Should maidsafe start giving timescales?

Oh my god, I thought safe network will be released in 2018 or maybe max 2019? You guys really think it would take that long? I consider

Here we see the ā€œusefulnessā€ of inaccurate timescales. They mislead people one way or the other.

@SmokeTM I would pay no attention to anybody making guesses about something that is impossible to estimate accurately.

:grin:

His post is tongue-in-cheek dude. Live launch of the final network is unlikely to take years :wink:

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Itā€™s not a matter of ā€œifā€, itā€™s a matter of ā€œwhenā€. Beta release not too far out

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That canā€™t be right. Iā€™ll be 111 years old. Will Maid cure old age too

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Just remember someone high up in this organisation said that All the hard work is behind us.

Serious long time lurker here. Been reading the updates religiously. Not having deadlines do worry me. Adding pressure in the mix helps to ensure time is not spent on constant refactoring and wasting time on finding perfect solutions. Instead it encourages creativity and gives you the incentive to cut features which arenā€™t critical to project success and get an MVP out ASAP.
Advocating for good software development practices but with a leaner mindset.

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You should be in any of our internal meetings. Then you would see very high pressure indeed, so much so we do lose people due to it. Any more we would destroy the team. Timescales do help with known roadmaps with zero innovation involved, however thousands of supporters and huge numbers of investors, who speak to us often (many many times per day) is way more pressure than many could cope with. We engage and accept that pressure at some cost in terms of time sink and also taking a good virtual kick in the stomach very frequently.

tl;dr Pressure is not something lacking in the maidsafe team for sure, I can guarantee that, if I could I would reduce it, or at least a lot of it, if I could, but I cannot because we do need all the answers we need and of course then we do need to launch the full network.

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As an avid San Antonio Spurs basketball fan, let me share a mantra of our organization:

When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before. -Jacob Riis

I understand your frustration for wanting to get out an MVP quickly, but itā€™s important to remember that there is abundant innovation going on everyday with the devs, and innovation by nature doesnā€™t tend to be very predictable. Nice and steady and weā€™ll be fine.
Pound the rock Safe Team!

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And I hope there will be similarities with the Three little pigs story (only the third house made safe) :smile:

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As time rolls on I agree with this more and more

3 years ago I would have definitely just clicked ā€œlikeā€ on your post like this and felt good.

Let me preface all this by saying everyone Iā€™ve ever met at MaidSafe are tip-top amazing humans with unparalleled motives, engineering abilities, personalities, and aspirations. This includes @dirvine @nicklambert @ustulation @anon86652309 @Viv @hunterlester and now virtually, @dugcampbell . Amazing amazing people who have all deeply inspired me and changed my life.

But I feel like a 3rd or 4th generation ā€œSAFErā€ now that we have lost so many, having stayed around much longer than most. Iā€™ve watched every David Irvine talk back to the very beginning, and remember hearing ā€œBeta launch product for the event in a few months in New York,ā€ which was 2014 if I remember correctly.

There are no timelines and it seems like any meaningful launch is hidden behind a massive wall of features I worry are required to be ā€œperfectedā€ by the team before being released. This wall is made up of things like data chains, republish, splits and merges, deduplication, test economic systems, PtP, farmer vs builder rewards, and a truly massive nuanced series of systems that have never been designed or tested by any company because of the novel genius of their decentralized design, and I mean those compliments with all sincerity.

I think the launch plans for MaidSafe might need a very new direction if the project is to ever reach that stage.

For a team whose leaders are so open and appreciative of community feedback, I think a new stepping-stone path to MaidSafe launch is desperately needed. One where things are much more open, and things are released and can be tested by this community who has proven to be steadfast, dedicated, and technically brilliant such as @tfa @bluebird @mav @oetyng and everyone else. Thereā€™s hundreds. And millions around the world if we really make things truly open.

A plan I can see succeeding to launch is release things faster and much more openly without even worrying about the MAID as much, since that mindset makes you worry about making things perfect before launching them, to protect peopleā€™s money.

Donā€™t want to stall changing the world to protect MAID, the tyrants run free every day SAFE doesnā€™t exist

Launch like this:

  • release datachain work
  • release early test safecoin code (since itā€™s ā€œso simpleā€)
  • release vaults from home (since it existed about 6 testnets ago)

Let the community and open source world tinker with that forever

Then, for the future releases:

  • release test safecoin ASAP for devs
  • release full SAFE ASAP and allow it to fail publicly until it finally succeeds

This is more of a mindset that actual demands but the demands do matter also :slight_smile: I have just structured my whole life around this project for a very long time and canā€™t imagine a future without it. But over the years everyone gets scared. And that fear has driven me to look closer and what might be stalling things.

