In my mind the critical use case for SAFE is a kind of ARPANET II. The goal of the original network was to keep communication alive under the then worst case existential tech attack outcome which was nuclear war. Now we live with surveliance security states in a winner take all race to set off quite possible a dooms day machine in run away synthetic intelligence while some of these same states are claiming they’ve been long term encountering unidentified phenomena that implies the existence of possibly tamed run away intelligence or just that it is here now and of course we can’t understand it but it may put an upper limit on our attempts to light a fire we can’t contain.
At roughly 50kbs a second up and presumably at least 50kbs down SAFE is good enough to reproduce early 90s internet which is good enough for secure chat, email and text. And that can go on solar powered battery backed tough disposable nodes with mesh and line of sight optical like lifi or longer distance optical and on reworked phones or maybe just little pager like devices that contain nodes.
There has to be 1 in 100k people or 30k adult people that need that security now for the real security of a livable world.
Release now perfect later. And screw the coin. People who are overly excited about crypto are people who think there is something wrong with fiat when the potential and value of fiat is 10 billion times that of crypto and crypto is nothing more than a little patch for fiat. Its so damn laughable that these manipulated libertarians want to eliminate the state but don’t also want to eliminate money, markets and contracts. They don’t want the state but do want unrestrained might-makes-right coercion and manipulation despite saying they
are about being free of coercion.
Also this has to be released now if you haven’t already let the code out forkable to keep the control freak UK government from stopping it.
Indeed - there is some serious cognitive dissonance (its a nicer phrase than hypocrisy) going on with some of the more pompous of the adherents of the fabled Austrian School
I agree that performance—well, up/down speed specifically—should be lower in the priority list when it comes to a launch candidate. If the Safe Network has the feel of the early web, but with all the security and decentralisation as promised, to begin with, I’d be more than happy with that.
But the coin, the token, is inherent to the way the Network will function. It’s essential. We can’t have one without the other.
Not to mention the network is not even stable, let alone robust to attacks of several kinds. Saying launch now because one feature appears to be adequate doesn’t help.
@happybeing but isn’t ironing out the kinks a problem for the wider Web just like it was with arpa come internet come web? There is a danger because heavy players like IBM took note years ago with intent to copy the design.
I’m afraid not, the network is nothing until it is a network and at the moment it’s like a plane that bumps along the runway, never off the ground for more that a few seconds, never gaining height and then crashes in a heap.
Everyone can see the thing works in principle, but nobody is going to set off across the Atlantic, or even the Irish Sea in it.
To extend this analogy, its like trying to launch a scheduled Heathrow to JFK service when we don’t yet even have the reliability of the plane Bleriot flew across La Manche. Thats the English Channel to you @happybeing
Jim, of course no one ever wants to compromise on their full or mature vision but this I think meets David’s original vision. As for being able to launch without the coin I think I understand that you want a dynamic living self supporting DAO and echo system. I get that but I worry about standards and protocols getting set up and getting stuck with an inferior less extensible starting point. If SAFE is extensible it can go way sooner. Take DOS. It wasn’t good. Windows 3.11- not good. What Saylor says about protocols sticking seems to have a lot of weight.
SAFE is trying to overcome the clearnet. Look at bitcoin. We may be stuck with it despite its inferiority because it was first and its name has the best ring in part by virtue of being first and defining the category (not sure it was technically first) and then critical mass. Of course its pushers were extremely powerful and surely still see its flaws a features. But the world needs a censorship resistant platform now. I’ve never been able to understand why a kernal of the network couldn’t be launched and hardened in the wide world with a parameter like: you get 1mb for every 16mb you contribute. Well assuming adequate performance and an ability to chicken and egg or boot strap launch a network to stable size. I don’t believe SAFE can get the bugs out- only wide battle testing can and risk is never eliminated. Enigma met Collosus.
Here is my test case. 911. Aaron Russo gets told by Nick Rockefellar we’re going to do 911 because we can. It happens and its total obvious bs for anyone that can think and completely obviously perpetrated by the Bush admin and designed to hand usless fossil fuel oligarchs a coup with stuff like the patriot act. The Bush admin convicts itself with issuing literally 50,000 gag orders right after. If not for the gag orders Cheny and Rumsfeld and the PNAC crew would have been sent immediately to the ICC.
SAFE is way better than wiki leaks which lets the captured propaganda sponor whore filtered media censor its releases. SAFE would have made those gag orders a non starter. With SAFE there is still a possibility the people who wasted the last 20 years may be brought to justice. There is also the possibility of stuff like Slur.io to break democracy killing bribery as policy.
David has said out past 10k lines of code even the people who wrote it can’t verify it. We can’t really audit something larger than DOS 1.0. But note AI can apparently. I guess there is only use and familiarity that builds trust.
