Why isn't there a trillion dollars of funding and 100000 engineers working on SAFE?!

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I’ve been thinking about SAFE regularly for about 3 years now. Its possibly the most important project in the world so where is the help? Maybe its not sexy enough or too hard to explain? But that’s not it. IBM gets it and is working on something similar.
Maybe there are too many similar projects?

Maybe some people who would work on it are working on AI or Digital Physics, but wouldn’t these people have some time for it? What is it that we are missing that is keeping people away?

I hate to pull a Ron Hubbard, but I think the why that people aren’t getting is this: SAFE or a similar project is our best chance at avoiding nuclear extinction.

Where is the umbrella group?
Maybe its got a bunch of iconoclasts who wouldn’t get along (?) Irvine, Berners Lee, Buterin. Maybe people think the GPL was enough? Maybe people think involvement paints a target on them? Maybe they think someone else will do it? Maybe they think we are already close and they don’t want to disturb things? But we are coming down to the wire. We need it right now and its getting ignored. Maybe it can’t be higher profile because it would attract ill intent? Right now is the time for the smartest people in the world in this area to come out of the wood work and help.

If SAFE gets up and running there will be support for projects like SAFE, it will accelerate things which is needed right now to address challenges.

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Yes I think about this alot and it’s really disheartening how much money gets poured into stupid things when the most important project in the world has trouble raising $6m or whatever. Just makes me want to work harder for it!

You’d think there’d be some $20m grant for this kind of research somewhere. By some institution or something

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Too low profile hurts

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If only Nick and David and Berners Lee could meet. Berners Lee should have an interest and is surely aware. David has been working on a lot of what Berners Lee now has an expressed interest and projects for more than a decade. Silicon Valley is using the concept behind SAFE as a Prop. I’ve only seen a couple interviews with Buterin, but his block chai focus may put people off to other approaches. Also suspect that the coin puts people off for SAFE, they think nothing tied to one particular coin an be taken seriously I see the potential of the coin as a driver for the network and a way to get to needed scale, but don’t want people thinking of SAFE as a coin bet because block chain based or not its hugely off putting.

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Don’t know much about Berners Lee, but on the Ethereum side, they have their own implantation of distributed storage in Swarm. They also have close ties with IPFS, whose FileCoin storage incentivization layer will run on Ethereum. ENS will provide DNS functionality, mapping contact addresses to names. Whisper gives encrypted messaging. TrueBit will take secure computing off chain. So overall they are tacking many of the same problems, but in a different way.

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I think most of the core ideas are being developed strongly by lots of different entities and teams. Immutability is big. Peer to peer stuff is big. Encryption, hashing, cryptocurrencies are all big.

Just everyone has their own set of values and priorities.

The main challenge of MaidSAFE is irreducible complexity. You need a lot of moving parts to make it work, and most of those parts are not terribly useful unless the rest of the contraption is built. The industry tends to support one bite at time technologies and libraries versus monolithic stacks that take decades to come to fruition – mostly because most don’t succeed – and also by the time that a project of decade long complexity does come to fruition, requirements have shifted to the point where something entirely new is needed.

May or may not be the case with MaidSAFE, but I think that is the underlying hesitation…

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That sounds right, but do you have the sense at this point that the pieces in SAFE’s case are coming together at a good pace?

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Good code takes time[quote=“jreighley, post:6, topic:13498”]
and also by the time that a project of decade long complexity does come to fruition, requirements have shifted to the point where something entirely new is needed.
[/quote]

The thing is, the SAFE Network is also constantly changing. It’s Amazon, Godaddy and Dropbox wrapped into one with a money on top that’s mind blowing. This project will be relevant for a long time in the future.

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Maybe.

The parts that don’t work yet are massively critical. The currency, the database mutability features etc.

So if an outsider looks, they are going to see “Interesting idea, Not ready”.

If the market was terribly hungry for everything maidSAFE offered and it was close money would be flowing in. I don’t think the market is that hungry for it, because you can’t want what you can’t taste. And for the most part, businesses don’t make risky IT moves, let alone invest in something that isn’t tangible… MaidSAFE solves a lot of problems that Businesses care about, but it also solves a ton of problems that they don’t. Given a choice they are going to tend to go with the solutions that are on the shelf now rather than investing in something that solves their problem and a whole bunch of problems they don’t have.

Once SAFE is on the shelf, it may be quite competitive (Assuming it finds a sound economic abstraction) But until then it’s going to have to beg life everyone else…

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Yes. Based on my experience with large projects developing new concepts.

At 5 years after converting to RUST is the point where I would be worrying if it wasn’t at mid to late beta testing/production. But even then there maybe some very good development reasons for such a delay.

