The Difference Between Can't and Won't

Blockchains can store small amounts of immutable data permanently.

SAFENetwork can store small or large amounts of immutable data permanently.

Considering these two facts, with both technologies being open source and distributed, there are more similarities than differences.

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You’re just repeating what @neo said. I’ve already replied to this here and here. Unless you can come up with a technical solution to your utopic vision, this is all sunshine and lollipops.

So, can you do it? Give me the technical way to accomplish this vision?

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It seems to me that the issue is not with what others are saying but the way you interpret it all. What people are saying is pretty much true and the liability is with the owner/uploader of the data. Be it curating & indexing videos, or the videos themselves.

I launch safe.tube, people add links to safe.tube, they control the data, but I control those links. I choose which link gets to be displayed on the page. That means I am legally accountable and must remove links to illegal content.

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This is correct. No one has opposed this from what i see, well at least the ones you say are repeating me.

But there are at least 2 major other ways youtube can be set up and the author is not liable.

If you disagree then you disagree with observable history, one being the bittorrent program.

Great. Then let’s focus on this problem.

Ok, what are they?

Even if you can come up with a technical solution to run bittorrent on safe, this solution sucks. Nobody watching youtube videos wants to mess around with torrents. This is highly inconvenient.

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Buy Why? Wouldn’t this just be a self fulling prophecy for you. I’d say lets focus on the other solutions that move all liability to the users. It should be the user themselves that bear all liability for the material they post.

Because from what I gather, your solutions involves p2p alternatives, such as sending link to videos by pm to your friends. I want to have a global, centralized repository where everyone can participate, not just a small list of buddies of yours or me. I want a youtube clone.

Then go back and read because they did not involve any p2p other than the SAFEnetwork being a decentralised network. And they would be able to be classified as a youtube

I am not responding till you go back and reread all the posts by people giving you valid scenarios

I’ve read your solutions multiple time. They don’t make any sense. I’m looking for a concrete solution to the problem, but you only gave vague answers.

Which posts in particular did I not reply to sufficiently ?

I think this is one of the most important, though perhaps not yet urgent, topics we need to keep working. I can see government and big tech coming for the Safe network at some point and there are so many angles of potential attack. We will need solid defenses. Perhaps at some point just prior to going “live” we should engage some legal advisers on this? My fear is that the defense of “can’t control content” while it works for Bitcoin for now, is actually a trap. Regulators could shut off all FIAT/SAFE conversions if they wanted to. I suspect they don’t consider doing this for BTC because all transactions are openly posted on the blockchain so it is more valuable to let people think the transactions are quasi-anonymous right now. With KYC the crackdown in unpaid taxes has already begun. With SAFE I can see just outlawing FIAT/SAFE conversions. Won’t trouble small players (private cash transactions), and the network could still technically function, but that would cripple the SAFE economy. So please keep at this (I know some may be getting frustrated), but I don’t think we can possibly spend too little thought on all the potential risks and angles of attack here.

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Alright, take two. John is still dead.

No there is not. Not in the traditional sense of what a website is. If you provide a link to a piece of data, you open yourself up to the responsibility of sharing that link.

Potentially, yes you have. The tech you use doesn’t absolve you of your legal responsibilities. Whatever are your opinions about them.

Alright, self promotion moment, read this up. It doesn’t get too technical, but it gives an example on how to build a system where the data is completely separated from the UI and how an App can function on Safe.

The Safe network is not a replacement for the web. I know it’s marketed that way, but in reality, it’s just a giant shared database with no centralized indexing. So it sucks right? Well for some things it does, but for other things it’s pretty damn ground breaking. But yeah, the web isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, both will be working in parallel for a pretty long time at least.

If you want to use it to centralize something, like a sharing video website, you open a nice can of responsibilities, like you do on the web, you are just more hidden by default, much much much more. But it’s also worst because data are never erased, so you can’t really moderate it, it’s always there hidden in plain sight. In short, don’t do SafeTube as a centralized indexing service. Or do and accept the responsibilities.

You can still do a SafeTube though, but it would be just a fancy UI for users to organize their play list and share them with their communities. Is it inconvenient? It is, but it’s kind of the price you pay to give back people the control over their data. Can’t have it both ways.

so TLDR: If you are looking for centralization, go on the web, it’s remarkably good at it. If you are looking for decentralization, go on Safe, nothing will come close to it.

And this is a controversial topic but, if you mix both together, you got one hell of a piece of tech to play around with.

That’s for my understanding of version 1 though. Folks working on this are pretty clever. Who knows what the future holds.

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That was a great read, you’ve clearly been thinking this through and come up with some amazing ideas. I’m definitively going to look closer at this when I start developing my own site for safe net. But I am still confused as to how the actual sharing between users can occur efficiently. In addition, the mutable data itself does also have an owner right? That is, someone with the rights to manage permissions and changes to the data. Seems like they might still have some liability?

Look, youtube is screwing users over at the moment, they are deleting videos like madmen. It’s quickly turning into a platform where only political correct content is allowed. Every year they come up with stricter terms of conditions. It’s like burning the library of Alexandria. Millions of videos will be lost forever. The copyright laws enforcement is now getting very strict, so imo this is a pretty urgent and big problem. We need to replace youtube.com with safe.tube.

I’m not looking for “centralization”, I am looking for a central place for content, a repository of videos neatly organized such as youtube, but in a decentralized form (so that nobody is to blame).

