Symform - Free* online backup service

Profit from apps they’re creating and will in the future?

What is this @janitor?

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In a couple per posts @janitor you’ve stayed from facts to speculation presented as fact.

I’m referring to the “you need to donate 4x (not 2x)” when does to various factors we don’t know what the ratio will be, or how the SAFEnetwork pricing model will compare. And to the point @Melvin refers to about MaidSafe: you appear to say they take a cut, whereas the plan is for this to go to any and all core devs, and it is evident that MaidSafe are trying to reduce dependence on them rather than use this as a revenue stream. My understanding is that their aim is to earn from from app development and other sources (not necessarily related to SAFEnetwork).

Please don’t make incorrect or speculative claims about SAFEnetwork without making this clear. All you need to do is say “I expect” or something like that before them. Alternatively, please “Reply in new topic” and back them up.

Okay I chose the words poorly, hoping to make a point that’s easy to understand for Eddy.
Of course coins would be created for storage provided by the farmers, but a percentage goes to investors, doesn’t it? And unless the coins are at some point sold, in the very long run all coins would end up in investors’ pockets.

Again no. Your attempts to simplify things are too say the least misleading.

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@janitor - I’m stealing the word, “freetarded”.

Bitcoin, friggin’ bitcoin has like eight devs working on the core IIRC. I know maidsafe nigh has to play dumb for legal reasons, but the users don’t. We know full and well that big money will be made by the dev team on account of being the main contributor to the network code in the early days and using their early adopter advantage to acquire relatively massive amounts of safecoin.

On-topic: I think the app needs it’s own crypto-currency to get people on board in the long-term. Once people learn that they can get paid to contribute resources to safenet/storj, the sell to resource contributers becomes a lot weaker.

No one ever said they won’t make money in the future. Janitor’s statement was false and that’s why I asked what he meant.

and using their early adopter advantage to acquire relatively massive amounts of safecoin.

About how much?

8 people * $50K = $400K/year.
I don’t want to research who pays them but I think they get some funding from the Bitcoin Foundation and similar donations from companies who use bitcoin to earn money part of which can be spent on development.

Symform takes a cut in HDD space. You donate 100 GB and get 50GB. I am still migrating my data from one disk to another so I can’t say if the 50GB is usable or before their RAID protection is applied, but I assume it’s after, i.e. you use 66.7 GB of the 100GB you donated to them.
Then they have 33.3 GB * 0.667 = 22 GB, so that’s the amount of usable capacity they can sell to other people.

There’s no coin except US$ in there. The approach is quite similar to the SAFE Network (when used for backup), just without Safecoin.

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I’m assuming that Symform only has private storage. Is there any kind of public data type networking system?

Symform is actually doing somethign very similar to SAFEnet – they are breaking up the data into chunks, encrypting it and storing it on ‘traded’ hard-drive space around the globe. I’m sure they have some of their own hard-drives that they used to bootstrap their network, but they are taking advantage of users hard-drive space just as SAFEnet intends.

Their system is however centrally managed, unlike SAFEnet which will be fully distributed. So encryption keys are stored with them and if they get shut-down for whatever reason, the data, which may remain intact, will likely become inaccessible.

Looks very like how Safe works and is patented too, which may need looking into as another “risk to Safe”. Looks like a Microsoft/Amazon version of Safe really. My worry has always been the Big Boys just nicking the tech and building on it, as I very much doubt massive legal battles can be afforded by Maidsafe. A related attack would be for Govts to encourage use of the "friendly/legal version of this type of tech.
The frequently asked questions section is interesting and hints at possible system requirements for sustaining Safe Network…maybe? The patented bit appears here:

"Symform has developed patented technology that is more redundant and secure than the centralized data center approach. We assume that all Symform devices are insecure and unreliable. This is the basic foundation of our architecture. We address this by encrypting the data using the 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) at source. We then divide the encrypted data into blocks. Each block is then shredded in 64 equally sized fragments. Then, we add 32 parity fragments to every block using an error correction algorithm called Reed-Solomon. This results in 96 fragments with built-in redundancy and security where any 64 can be used to reconstruct the block. These 96 encrypted fragments are then distributed randomly to 96 devices within the Symform Cloud Storage Network. We call this patented technology RAID-96™.