We are at around 2 years since Starting RUST conversion and we have code working and development accelerating.

You will find that most if not all other crypto projects have money at the core of the motivation for Quick deliveries (even if not good code). You also see a lot of pushing from those who want to convert their coins into large profits. The best projects are ones that allow the developers to develop rather than produce results.

Have a look at microsoft, they pushed out code, missed multiple deadlines for each OS and the OS is more rushed coding rather than getting it even close to good programming. Full of bugs and the users feel like they are paying to be bug finders.

And to answer why there is not more money. Because those with the extra large money do not want to see a version of the internet that they cannot collect information on everyone. They want control and earn more money off the people (& their info). Microsoft could give away their O/S and make more than enough off their other products that use Windows O/S. But no even charities have to pay for the O/S from 2nd hand computers given to them.

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@19eddyjohn75
I hope so.

My biggest concern is the complexity – If Bitcoin cannot change the block size without a Civil war, how is MaidSAFE going to change it’s economic model? Or any other critical components that need tweaked over the years? What are the chances it will be sound out of the gate? Slim, I am afraid, no matter how good the programmers are.

Bitcoin is very simple, MaidSAFE not very simple at all. MaidSAFE cannot afford to fail, or it will not be of any trustworthy use to anyone. But complexity leads to failure and high maintenance costs. Maintenance is very hard to do without centralized control, which I don’t think MaidSAFE can afford to allow.

Time will tell. I love the idea, and spent a good couple years as a hard core enthusiast, but skepticism is stronger all of the time…

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Stay in beta for years, like Google did with Gmail and other products.

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Yours.org wallet has enabled instant transaction & zero fees WITH BITCOINS, if the community wants to keep yelling about the blocksize to draw media attention instead of demanding that Ryan X Charles release the code… :confused: I’m super simple, but I can’t see the logic behind that. :stuck_out_tongue: Yours.org wallet even got a fiat function so they can compete with goabra.com, tether.co and the banks at the same time. :kissing_heart:

I thought the same until i listened to this
https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/lets-talk-bitcoin-319-barnacles-of-consensus

Codewise no, but the Maidsafe devs are doing this with surgical precision and extreme testing. For a simple person like me it is simple I can upload my site and register a publicID without a middle man. Now to upload my site I use aws + Godaddy for my domain name.

The SAFE Network might be interesting privacy wise, but for poor people who have nothing but the internet this might be a source of income unimaginable. @Warren we don’t need a trillion dollars of funding, the SAFE Network is worth a trillion dollars and people will discover it.

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I do like the idea of the whole “Anybody can do it” Free is always a great selling point, But I am not convinced on the scaling of the “pay once store/host forever” thing. We are betting on hard drive space being inexpensive and surplus. That’s probably not a bad bet, but bandwidth is a bigger issue.

How are we going to generate economic back-pressure if GETs strain the network? If we only charge for PUTs that is an asymmetry. We are robbing Peter to pay Paul’s bills, but Peter doesn’t have to play at all, and the whole network could collapse. These kind of things seem dangerous to me – And they aren’t really code.

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We already got the answer to bandwidth

Here in the Netherlands we even got 10gb
https://www.tweak.nl/glasvezel/pionieren-met-10-gigabit.html

These are just a few examples there is enough bandwidth out there. BTW there are places where the internet connection is so speedy that it’s almost lightspeed like where they trade stocks, whenever there is money involved technology will be offer, the SAFE Network might even trigger terabyte internet connections.

Our sillicon valley is places with gb internet connection, instead of waiting on Maidsafe to deliver code we should already be looking for ways to have the SAFE Networks infrastructure in place. Bandwidth is not the problem, the problem is what this community is willing to do to get people involved who already got the bandwidth.

When you look at the costs of the bitcoin network, I think we won’t have a problem at all. To be real honest to you, people with botnets can’t wait for this to come out. It would help incredibly if we have a few SAFE Networkers located in place with gb internet connections.

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Safe net may be complex, but it is necessary imo. Trying to cobble together something similar from existing components is not going to scale or function nearly as well.

The criticism that safe net is monolithic is misplaced too IMO. There are clearly defined modules which could be used in other projects, but they happen to work best together in safe net.

Attempting to use blockchains for all distributed problems is not the answer. When all you have is a hammer, all you see is nails. You simply do not need to announce your every action to the whole world, which is what safe net’s consensus model is a avoiding.

