Update 16 June, 2022

Development Updates
41

I am not disputing that there are new laws which may effect this project. What I am saying is that even under the regulatory regime of say five years ago, the aims of this project would still have been in conflict with many laws and regulations.

To give a specific example, Regulation EU 2015/847 has the stated aim of “ensuring that basic information on the origator and the beneficiary of wire transfers is immediately available”. The definition wire transfer was then extended to include crypto asset providers, which include companies which “make arrangements to exchange one cryptoasset for another”. Exchanging Maid for SNT would meet that definition in my opinion.

So that is not a new law, and it doesn’t place the regulatory burden on individuals. It wouldn’t be sufficient for individuals to have the ability to disclose this “basic information”, the burden is on the “crpto asset provider”, ie Maidsafe.

The point I am making is that this law, and many other laws, have existed for many years in direct conflict with the values on this project.

Whether there’s a plethora of new laws, a coterie, or even just “pure hunners” of them, the fact remains that the regulatory regimes of the EU, the US, and the UK have not been in sync with the values of this project for at least 5 years, if not 10 or longer.

It is baffling to me that Maidsafe staff would ever have believed that they could launch this project in compliance with these regimes. These types of laws and regulations are the very reason this network is required in the first place!

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42

You can make a case that there were already problems but they are nothing, literally insignificant compared to what is happening now. The project was always going to face legal hurdles, and it has always looked into areas to assess what it needed to do to deal with them at any stage, but what is happening right now in the UK (and elsewhere) is completely different, and I don’t believe anyone could have predicted how bad. Go read Heather’s blog post linked above.

One specific point to bear in mind is that the Online Harms Bill introduces “hostage taking” to UK law, and that is something entirely new which affects any provider of user created content based services. The regulatory shift is off the scale.

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43

This is also relevant. We have a very different political environment in UK today even where laws have not changed:

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44

It’s the degree of conflict. However, I am still not worried and believe if the design is right, which I feel sure it is, then these become non-issues. Ignorance though is not a good defence.

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45

Is the network still permissionless if certain criteria needs to be met ie (not on a banned list)?

46

These are very fair points, particularly around the political context which I hadn’t thought about as much. In that context though, do you really believe that the team can appease the regulators without compromising too much?

I think in my mind, I had imagined them launching the network, a bit like Uber launched their app, and that the superior tech and public support would reduce the power of the regulators. Eg. Insisting drivers complete the Knowledge was not necessary when sat nav was widespread and coupled with mobile phones.

I guess an ask for forgiveness rather than beg permission approach is what I’m getting at.

Also, just as a final thought, if the team go down a regulated approach rather than simply launching a neutral platform, I think than the ongoing compliance burden would be enormous, which is a significant downside in terms of cost and manpower.

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47

Yes and it really has to be. Otherwise, the whole thing falls over.

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48

I hope we compromise nothing, but not MaidSafe. I mean the whole project, community code and humans who use it. We need to be cogniscant, put up strong and reasonable ways forward and not try to punch the regulators in the face or simply state they are rubbish. Instead, we need to show there are ways global consensus works. It’s how Safe works and if everyone wished to ban something, perhaps they could, but it will take everyone to agree.

That is an argument we can stand behind and show we are not promoting harm or facilitating anything beyond the will of the people.

As I say it’s not us, maidsafe, anyone can write nodes and code for them. We need to show writing nodes that deny knowledge or access to data won’t work. That is a good place to be. Not extreme, but understanding.

tl;dr Let’s look at logic and local approaches to freedom, not political stances or biases. Freedom must mean humanity have the choice.

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49

Given that we’ve had unstable community test networks for many months, may I ask what the nature of the bugs are? Is it technical/code bugs causing most issues or application design issues? Are fundamental design issues still occurring?

If there were purely code bugs, I’d have expected most to be swatted now. I’d also be expecting to see the community test nets become gradually more stable, rather than similarly unstable week to week. Some insight into this would be much appreciated.

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50

Many were out of sync agreement on members and particularly when elder churn happened. We think those are more solid now with some recent work in making those types more strict. So there we can fall back to consensus if even Ae is not proving enough. i.e. in periods of mass churn, we fall back to force synchronous changes.

We have had a few possible deadlocks and therefore the look at single thread core with just async. That is less code and cleaner code to read. I suspect that is more important than we realise as we have a ton of thread mutex locks and each is a possible deadlock. That’s a current drive to test a single thread and remove all the mutexes. This could be big, but we are not sure yet. It won’t mean we don’t have dedicated worker threads for comms/disk etc, but not have a multi threaded async (which is a bit of a jungle actually)

Another bug we know is the db we use (sled) stops after 3000 or so accesses, it’s not maintained, but the bug is fixed in main. We are testing other db’s there but likely we will use our own disk-based approach. This is a much smaller issue though.

Beyond bugs we are looking at data from start to finish, as we have al the bits in place we would like to get back to those API’s and make them simpler and ensure the backend is as agnostic as possible. That part is not a blocker, but something we should dedicate some Engineering to.

Hopefully that helps?

