This is real interesting, at least from a technological point of view. I don’t yet know what make of it. Sounds super creepy on one hand, somewhat useful on the other. As long as the things observed remain not uniquely identified (like the little blue stick figure on the video: an anonymous person), I see little danger. However, there are no theoretical limitations to stop adding some sort of fingerprinting that would allow for unique identification, at which point it would turn into a dream come true for any self-respecting autocracy.
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Who wants to give us a peak?
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Thoughts on open source by Klabnik (Rust and Ruby people will recognize his name):
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https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/25-years-later-interview-linus-torvalds
Linus has an unexpected view on anonymity:
I’m actually one of those people who thinks that anonymity is overrated. Some people confuse privacy and anonymity and think they go hand in hand, and that protecting privacy means that you need to protect anonymity. I think that’s wrong. Anonymity is important if you’re a whistle-blower, but if you cannot prove your identity, your crazy rant on some social-media platform shouldn’t be visible, and you shouldn’t be able to share it or like it.
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I feel like social media has become the high-tech variant of “my aunt knows somebody who heard it from a friend that…” While this doesn’t make a story automatically untrue, it certainly distances the sharer from the source enough that he or she no longer has much sense of responsibility as to whether it’s really true. For all intents and purposes, I agree these stories should remain unshared.
The Safe Network will be an amplified version of the above unless we make the apps that would later serve as a gold standard explicitly go against it.
I’m thinking, I should be able to say that I don’t want to see something on my feed unless there is a chain of trusted real-life relationships leading to a first-hand witness of an event. The people 2-3 steps away from me could stay anonymous to me but, obviously, they would have to be non-anonymous to the person on the chain before and after them.
This is just the basic idea which should probably be refined to use some form of grading based on the depth and the density of the connections, and I would also want to be able to explicitly “un-trust” certain people who may have fooled my friends but can’t fool me.
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I think this is the way to go. Linus is being dictatorial there, which I understand because most people need that! So maybe the ability to have such ‘validated’ platforms, but with opt-outs or alternatives where control is in our hands.
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Not directly applicable but perhaps could be peiced out as it’s written in Rust. Could at the least serve as inspiration.
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I’m happy you took interest because you are working with the Solid crowd and this clearly belongs there. It’s also not a simple problem.
For something like this to work, we need a way to signify things as first-hand experiences and the like. Many languages use grammatical devices (such as suffixes) to express things you would have to spell out in others: “I saw it with my own eyes”, “I heard it from somebody”, “it’s common knowledge”, and linguistics have done a lot of research about these concepts under the labels of evidentiality and its superset, epistemic modality. I’m mentioning it because it would be easier to look into the already existing research than figuring it all out from scratch. Also, less error prone.
It’s obvious but I mention it anyway, we should be able to apply evidentiality on statements about evidentaility itself: “I personally-witnessed that (X-person personally-witnessed Y-event)” or “(I was-at Z-place), (I personally-witnessed (X-person was-not-at Z-place))” and similar.
Another complexity is that getting caught lying should have an affect on reputability, but it can’t be a global score type of thing since I don’t necessarily care if a random person accuses my best friend of lying, but I would very much care if it was the other way around.
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Crossing the Rust FFI frontier with Protocol Buffers
…one of the challenges to this new approach is safely passing richly-structured data across the API boundary in a way that’s memory-safe and works well with Rust’s ownership system. We wrote the ffi-support crate to help with this, if you write code that does FFI (Foreign function interface) tasks you should strongly consider using it.
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On first scan, this would be a huge step in computation on SAFE as it does have an upper counter (so we can associate cost) and satisfies the transaction and function privacy (make all functions private). Very good find indeed. I will be diving deeper into this one very soon. Thanks a lot Nigel, brilliant detective work and it’s in rust as well 
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Yes, doing that with flatbuffers instead of protobufs makes a lot of sense. Nice stuff, I passed to the safe_core team, they should be very interested in this one. A good day for community research today 
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I uploaded the initial routing model, with diagrams, in safe…
safe://routing-model.digipl
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Computation wise. Could a trusted computation of a problem be stored so that the next guy making the same computation, or uses part of the same computation just retrieves a result set. You could address the result by a standardisation of the way you ask the computation?
Int_0_1000 f(x):1000steps ← Hash that string? Use it as a look up key to the results set? Would save processing power.
Option to earn SAfECoin to verify existing online computations? Would need a trusted computation library.
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Thanks [20 characters]
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… Quoting myself again.
Bitcoin uses computational power to just hash, that’s a lot of computational power down the drain.
Imagine, appart from paying you for your hard disk space, the SAFEnetwork also paid you for running sets of calculations. Some needed immediately, but some calculations pre-calculated and hashed in advance so if ever asked the answer exists on the network.
You could have presimulated electronic circuits, and logic circuits. You could use the SPICE circuit description file as a key itself to the simulation results on the SAFEnetwork.
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Julian Assange to be expelled withing hours or days.
The abuse case was dropped against him, what are they going to arrest him over now?
Also, going to be interesting - didn’t he promise a bumper information drop if he was arrested?
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@pierrechevalier83, @dirvine any thoughts concerning the F* language and its formal verification? In the Evercrypt article Isabelle and Coq are also mentioned. I remember these from a post from @Andre_Gerome (Review of the PARSEC paper).