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I wonder how the current use of bandwidth on the current web will change when people can use a copy of “whatever” on SAFE rather than torrenting it and all the up/down bandwidth used by it. Many not only download it but upload it for others. Now they can know it will be available when they want it thus killing off all the torrents occurring because of the FOMO. How many torrent the whole 4-16GBytes just to say that vid is crap and not watch more than 10 minutes. Such waste of bandwidth.

Some ISPs estimate about 30% of their traffic is torrents.

SAFE will change all this and shift the torrent bandwidth to serving SAFE.

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This is an interesting question, all the developers and investment really should be flying in to SAFE much faster than many of these other projects, but it’s also fairly obvious and understandable when you think about it imo.

Firstly, SAFE is quite complicated to wrap your head around and most of us spent weeks asking questions before the penny really dropped. It needs to be seen working to be understood by anyone who can’t be arsed to spend all that time learning about it.

Secondly, there is a gold rush going on. Developers are building on what they have with the options they have available. The self-fulfilling prophecy of Eth’s success has a gravitational pull and justifies itself by the numbers of developers and amount of investment it has created. It doesn’t need to have solved scaling, privacy, mass appeal or efficiency, it only needs to nod at the work being done on solutions and the size of its ecosystem to convince more and more people to follow the herd.

The rush to beat everyone else to the big disruption is a seductive draw. If you were working on a DLT project that could operate on Ethereum what would you do at this point?

Personally, I’m a firm believer in standing still or moving slowly in the right direction rather than running the wrong way. I can understand why Eth has 50x the investment atm, it has a product and is not just ‘theory’. I actually think that makes it the worst bet in this space right now (from an investor perspective), since it has one of the least appealing risk/reward profiles.

History has some important lessons for us too I reckon. Mass adoption is not something that big business, investors or developers dictate or decide (although they all try and would love to succeed), it is something that they chance upon, respond to and search out.

Eth is still a developer playground and needs its killer Apps to gain any traction in the real world. When SAFE does launch it is the killer App. Any random person can and will find SAFE immediately useful and accessible. Eth has been around for a while, but it’s still no use to most of us. I can think of several reasons I’d use SAFE on day 1, and I can think of half a dozen very obvious killer Apps that would be the talk of every living room and newspaper within months of SAFE’s functionality existing in the wild.

Ultimately this war for dominance of the new digital age won’t be won or lost by the greed fuelled rush of speculators, startups or developers, or by the decisions of big multinationals (much as I’m sure the board at IBM or microsoft would like to think they are making these choices for us). If we were fighting on the same terms then network effect would be insurmountable, but really we aren’t and it isn’t.

This war will be won or lost in our living rooms, by word of mouth (passion), and on the bottom lines of the balance sheets of every business in the digital world.

I agree with neo that the timeframe for SAFE’s success is not endless. There is certainly a point at which I’d worry that the world will miss out on the unique aspects of SAFE because so many of the useful aspects have been solved in less efficient ways, but we are still a long, long way from that imo.

I think there are a lot of good reasons to be very excited by DLTs and the kind of functionality we get from them (like Eth’s smart contracts that first got me really excited about this ecosystem in 2015). It’s one of the reasons I’m so excited about SAFE now. Thinking about smart contracts that scale with empowered users in a new data paradigm set on the foundations of a resource-based economy gets me very excited.

So if you ask me, the valuable questions to answer are not ‘why isn’t all the money flowing into SAFE right now?’, that’s easy enough to explain. They’re questions like, ‘what will the public do and why when SAFE launches?’ ‘Will the economics work?’ 'How will it evolve and change? ‘What will get press coverage or find immediate and unique utility in certain groups and why?’ ‘What will we all actually talk about and use and why?’

I absolutely agree that there are still risks, but at this point the risk is still that SAFE doesn’t work, not that SAFE could ‘lose’ the battle for mass adoption in the first wave of speculation and before it has even launched a basic functioning network that proves all of the theory. If and when Eth (and others) actually solve the many problem they are working on we might have an issue with SAFE’s success, but even then, I would never discount the solution that could be in every newspaper and on every living room PC within a matter of months.

The really good news I see is the $30bn cap that’s rising fast in crypto. There’s a whole lot of interest and money ready to fly at good solutions and there’s a tremendous amount of energy swelling in our ranks. This ecosystem will form the basis of SAFE when it launches so I see huge amounts of potential being created. You might just get your wish and see trillions invested and many thousands of devs working furiously very soon after the launch of a live network :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Yeah how hard would it be to add Wikipedia like this into Alpha2, so everyone in every country can always see it? They offer 5gb version and full 25gb version. Just get lots of PUT invite codes from MaidSafe to make it happen?

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Good suggestion - I think it’s being worked on:

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