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51

This seems to be the common misconception: that because the team aren’t sticking their heads in the sand and hoping nobody will knock on their doors, they’re looking in detail at the problems they may have and how to deal with them.

It’s not “going down a regulated approach”, but understanding how they will or at least could be impacted by regulation.

Do you think Uber went in blind, and didn’t have teamed of lawyers trying to understand what might happen in each jurisdiction? They just did it in private, whereas MaidSafe get criticised for doing it in the open. :man_shrugging:t2:

I guess we have a lot of mistrust in this community, which can be healthy, but when

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52

Exactly and what can can everyone agree on? That child abuse is bad. Other than that not much.

My only concern is who are at the helms of the global decision making? Governments or government representatives? Some kind of elites or WEF?

I highly doubt that. It’s been stated even the community has a say, if I’m remembering right. If there are good orgs all around the world that still have to come to agreement on broad human rights issues I don’t think that is that threatening. Would I prefer to avoid all of it? ABSOLUTELY!!! Cypher punk the shit out of the world. Unfortunately, I feel it is probably if not completely unavoidable.

Maidsafe is showing good faith and effort here and I think that does make sense in this environment where governments have more control than ever and even governments are becoming more populist or leaning authoritarian. You have to tread lightly or in complete secret and the latter is not easy and too late for this project anyhow.

The autonomous network was built by humans and at one point we had all agreed on fundamentals. Strictly the fundamentals have not been broken (imo).

I’ll state it again that consensus is a majority vote much like a direct democracy. This project relies on consensus. Not everyone agrees all the time on everything but consensus is how things persist and prevent being broken. The fundamentals are still here and this effort is to prove this technology is safe for everyone.

Also excited for @bzee! That’s the real development this week.

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53

Yes, indeed. It is unfortunate that this significant bump up in the collective skillset has been lost in the censorship noise. The engineering team is relatively small and adding a major brain like @bzee does raise the collective capability and capacity.

We will be arguing re censorship for months yet if not longer but now there is greater capacity to ensure more bug will get squashed, new optimisations introduced and alternatives properly evaluated

Welcome @bzee

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54

I totally agree with what Dirvine says.

Freedom must mean that humanity has the choice

Let’s not make one more warrior confrontation between humans

It would be desirable for any person, entity, institution and government to be able to express their disagreement with what was published and not only this, but also to leave a record with their name.

With this, the option is given to express to anyone his position on what has been published, whether it is total rejection or approval.

In this way, all opinions and options are respected. CENSORSHIP IS NOT AN OPINION NOR AN OPTION, IT IS BLINDING VISION AND INFORMATION TO REALITY

I do not think it is excessively difficult to incorporate the information that people, institutions or governments are against and in favor of what is published, MAIDSAFE must be as neutral with the rejection as with the acceptance

Touching the hot spots, whether it be the purchase of weapons, etc, hitmen, pederasty, the manufacture of weapons, etc, etc, Maidasfe must not interfere in the legality, it is not its function, for this, the justice, the police and the state, MAIDSAFE collaborates with them exclusively with information from what there is, should not interfere in what its powers are, Maidafe neither collaborates nor should it obtain anything from either side.

We must stay away from the ALARMIST discussions that posting on hot topics encourages negativity and human perversion without putting what is lost on the other side of the scale, being as comparable to one as the other, MAIDSAFE should not be a entity neither moralistic nor righteous, the Inquisition today is famous for its injustices much more than for its desire to preserve morality.

Maidsafe must make room for everyone by giving everyone the power of expression, before taking a knife from a child we must inform him of its dangers, in the name of morality and justice entire ethnic groups and peoples have been razed.

Security without freedom ends up destroying both.

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55

I have exactly the same experience. Talking about safe with others makes me realize that it’s not all good, Safe will be abused by bad people for their bad intentions.

That is exactly why I think it is good that Maidsafe is exploring their options. Legislation is no joke and should be anticipated.

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56

Yay for @bzee, welcome addition!

In relaton to

Interesting, this could be related to the discussion on one of the most successful testnets back in Jan:

Maybe this could have been picked up earlier…

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57

I love this SN project. In particular, I am deeply impressed by their philosophy, sincerity and transparency of SN. Thx all

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58

Anything people build can be misused for evil. If builders worry to much about the evil consequences of building things, nothing will ever get built. :racehorse:

Would you like to lead a boring life? Anytime you think of trying something new, figure out all the bad things that can happen. Visualize the worst possible outcome. Focus on the scariest aspects of what you are doing. You will decide it isn’t worth it. :racehorse:

Imagine the way our internet will degenerate if SAFE is NOT built. That IS the worst possible outcome. :racehorse:

:secretariat415: :sascha:

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59

Great progress ! Is there roadmap / estimation to production ?

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60

The project NEVER gives estimates of timescales to production. This is uncharted territory and the devs rightly have no wish to build a rod for their back in case some estimates were too optimistic.

All we can do is be encouraged by the rate of progress. As always its an 80:20 deal and many many times we have been into the last 20%.
I know in theory that means it will NEVER be finished but yer man Pareto was just handing out estimates :slight_smile:

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