Techcrunch: Decentralize All The Things! - Maidsafe mentioned

5 Likes

Great comments from some of the forum members, amazing support as usual! A response from the author to @eblanshey would indicate a more in depth piece on non block chain consensus may be in the pipeline.

2 Likes

I don’t want to sound negative, but I’m increasingly getting the feeling that we’re not getting the Maidsafe message out. When I read the article (I think of what Maidsafe would mean to me, if I never heard of it before) everything just passes on as: Yeah whatever. Maybe it’s just me…

I would love to see a video put out what Maidsafe will be in the future, that speak directly to consumers & companies imagination. I’m sorry to say but the current video (maidsafe.net) sounds technical…

It would be fun if the video start with the current internet 1.0 and an IOT device (fridge) getting ATTACKED/HACKED. After that they would show it from the SAFE network how the IOT device can’t be attacked and your fridge even making you money. Yeah I just say fridge to sound cool. But what would be a better device is a TV.

Your Tv runs on the SAFE Network and your looking at the “Maidsafe in the future video”. Besides that your Tv can’t be hacked, it makes you Safecoins. Right from your Tv your also able to send Safecoins from America to Africa FOR FREE, with NO TRANSACTION LIMIT. I realize that this is a complete other topic like:

Marketing:
A consumer unstandable Maidsafe video (show them how Maidsafe will benefit them in reaLife).

1 Like

I think we need to be mindful of what stage we are at. We are still at the very early, not even released yet, phase looking to generate awareness amongst; opinion leaders, influencers and early adopters. These groups are typically fairly technical, with some exceptions of course. I think your suggestion is ultimately a good one @19eddyjohn75, but IMO would serve us better a bit further down the road.

We are trying to communicate a complex and alternative view of computer networking and this is not something we can expect to achieve over night. I personally see real progress though and a few key journalists, such as John Evans, are starting to wrap their heads around what we are doing.

8 Likes

Paging @Warren… Marketing help needed :wink:

The article puts everything in the same basket.

The article makes a good point about stacks. It doesn’t matter how convenient crypto approaches are.

What matters is the most convenient solution (or 2-3 top stacks), and that (those) win(s) the game simply because most people are lazy and disinterested in understanding pretty much anything. I don’t know what would have to happen so that more than 5% of people actually do something about decentralization and privacy.

My expectations are modest. Within 2 years no more than 10% of people will use crypto solutions in their day to day life. I hope I’m wrong.

1 Like

Agree, so we need to hide it from them. This I think is key, give a better experience than today where possible (everyone says this, so not platitudes, I really mean we need to otherwise all else is irrelevant). Appeal to the laziness of folk and just make it simple, never let them need to see a crypto key or hear the word. Right now the transition from core providing the platform (with years of improvement in front of us) over to the app devs. We are working hard to build that team and this is the big swing, we need now to produce super simple already installed apps and authentication automatically on remote sites etc.

8 Likes

After first learning of this project, the most exciting point for me initially was the possibility of a self-CA system. If the project can manage at least this, it is much further along than other communication systems. Even the new DIME protocol is limited because it turns the DNS system into a CA. Everyone has to trust the root signers, and the signers of their TLD. Bah.

4 Likes

I’ve written Richard Stallman and he hadn’t heard of MaidSafe and while he says, “It might be a good thing”, I don’t think he understands the potential yet (I’m just beginning to myself). I also just sent a message asking if Eben Moglen is aware. I was watching this talk from a few years back again and think he needs to know about MaidSafe.

4 Likes

David and I actually had a meeting with Eben Moglen about 18 months ago. It was quite a strange affair and I’m not sure he understood the implications of the network. He is an inspirational type speaker though and would be a good guy to have onside, definitely worth you reaching out. Thanks for all the help!

1 Like

Oh, that’s interesting. I am trying to find out if he knows because I use Diaspora, which was designed to be decentralized. Diaspora was written by developers who were inspired by Moglen’s talks on the need to build new services. However, now I’m wondering if MaidSafe is simply a more efficient data handler and Diaspora should abandon their back-end and use MaidSafe instead and just focus on Diaspora as a MaidSafe application.

That is, if I am understanding what MaidSafe is designed to do.

100% Of course there is a wee bit more. I want to see routing_v2 able to provide consensus based DHT for general use and many more projects to use it. For full consensus it needs vaults (secured CA replacement). For playing and getting an understanding of group based consensus routing_v2 should do that just fine. It will open up folk to see how this works and then recognise why vaults do what they do. For loose consensus (torrent/open publishing platforms etc.) it may be enough as is. Really cool if that were the case as more use is better code.

3 Likes

I just watched that talk by Eben Moglen - "What do we need… We need a webserver we can put in our pocket and plug in any place and be able to sync it up with any router that’s around, should have a couple usb ports to attach it to things, it should know how to start itself up, it should know how to start its webserver, it should know how to collect your stuff from all the social networking places , it should know how to send an encrypted backup to your friends’ servers, it should know how to micro blog, it should know how to make some noise like tweet, it should know how to be your avatar in a free net that works for you, and keeps the logs, you can always tell whats happening in your server, and if anyone wants to know what’s happening in your server they need a search warrant;
if you want to move your server to Oceana then take it there buy a plane ticket… No spying for free.

Sounds like this guy would like MaidSafe when he’s seen it done :slight_smile:

4 Likes

I agree with @nicklambert, it’s still pretty early. In my opinion, Bitcoin is the primary cause for the whole decentralization movement; if it weren’t for Bitcoin being the catalyst, most people wouldn’t care about this stuff. So from this point of view, MaidSafe’s great advantage is riding the stream of the growing decentralization trends that bitcoin started.

