Hello. First post to the forum. New to this project and fascinated by the concept. However, as someone with zero technical computer knowledge I have a few questions that I’m hoping can be answered.
Will I be able to access websites like Amazon, PayPal, Ebay etc on SAFE? If not, will there need to be new versions of popular sites like these created for SAFE? What about people who run businesses on sites like Amazon or Ebay; what will SAFE mean for them?
Privacy and security seem to be the main selling points for SAFE, but in this selfie age the average person doesn’t seem too concerned with privacy - in fact people seem eager to reveal more and more of themselves to the world. And security concerns are being addressed with innovations like 2-step verification and face recognition (those are two i’m aware of; there are others i’m sure but I’m no computer expert.) What else does SAFE have to sell it to the general public - to people like me? I like the idea of decentralisation, but I also like the idea of Linux; I still quite happily use Windows.
I repeat, I find this concept intriguing. This post is less about being a doubting Thomas and more about addressing gaps in my understanding and perhaps blind spots in the vision of SAFE enthusiasts. All answers/suggestions will be gratefully received.
SAFE will deliver everything normal servers do as well, so these companies are free to create a version of their website on SAFE as well. If they don’t than you can not find them on this system. But why shouldn’t they? Netflix could offer a discount version of their service as they safe money on bandwidth using SAFE. So they could offer it both ways: on the normal internet and on SAFE at the same time.
More and more people are concerned with privacy. Whatsapp is already quite secure when you message your friends, but still a lot of people move away from them using Signal:
In Germany you’ll get a fine when they discover you use BitTorrent for illegal downloads.More countries will probably follow. people don’t like to be criminalized for using a service like Popcorn-time. On SAFE no government agency can ever see you used a service like that.
I don’t know about the big boys and I’m also not a tech geek, but generally speaking here are a few things it will mean for people running online businesses:.
I think you will be able to just drag and drop your site on the SAFE network, so porting over couldn’t be much easier in that respect. [EDIT: see below, only true for static sites. Otherwise they need re-writing].
Sites on SAFE also only need to pay once, rather than having an annual hosting fee like on the internet.
You can’t do denial of service attacks on SAFE (no server to spam) so that would be a godsend and big money saver.
The site would scale positively, so the more users accessing it the faster it would load, rather than lagging when trying to buy tickets for Glastonbury etc ;).
You could conduct frictionless, feeless, instant, secure and private transactions - also suitable for IoT. So that has pretty huge implications for anyone running any online business.
No central stored data as a point of failure to be attacked.
I’m sure that’s only scratching the surface, but those would be good enough incentive for most businesses if there were customers to be acquired on SAFE.
Yeah, but people do want freedom. People don’t understand that this is what privacy and security really are. They don;t need to understand it though, they just need to see that they need SAFEnet to do many things they can’t do on the legacynet - think how simple whistleblowing and running services like wikileaks could become. 300M people a day use bittorrent. several million a day use Tor etc. How many Ashley Madison users and dark market buyers etc would rather have a simple and robust solution.
Also, think how important this kind of robust security is for governments etc. Seen the Snowden film? Nuclear power plants, water treatment centres etc, these all need robust security. The US could turn off the power in Denmark. Do you think the Danish like that now that they know?
Make no mistake, privacy and security may not sound sexy, but they ARE freedom. You can’t have one without the other. So in actual fact they are very cool, popular and powerful incentives, even if people might take a while to understand that.
All the privacy and security stuff out there now is a pile of plasters (band-aids to our cousins from the US). SAFE is the foundational solution. It solves the root problems rather than just trying to tackle the consequences of a poor infrastructure.
Anyway, that’s enough from a non-techy like me. I’m sure I’ve given you a bit to think about and given you good reason to search out more informed and intelligent posts than this one to help you dig deeper down the rabbit hole
Nope, we have a lovely beaker browser and it is a beaut!
Now this is the kind of post that should be front-and-centre when it comes to SAFE info for newbies! Great info - exciting and relevant. No need to apologise for being non-techy - was plenty informed and intelligent for me!
Lots of food for thought from both replies. Thanks.
That’s only true for static html/js sites. However most of the sites today use server-side scripts such as PHP etc. These sites won’t run on SAFEnet and need to be rewritten using JS and SAFE’s data logic.
Traditional sites which use server-side scripts rely - as the name suggests - on servers (e.g. web & database servers). On SAFEnet there are no servers so the website logic has to be handled via the browser (client-side) e.g. via Javascript. Instead of database servers you would use the SAFEnet itself to store data which can be achieved using its API: https://api.safedev.org/
but that only makes a difference for “professional users”
blogs e.g. are static (at least i don’t know why there should be ones who are not) - then forums - okay private people do run forums, but that issue is addressed by http://www.project-decorum.com/ so running forums on safenet will again be drag&drop like static sites
…shops and other non-static sites are made and run by professionals anyway … so they can calculate their server costs and the costs for adapting their software to run decentralized in safenet … i’m very positive that many many projects (especially the open source ones) will see that it can be way less hassle to write something that just utilizes the (then) existing safenet instead of setting up/maintaining/expanding a own server infrastructure that doesn’t scale with demand automatically (in contrast to everything running on safenet)