Your p2p solution is certainly interesting, but unless someone can come up with a decentralized alternative that functions as youtube we’re going to need people to step up and take the role as owners of safe.tube, Until decentralization is possible without sacrificing convenience and availability we’re bringing back John.

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Thanks, glad I could help. I’ll let others reply for the specific, I’m pretty out of the loop with the API and the details of the inner working.Check out the dev forum if you haven’t already.

I understand that. I expect that the Web will be used for quite a while for links discovery on Safe. But you can bet the people working on Safe can’t wait for the network to be live so they can start working on more cool features. Meanwhile, John will have to wait a bit more, sorry John.

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Indexing was discussed a bit here. In my opinion it is not feasible to do what you are looking for on the base layer of SAFE network. Think about it…everything happens client side. The site would be unusable if the user has to download the whole content index of the site every time they visit it. Or even if they just have to do it the first time they visit and update the index on subsequent visits, I don’t see that working well. If you tried Augur in its early days, one of the main complaints from users was the initial sync time. I don’t know how big these indexes are for YouTube, but given the volume of submissions they have, it must be huge. An app of this scale might need to think of being a next layer on the network, like how lightning network is on Bitcoin. I posted here about an indexing network for Ethereum. It might be worth looking into how that works.

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@warz, I was about to say the same, that solution would be completely unscalable.

I saw @drehb that you mention MD capacity in your post from way back.

I think my topics on indexed and searchable dbs can add some information. Like this post DataStore over AppendableData design - #20 by oetyng and following contents.

Or the OP in that topic.

There’s also a repo for the SAFE.DataStore that has rudimentary indexing and searching.

However… SQL-like querying of data will be available with SPARQL over the RDF-emulations that MaidSafe implement.

I am not well versed in the RDF world, but it would still seem to me that it maybe is not the silver bullet for storage (since basically no db type is, all dbs suck - at some stuff), and eventually we might want to some other kind of emulation/implementation as well.

So, as for building up indexes, that would be the first best bet anyway; available in the core, supports SQL like queries.

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As long as the “website” remains decentralized, it must per definition be possible.

If you mean with “run” to moderate or control with certain exclusivity or privileges, I would not call it decentralized and you would be responsible.

I think that the base layer of SAFE network is sufficient. Perpetual immutable data storage and global access is sufficient, and for anonymity anonymous PUT and GET would be nice. And SAFE Network will be distributed and scalable unlike Bitcoin and Ethereum.

As long as information is discoverable, we should be fine without any kind of master index. People will build indexes, some may be automated, but there does not need to be a monopoly on indexing.

I think it is just a matter of innovation, and getting rid of old ways of thinking.

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There are three independent things

  • The app/site
  • Indexes/catalogue with links to data
  • The data itself

A site does not have to contain an index of content, that could be provided by the user.

If I create a video app, I don’t have to provide any default index. The app could be an open source project and completely independent of any index.

I could set up a site with this code and hardcode it to a particular index in which case I’d be responsible.

If I instead set up a site where the user has to type in the address of an index. I have no responsibility.

The app may even support a list of indexes to search and a list of blacklists of content to skip, such as spam. The blacklists are essentially moderation, but anyone can make them and a user can basically choose which moderators, if any, they want.

The software is now independent from the data and the indexes of the data, so the question is then reduced to whether an index can kept without anyone being responsible for the content of the index.

I think it may be possible to achieve this kind of indexes with AppendableData.

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I thought this was a good analogy. A safe app / site can be thought of as this. Web browsers typically don’t block web sites and aren’t required to.

Whether you’ve created a pastebin clone, photo bulletin board, youtube-like clone, etc - you didn’t necessarily create a moderation system / delete button. Just like your browser vendor may not have. Without further development labor and publishing, you have no way to comply with the request.

There was a news story and bit of controversy some time ago with Apple being at odds with the U.S. government because they refused to build/sign a tool to hack their own operating system (San Bernadino terrorist’s iphone). Apple made the legal / constitutional argument that the government has no right to compel labor / speech. Similarly, you could refuse to develop/publish “delete” mechanisms (e.g. block lists). If anyone asks you to take down content, you reply “the software doesn’t have a way for me to censor content uploaded by users”. If they ask you to build one, you can decline like Apple did, or name an outrageous price they are unlikely to pay (e.g. “Tell you what - I’ll do it for 1 trillion dollars. Payment in advance, no refunds.”). That may not work if the adversary is willing to apply pressure anyway (e.g. torture you).

You can also have the consolation that users are still able to use the original tool (which is incapable of censoring the content). Torturing you would have limited usefulness since your code is open source and undeletable by the SAFE network (users can run the last version you published prior to being compromised).

In the case of Apple, it was reported that the government eventually got in by hiring a hacker, and basically dropped their argument with Apple. The thing is, law can always change in unpredictable ways. People in government can even pass illegal laws (violate their country’s own constitution). The U.S. for some time treated encryption software like military munitions and technically still does (the first and second amendment did not stop the government from restricting encryption software).

That said, in the US, you can also make an “ex post facto” argument. For example, say you published a tool, and the government later passed legislation that made your tool “illegal” for whatever arbitrary reason. You are unlikely to be prosecuted (courts are supposed to throw out the case), since it wasn’t illegal at the time you did it.

A lot of this is theoretical and down the road, since there is no decentralized permissionless database implementation for the SAFE network (additional development of SAFE is required). However such a database app is possible today AFAIK with other projects. For example, with a smart contract on EOS or Etherum. So I was considering it from that angle - a relational database that anyone can write to (but not delete).

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