Thursdays are back! [Update - July 15th, 2021]

Every Thursday, just like in the ‘old’ days, we will be publishing a brief update as to what the team is up to. Full dev updates will be reserved for new testnet releases, but between releases we think it would be helpful to the community to shine a light on progress and what the team trying to achieve without getting too deep into the weeds.

Each week we’ll also try to add a bit of explanation about a particular area - this week it’s DBCs.


We’re pleased to welcome back DevOps Engineer Chris O’Neil (@Chriso), who was part of the QA team here at MaidSafe until 2019. Chris’s appointment beefs up a team already strengthened by the addition of engineers Anselme Grumbach @Anselme and Chris Connelly @Chris.Connelly who are already pretty well up to speed.

Here’s a bit of background from the man himself:

I’m currently based in the south side of Glasgow and have been in the software industry for 14 years. I began my career as a developer and worked on product development for about 7/8 years. Then I moved more into the DevOps space, and that’s where my main focus has been for the past 5 or 6 years. I’m delighted to rejoin Maidsafe and be part of the project again. While I will be happy to help with any DevOps requirements, this time I also have the ambition to be part of the network development too.


Progress

@Chriso’s ARM builds of sn_cli and sn_node are now merged, although more testing and bug fixes may be needed before it’s ready for prime time. (aarch64 builds will be following shortly, @chriso is working on the implementation there just now :+1: )

An updated self-encryption API is in the works, to allow parallelisation of the SE process in order to speed file uploads. Planning stage at the moment, but we’ll let you know when there’s something to see.

Logging and linting (automatic flagging of syntax errors) are being reviewed to make it quicker and easier to find bugs and inconsistencies.

Messaging: for optimum performance, communications between nodes should be kept to the absolute minimum required. The number of messages has already been significantly reduced as a result of testnet analyses but there is more to do here, particularly to allow support for offline signing. To this end, we’ve just merged a major messaging overhaul which aims to simplify the messaging protocol.

DBCs: Testnet 7 will include a basic implementation of Digital Bearer Certificates (DBCs). The implementation design is moving on nicely, and we’re investigating the best way to ensure absolute privacy.


More on DBCs


A DBC is a unique digital token that has value by virtue of the fact it has been provably issued by a trusted mint as part of an economic system. To spend a DBC you need to get it reissued by a mint. The mint can take your DBC and reissue it as two or more new DBCs if you wish (e.g. payment to a shop, the remainder as change to you), and multiple DBCs can be reissued as a single DBC.

The important thing for us is that DBCs provide a quick, safe, flexible way to make payments that is compatible with multisig/threshold signature cryptography and can be used online and offline. They simplify many aspects of the Safe Network economy.

DBCs actually date back to 1997, but they have not gained much traction to date, largely because of the difficulty of securing a centralised mint which is a single point of failure.

The sharded nature of the Safe Network removes this vulnerability, with each section having its own mint and with DBCs randomly scattered across sections. In addition, a mint on Safe can be trusted because it is hosted by section Elders, nodes that have already gained the trust of the network. This is vital in providing protection against Sybil attacks.

Currently, the team is working on ways to ensure that a compromised section could not possibly publish transactions passing through its mint. More about that in a future update.

Useful Links

Feel free to reply below with links to translations of this dev update and moderators will add them here:

:russia: Russian ; :germany: German ; :spain: Spanish ; :france: French ; :bulgaria: Bulgarian

As an open source project, we’re always looking for feedback, comments and community contributions - so don’t be shy, join in and let’s create the Safe Network together!

94 Likes

2 hours no first? I’ll take it then.

Thanks for bringing these back @maidsafe.

31 Likes

Yayyy!!! I can tell some community needed it :grimacing:
I am also delighted! Now to read.

18 Likes

Along with avoiding unnecessary uploads of duplicate perhaps … will be great to see these kind of changes as they will affect user experience.

Nice to see updates again… :+1:

19 Likes

Great! Excited for TN 7! And these updates. Thanks team

19 Likes

Talk about a blockchain antiquater, DBCs on SAFE should do it!!

19 Likes

I like it!

13 Likes

Keep plodding. Keep coding. Keep up the good work guys :+1:t3::+1:t3::+1:t3::smiley:

18 Likes

Guys do you still believe maidsafe will release something real for all? No fud here!

1 Like

Yes, no need to keep asking this kind of question.

14 Likes

I’m really excited even for simple DBC implementation in T7 but I’m also stoked to see how @JimCollinson is coming along with any DBC related UI!

Hoping upload is drastically improved with the parallelism in SE.

Keep chugging team and thanks for bringing back the updates.

Also welcome back @chriso!

13 Likes

I wish you could just stop this constant kicking the team in the stomach. It’s getting beyond a joke now. I strongly suggest you bugger off and let this happen. The thought we are all working for no purpose is … well I cannot describe it, but as I have said previously, negative energy is poison to a project. So please stop poisoning this project and go somewhere else where you can be happy.

37 Likes

It’s amazing isn’t it? Mr/Mrs/Ms @Lackys, last seen 8 weeks ago moaning about a Maid price drop, suddenly pops up again to muddy the waters when Maidsafe step up to communicate progress. Almost as if he/she/it didn’t have anything better to do with their lives.

16 Likes

Yes I do. Actually, they already have done so. @dask just put it together in another thread recently, I quote it here (and add a list formatting, I hope you don’t mind @dask):

20 Likes

On the upside @Lackys throwing such softballs only shows how easy such negatives are turned. Zero impact here where other projects would struggle to evidence the progress being made. The lazy just need to read the updates and wonder how so much progress gets done!

14 Likes

Also nice to see how quickly this update got 50 likes in a silent summer Thursday. We are here.

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Thanks so much to the entire Maidsafe team for all of your hard work! :racehorse:

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Its getting close! Exciting times!

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Reading about how DBC is actually old yet being integrated into something (Safe Net) that can actually utilize it was quite something. It’s happening!?

7 Likes

It is important question.
There always a need to look critically at the progress.

There are three different things: what is desired process, what is actually happening and how it is perceived by observers. Ideally, they should match.
I see two way communications to outside world from the team, but since questions rises, some communication aspects may be developed not enough.
So “working for no purpose” can be transformed into “all is going well, but for some reason some people can’t understand what is happening”.

I did not track what happened previously with @Lackys, but I think there is no need to be angry at him.
If he can describe what is wrong, it may be useful to debug a problem (social problems have similarities to technical ones). If not, then community and team should have immunity to ungrounded criticism. There will be always people, who do not like product. Look at YouTube for example. It is almost impossible to have 0 dislikes for relatively popular video.

I hope that project can be successful no matter what energy fluctuations are happening :slight_smile:

4 Likes