It would be interesting to compare patents I think…Just out of interest, hypothetically, say Microsoft/Amazon infringe Maidsafe’s patent - are Maidsafe in a position to do anything about it? I’ve no idea really, but it’s a concern.
This ties into the "risks to Safe Network thread, but not sure how to link. :smiley:

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14 posts were split to a new topic: Early demand, and effect on storage costs, after launch

They can rent storage servers in several locations around the world, and the rest can be provided by users.
If data can be lost only if 1/3 or more chunks is lost, they would not need to provide much more than 2/3 of capacity by themselves.
If they implement QoS or tiers they could send the paying customers’ data only to their own servers, and non paying only to peer-provided storage.

I was trying to point out how the maidsafe will be the group of people netting the dev rewards for a long while, despite the their expressed intention for the opposite to happen.

If bitcoin is anything to go by, if the project does what it’s suppose to do, I’d say It’ll be worth some serious **** you money.

@janitor I mean that Symform will need to set up a cryptocurrency that works with the program that is paid out to the storage providers instead of free space, since safenet and other projects effectively does that.

That would be interesting,
I imagine most people are okay with bartering their space and bandwidth in return for service, but there may be a small or large group of crypto enthusiasts who would like to get paid in BTC.

But at the same time this group would constantly bitch about the fact that Symform holds the encryption keys…
Maybe it’s better for them to stay away from cryptocurrencies as long as they want to keep their current approach to encryption.

Was that aimed at me? I’m not bitching about this fact, I merely pointed it out as it’s one of the relevant differences between the two systems … is it not?

I’m talking about Symform’s positioning. Enterprise backup s/w can take encrypted backup, so they don’t care if Symform owns the keys for the 2nd round of encryption that happens on Symform. It’s a huge market and the lowest tier that actually matters to P2P backup providers.
The crypto backup market isn’t relevant to Symform. There’s no reason why they should care what crypto users think. That’s all.

I just received the first megabyte of data from Symform (1.3 MB, to be exact).
That entitles me to about 650 KB of backup space on the network :smile:

Edit: I got 20 MB now. It’s coming in periodically (network traffic stops and starts, maybe due to new backups or simply network churn).

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Short-term I can see their business model working, but in the long term, say 5-15 years, I think that there will be tech companies with their own cryptocurrency, and tech companies that are out of business. The sheer amount of mass collaboration that is incentivized with crypto-currencies backed by strong services just will not have an equal.

I can’t tell whether Oracle’s business model is going to work 10 years from now (and 10 years ago many were saying Oracle’s finished). You may be right. We’ll see.

In the meantime, unlike Storj (which doesn’t have a working product - the biggest difference) Symform doesn’t let one use their service to make money - any contributions can be reclaimed only in their backup service. It’s less convenient, but it eliminates all payouts which is great for Symform as it largely relieves them from the need to use a cryptocurrency.
They could accept bitcoin payments, but since most enterprises need to receive invoices and contact Support, there’s little need for anonymity and cryptocurrency.
Sure, they could use a 3rd party API to also accept cryptopayments, but right now there’s little to no need for it. It’d only be a distraction at this moment.

After running this for 2-3 weeks:

  • I’m contributing 2 GB (only, for testing purposes).
  • I haven’t tried to backup or restore anything, I am mostly concerned about network utilization because I don’t want to have it disturb my usual browsing habits.
  • Since about a week ago it’s stopped filling up my system and it’s currently utilizing 1.3 GB out of 2 GB (kind of weird, but maybe there’s too much capacity out there).
  • While it was filling up, I’d get 30-50 KB/s, now it’s using 0.5-2 KB/s, probably just reporting in to the mother-ship.
  • To be honest I expected more churn, to say the least. And I saw a fair amount of outgoing traffic before (up to 50 KB/s), so maybe that was when a “whale” provider dropped off or some other stuff was going on.

Related to churn, since Symform doesn’t give you coins, you can either provide your space for free, or get paid in the form of getting 50% of your space for online backup. The first group is probably small, so I would explain the low churn by the fact that most contributors have something at stake (their online backup). With SAFE we are told farmers will have their reputation at stake (make your own conclusion which approach causes less churn).

I haven’t tried to see what happens if I put online 1 GB of data and then lower my contribution from 2 GB to say 1.5 GB (it shouldn’t be possible, but in order to test I’d have to try). (2 GB is the minimum to contribute, by the way, so the example is not possible, but hypothetical). I would imagine the service checks your utilization of the network and disallows going below 2x of what you use.

That’s about it. All in all it’s not a bad idea if you have a system with some 200 MB of free RAM and few GB of unused disk space. But is it more convenient (for backup; not for “apps” or whatever) than having few hundred GB free on Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.? Probably not. Maybe the best target for these guys are small businesses with few TB of data, but that requires a lot of bandwidth to fill up, so who the hell knows.

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