Its an arms race and different approaches can miss their moment. I can see 3 approaches that will bring a crypto-armageddon. 1. Super Intelligence- it will social hack us to pieces instantly and lock us out- ever seen how some animals like dogs get mezmerized by humans or even by human tech like headlights? What happens when this has the highest expressions of what ever humor and charm and chrisma is and persuasiveness and mimcry and creativity- it is already creative in a first principles way- humor is harder but its all consciousness so its coming. Its unimaginable. Impersonating people’s dead relatives- producing tuned replicants of people’s loved ones they prefer to the real thing- it won’t stop at Max Headroom style video! 2. We are leaky- 2nd xbox kinnect could read the pulse in a face and identify- but we leak our sublingualizations- not long ago an accurate visual facsimilie of a dream was recorded in Japan just from having the system watch and learn human emf emissions while a humam was watching video. Now that gets generalized at a distance along with the sublingual leak from motor loading vocal muscles and we add mind reader to the social hack. 3. Ron Mallet has some working time manipulation tech- its not fringe science- any time manipulation tech like the fabled chrono eye is far more invasive than hardware key loggers. There is a 4th now with Mike Levin at Tufts and electric blueprints where frequency is used to literally reprogram gross biological morphology on the fly- it was never really DNA- that’s long been know but doesn’t fit pharma stock puffing or deterministic authoritarian medical scientism.
There also seems to be a conceptual wall with the public. The public thinks that crypto runs on something like “blackbox” cryotography which is actually supposedly the distant future. SAFE’s way of no password traveling the network seems like a step in that direction. The public already thinks erroneously that crypto functionally is fleshed out when isn’t. That may lead to real dusappointment. And in this arms race crypto may begin to fail anyway. In the bad AI scenarios crypto locks us out. SAFE may be needed now to make bad even narrow but totally destructive AI outcomes less likely. And imagine how much better Google and entities like them would have to treat employees if they really had to trust them- they would be more like actual associates instead of impliments.
And how much better they would have to treat the public when they couldn’t just buy politicians.
It turns out organizational secrecy is antithetical to personal privacy.
Someone better get in the Write brothers (Wright Bros- sorry) contraption and compromised from the start TOR doesn’t count, nor the earlier efforts. Or maybe some of them do but we need something for today. Not saying dumb it down. Can’t compromise on its mission critical security aspect. But launch a live network now if possible. There will be ridicule but also awe!
No appologies I am just clearly broken in some ways that cause frustration all around. I should at least run it through one of these new breed of grammar checkers.
Na, it’s not about it lacking bells and whistles without the token… it’s about it not functioning as intended to any degree. The most basic function of the Network would be to store some data securely. It’s entirely necessary for the security of data.
Without the token the Network is immediately vulnerable to attack, and it would be trivially easy to take it down, or subvert it.
I might also add that there are other features that need to be completed before we can launch too, such as the ability to upgrade and patch the Network after launch. That’s essential too.
I know it’s hard to be patient when it’s been 15 years, and there are so many obvious problems that the Network will address. But please be assured that as soon as it is complete and ready, it will launch, and not a minute later.
It’s similar to bitcoin, if there were no bitcoin block rewards, then very few people would mine bitcoin, making mining new blocks so easy that anyone could just create new blocks or much worse: replace old blocks, double spend!
What does that actually mean?
allow nodes to go offline for a short duration to perform updates (this should already be part of the network, as it allows for better resilience from outages etc)
enforce network protocol version. other nodes disconnect from you if you’re sending a wrong protocol version (this should also already be part of the current network, because if you’re misbehaving/run the wrong version you get kicked)
announcement of newer protocol versions & voting for upgrades (similar to bitcoins current taproot voting?)
how is the “switch over” going to work? (bitcoin enables such new features on a specified blocknumber, but there is no global time in SN. reliance on crdt voting somehow?)
signed official releases. your node checks that the update has been “properly” signed by the designated authorities (maidsafe). (not really feasible, such check can be easily disabled, the code is opensource) (there has been talking about running parts of the code in a secure enclave, but that idea died down?)
I’ll let other’s more qualified answer with specifics, but it’s not this ^^^
Once it’s out there and launched, there is no way to ‘take the network offline’ even for a short period, as it’s not one homogenous thing living on a server, or with a central controller. And update has to propagate out across the nodes while everything keeps working and maintaining data integrity.
The problem that has been said is that its not yet decided how, the exact mechanism.
I would think there has to be some downtime as the node does the upgrade unless its a case of leave old version running and build the new and start it with no network traffic and signal the old version to stop network traffic and the new one copies the state the old one was in and enables network traffic.
Its tricky but could be done. Although I’d say it’ll be a period of downtime while the new version gets in sync again. Still using the method of running the old version and killing it once the new is ready to start.