The problem for getting around to learn about MaidSafe is one that I myself had to overcome. Try to see it from my point of view, as it happened to me, and you’ll see why it seems difficult to get MaidSafe out there:

Like most Bitcoin people, I came across bitcoin from a post on Reddit or an article about it. I started to learn what this thing was. No central control? Who owns what? After doing research, I started getting sucked in, trying to understand how it all worked. I was still somewhat confused after reading the whitepaper, so I spent a ton of my free time learning and asking questions about it. That means searching google for particular concepts, asking a ton of questions on Reddit, watching videos, etc, until I felt pretty comfortable with it. This took a lot of time, and the learning curve was steep.

Now imagine many months of learning have gone by, you’re pretty knowledgeable, and all of a sudden a ton of other decentralization apps start popping up: Altcoins claiming to be better in certain ways; Mastercoin, Colored Coins, Counterparty; Ethereum; Sidechains; MaidSafe; StorJ. I only have so much free time; where the hell do I start? I learned how colored coins worked. Then I started looking into Ethereum. At this point, MaidSafe occasionally makes the headlines somewhere. I read up about it: “a fully decentralized internet? eh, I shouldn’t worry about that now, that’ll take them forever, it’s too ambitious. I’ll read up about it later.” There seems to be an endless supply of technologies to learn. How can I ever keep up? It’s just too much.

Then “later” comes and I try to read up about MaidSafe. I searched Google, and not a single article that explains it all succinctly–only bits and pieces about various parts of the network. It’s a whole new way of doing things, I realize, I’d have to start from scratch. The video that’s available is too broad. I searched the forums, everything is scattered. I started asking a lot of questions (some of which still aren’t answered :wink:). Slowly I started piecing together the whole picture.

I think some of you may start to get a gist of how overwhelming it could be, especially for the average Joe who literally only just come across Bitcoin and is trying to understand it. Even the fairly tech-savvy will need to make a pretty big effort.

That’s why I really wanted to make that “succinct article” that I could just post a link to every time someone was interested or confused about MaidSafe (which is what I did for this TechCrunch article). It’s the article that I would have wanted when I first started researching MaidSafe myself.

In conclusion, MaidSafe has massive potential, but the barrier to understanding it is very high (at least right now). If anything, @dirvine is right in that the masses of people would never understand all this, and they shouldn’t have to. The only thing that is required is a) make them want decentralized applications due to all the news of corruption and hacking, and to do that b) make the decentralized applications ridiculously easy to install and use, and make them pretty (i.e. like material design, not Bitcoin Core).

12 Likes

100% agree with @dirvine.

I appreciate all the effort that goes into explaining our new ANT Tech. We constantly remind people it’s not blockchain technology. This is wonderful for: early adopters, tech savvy, investors, and anyone else that wants to dig deep into how it really works.

But for the average end user, it doesn’t really matter. I have limited knowledge how my car functions, or my cell phone, or my computer. If the technology is useful… I will acquire enough knowledge to operate it. Beyond that, my time is needed for other things, like spending time with my family.

When I heard about smart phones, no one explained how it works. They just “showed” me how to use it. That’s all it took for me to adopt it. If we make it very simple and easy to use, the SAFE Network will be adopted just as easily.

9 Likes

@janitor Inter-forum network or outreach the kind of awareness that @chrisfostertv provides but spread across collaborator organizations to produce highest common denominator results that open source is designed to facilitate.

Reach out to sciefi writers like Danie Suarez, William Hertling, Ramez Naam and Peter F. Hamilton. These guys already get it to a large degree and I think they would be thrilled by SAFE if they aren’t already. Get them to dream about this tech concretely and get them to use it in their plots and with care even name it. They will get the memes out. Their efforts can help protect the early vital info campaign and help prevent a reset. Their input to forums and boards might be invaluable even if they have to distance their pen names. They’d be great on interforums. If Richard Stallman said he didn’t know of SAFE, the key might be in stoking the interst in the frame of reference rather than trying to foster direct understanding. A coulple days ago I had an aware, interested person ask me point blank to explain SAFE. A humbling experience to say the least. Now is the time to do it we want people hungry for the tech. These guys get people in the trance state where they can take in these concepts and begin to value them.

I completely agree with @dirvine about no mention ever of “crypto,” and making it as simple as possible. What sells is end user empowerment, above all, because is what they really want and need, that is what sold the complicated modular PC and that empowering melding with the neutral open internet is posssibly the core of what brought us the web. Total control over interfaces I think people live. I think they get: you won’t be interrupted.

SAFE needs the best presentation materials ever as I think power will try as hard as it can to convince the public that only terrorist use SAFE including committing acts of terror and then telling the public that its on payroll terrorists couldn’t have done it without SAFE. This is where I think Slur type efforts will be crucial as it has the power to completely discredit the dicreditor in a way that gives a martyr halo to the target of abuse. The public needs to know the so called terrorist were on payroll because this is how much we can trust “just trust us” sponsored government.

@eblanshey Yes bitcoin had some great viral stuff going with the anonymous innovation and authorship and
something deeply appeals to people about there being something fundamentally wrong with money or in need of a upgrade. One of the main reason’s people want money is to be free of its influence, a strange addiction, if you just get enough you can quit. A popular book right now is the “The Death of Money.” I agree with everything you said. But as above I wonder even anyone understands this stuff better than the sci fi people. For the designer it might be art, for the economist its their stock and trade, but the dreamers and story tellers make it fit for us.

1 Like

My expectations are modest. Within 2 years no more than 10% of people will use crypto solutions in their day to day life. I hope I’m wrong.

While my estimates are about the same, don’t underestimate the “second half of the chess board”. Things can start slow but adoption curves can be exponential.