I love everyone here but Iā€™m very very worried and gets worse each day.

But Iā€™ll ride or die MaidSafe.

For better or worse

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The lack of a timescale is a bit concerning. Some say beta will be late this year, others sometime next year, others say 3 years time and so on. Only a few people know an estimated schedule but for their good reasons are keeping it to themselves.

As for me, Iā€™m retired and this project is fascinating to follow. Will we ever see a product rolled out for general public use (not Alphaā€™s)? I hope so but am not sure if it will ever happen. But it is a brilliant concept and fills in my spare time in retirement.

Iā€™m pretty sure this isnā€™t the case. The fact is, nobody has a secret schedule, because nobody knows when the work will be done, with a stable network viable for release.

Right now, theyā€™re considering the use of DAGs in sections to help with forming consensus. If this works well, theyā€™ll follow a path integrating thisā€¦ if it doesnā€™t, theyā€™ll follow another path. There will be many other uncertainties as well, each of which will make giving a time frame almost pointless.

How can anyone know how long something unspecified and uncertain will take?

Itā€™s a complex project that doesnā€™t have a very clear path to completion because itā€™s never been done.

Thereā€™s no path to follow when youā€™re hacking through an uncharted jungle. 1 mile could take a few hours, or days if a new route becomes necessary.

Perhaps thereā€™s how be a rolling timescale: 6 months to launch, reset any time someone asks the timescale, then eventually MaidSafe are guaranteed to finish ahead of schedule :slight_smile:

Of course I can understand peopleā€™s frustration, but as long as the network is still worth building, and the team believes it is eventually achievable, they should keep pressing on towards it because its value will be far greater than whatever effort is going into it nowā€¦ even if they donā€™t know when itā€™ll be complete.

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You could be right assuming Maidsafe has unlimited funding

Well reading all these reminded me my short duration in IT. Once I was working in a good project and was sole responsible for that. Though there was some timeline and client was eager to see the work, I was thinking to delay the meeting and take a little more time to make it better (than needed by client).

My TL called me and asked me a simple riddle.
ā€œA king wants to make a grand pyramid to be remembered after death. But its little hard, the engineers need to finish it before kingā€™s death or they will be penalized to death. Now how would they do it, as no information regarding kingā€™s death can be estimated?ā€
I thought for sometime and eventually it occurred to me, ā€œThey can start by building a smaller Pyramid which will be finished quickly and before any mishap happens. Then they can expand it as long as King is aliveā€.
I think all IT projects follow the same concept. But Davidā€™s target is much exceptional thus requires time. This is making everyone impatient.
IMO the team would have to compromise to some extent in near future else they might get out of the race. Specially if the network does not launch within the next 5 years I donā€™t think there would be much to discuss and support afterwards. So why not give a broader timeline, like 3-4-5 years? Even a little hope can light a long way.

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I like the analogy. If this were possible itā€™d be really great.

I suggested something along these lines in a recent thread. The response from more techy community members was that its not easily possibleā€¦ while I think it should be possible with some creativity, Iā€™m in no position to propose how.

If it were easy to achieve, I expect the MaidSafe team would give it a shot.

They donā€™t need unlimited funding if they get to launch at some point - just enough to fund ongoing development until that unspecified point.

Over time, MaidSafeā€™s commercial activities may end up providing significant resources to fund ongoing development even if progress were slower than hoped.

I think itā€™s the timing of the ā€œat some pointā€ thatā€™s in question.

Funds available minus payroll and development cost must equal zero at a date known to a few people. If the project is not complete by then, more capital can be raised but investors would ask the obvious question.

We could not be more open tbh @whiteoutmashups. We publish detailed development updates every week, we open source all our code, our jira tasks and even get the community involved during the design phase. Where do you think we could be more open?

I do understand and share the frustrations of those involved in the project, but any notion that we are looking to produce something perfect or are holding back to protect money are wide of the mark. This has never been about money for us. We (the company and the community) live and die by the security and functionality of the SAFE Network and releasing something that does not work, is not well tested is most certainly not the correct approach. The DAO and the Parity wallet hack are evidence of that.

It is good to hear that you are still on board Will. No one said this would be easy. I can personally see a lot of progress in recent months and I would hope the community continue to trust us in delivering the network.

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Itā€™s like asking for a timeline for the first flight of a paying passenger plane before the Wright brothersā€™ maiden flight.

This isnā€™t a pyramid, which was just a particular of building, not anything new.

This is the first of its kind. Like asking how long it would take to work out the structure of DNA etc etc

And you canā€™t say to those trying to build the first commercial plane to launch piece by piece - all the parts must be working individually, and then have been fitted together and tested as one unit (lightweight construction, lift, propulsion, control system, etc)

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