecoins I am afraid that the network will be an easy target for attacks by simply overloading it with a set of huge files.

Personally I wouldn’t mind a delayed delivery with safecoin management.

We are working on an iterative roll out, so rather than launching a feature complete network, we are going for the basic network in the first instance before adding features such as safecoin in future iterations. Working in this way allows us to understand what is working and what could be improved, prior to adding features.

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