What websites can you really build on the SAFEnetwork v IPFS

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Now you lost me (if you want others to understand a bit of context helps).
But I’m pretty sure that Oyster’s ‘pearls’ should not be cast before swine.
To not waste the time of the swine, that is.

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Osyter, Yster, Istar, Ishtar, Esther, Easter…and so on.
Mesopotamian linguistics is wildly more off-topic than we already are.

Getting back on topic:

  1. First Rule in the IPFS Cult is don’t talk smack about the IPFS Cult!
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I had already a suspicion about the Oyster → Ishtar. A bit too far fetched for my taste. Also Oyster eventually comes from the Greek osteon (=bone). Think osteoporosis.
On topic: I don’t know that much about IPFS and Filecoin, but I encountered this article yesterday about Cryptocurrency communities. With this interesting critique:

Filecoin and Dfinity are both recent examples of projects that have raised hundreds of millions in private capital from a limited number of exclusive individuals/groups with minimal community engagement and ownership.

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Are antlers/horns not bones? I agree though: the connection to the Oyster Protocol is loose. I wasn’t making it anyway…just having fun with symbolism, music, and cults. Add the Oyster Protocol, and I just had to run with it. I wouldn’t toss it out completely though…:wink:

Truer than we know. Crypto cruises, expos, and whatnot are child’s play when it comes to real military use cases and the ability to defend a technology with the equivalent fervor that the petrodollar has been defended to make it useful to large swaths of the population. Some bubbly-eyed millennial with a shinier notebook and a high-end education doesn’t stand a chance although I appreciate the innocent idealism. I don’t care how ingenious a product is. Products are invented, made, and produced, but something with the actual ability to threaten current paradigms with a bulletproof offering before big tech and nation states only comes from forging in the hot darkness of a crucible. Filecoin isn’t that. Dfinity? Cloud 3.0? Never heard of it.

Not really, see my earlier post

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This was one of the first things I looked into when getting acquainted with SAFENetwork.
The problem is mostly the lack of multisig and/or network computing.

Multisig is needed to actually persist any results in SAFENetwork (the fact that a buy and sell order has been matched, the transfer of token ownerships, etc).
Computing and consensus could be an alternative, but you still need the persistence of the facts - and preferrably in SAFENetwork, otherwise you’d be implementing SAFENetwork all over again just to store that info in a DHT with your overlay instead. You’d still need to implement a large part of what SAFENetwork already does, as to get any security in the groups that are supposed to reach consensus. So, that’s not so good. I mean, we would need to implement secure groups for every new decentralized application, immense duplication of code and logic and lots of overhead, when MaidSafe may be implementing computing after release, making all that code and logic redundant.

If trading is to happen near real-time, regardless of whether client placing a specific order is online, then we need the computing. And for it to be anonymous, apparently it is something like, for example homomorphic encryption, that is needed. I have not delved into homomorphic encryption, so I don’t know how near any real implementation of that is, if it is already widely used, or if it is like cold fusion.

So, developing any applications that need to perform these sorts of transactions, or execute logic that must be objective (i.e. cannot trust individual clients with it), is IMO quite hard right now. I think the best option now is to try and abstract that part away in black boxes, and start develop applications as if those parts existed, but leave it unimplemented in the black boxes in wait for the actual solutions.

It would be quite helpful though if we could get some discussions going in the community (and with MaidSafe) on how the solutions would most likely look, so that we can do more accurate abstractions, and chisel out what kind of architecture and application design this requires.


EDIT:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/simple-encrypted-arithmetic-library/

There’s C++ source code to download there.
On GitHub there are some forks:
GitHub - Lab41/PySEAL: This repository is a fork of Microsoft Research's homomorphic encryption implementation, the Simple Encrypted Arithmetic Library (SEAL). This code wraps the SEAL build in a docker container and provides Python API's to the encryption library. with python wrapper in addition to the C# wrapper, and plenty of explanatory comments.

And some hard core manual https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2017/11/sealmanual-2-3-1.pdf

Hm, so. Seems not entirely trivial to use from a first glance. I’ll have to look at that C# example later to see what I can make of it.


EDIT2:

Forgot to mention another key component of decentralised exchange; efficient querying - which there is also currently not any standard for in SAFENetwork. @intrz provided a very interesting list of papers on the subject here. So that too would be something we need to wrap our heads around.

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Also latency prevents competing in terms of speed. Even with computing since consensus is needed and that involves latency between the nodes. Still be fast for humans but not for insane day traders and their bots doing multiple transactions per second (x 1000 traders).

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Yep, true.
But if only we have something working, there will be a demand for it - especially for the inherent capabilities (decentralized, autonomous, anonymous etc.). And surely, there would also be a new category of people that would be attracted to it, just because the high frequency trading we know of today would not be possible there.

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Definitely. And I hope we see it sooner than later. Multisig makes the task much easier.

And yes the reduced frequency will be an attractive feature for many. Also SAFE allows the trades to occur without the person needing to be online.

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I thought multisig is part of the existing plan … Pretty sure David has said as much … of course the method for Safecoin isn’t nailed down in code yet and discussion still happening, so …

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Yes it is, but not sure if part of next few alphas/betas or if in a later release after going live

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Oh yes - good to point it out.
I got some details from David on it a while ago when asking about these things, more can be read here: Multisig transfer of safecoin

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That comment you made deserves to have it’s own topic, please make a topic about that important future challenge, if it don’t currently exist one.

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IPFS and SAFE seem to be completely different tools for different purposes. IPFS is simply hashed public files that can be cached at nodes closest to you so you can reach them quickly.

There’s no built in features for it to encrypt the file, and there’s no intention to make content you publish private to only you – its not personal storage in that way. It’s built to be a global caching solution for publicly accessible files. Hence dTube is all public and open content, and ok for IPFS.

Bittorrent is yet again totally different from IPFS AND SAFE. Bittorrent had only one goal, break up files so they can be quickly download in pieces simultaneously from many peers at once. It’s also optimized to deliver files fast by caring most about who is downloading it at the same time as you. IPFS and SAFE are more for permanent long-term storage. Bittorrent may like you to seed content for a long time, but inherently the protocol is not built around this.

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I didn’t know that IPFS was using whole files, interesting. I thought it was more like bittorrent … however SAFE does break up files like bittorrent and allows simultaneous downloading.

I don’t think IPFS is all that good at indefinite storage however - I’ve used d.tube and one video I posted doesn’t load anymore. Also Bitchute (another streaming video site) uses bittorrent and is quite popular/successful IMO - so permanent storage isn’t critical for many uploaders I guess - and perhaps those who are uploading there are also seeding.

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This is why the Filecoin incentivization layer is being built. People will contract providers to host their files using Filecoin.
(Btw, I think IPFS does have file chunking too, with the chunks forming a Merkle tree to represent the file if I remember correctly)

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I thoughts IPFS was an address system and locator for fast access and minimal duplication for retrieval.

Maidsafe i think antiquates all of that?

With its own methods?

Can this be detailed if someone knows?

I think this question must be asked in the DEV forum but as this topic says “What websites can you really build…” well…

Going to the point. I want to know how to make a dynamic website like we use to build with PHP and SQL. In other words how to build the back end of a website.

I don’t believe this guarantees availability though, unless filecoin adds self healing to IPFS? Moreover, privacy is not ensured, which could cause nodes to be blocked if unsavoury material is being hosted.

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