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

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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Ethereum has partners with governments. That itself is skeptical at best.

http://www.coindesk.com/the-united-nations-just-launched-its-first-large-scale-ethereum-test/

Eye-scanning hardware made by London-based IrisGuard, already in place to verify the identity of some of the 500,000 recipients currently receiving traditional aid, is being repurposed to grant access to coupons.

Too satanistic for my taste.

Nobody wants to inveset safe because it threatens the government establishment.

Meanwhile gov loves blockchain. Makes me wonder.

Edited: Add more more link

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The problem with Bitcoin is that it has no way to incentivize increased capacity. You can pay the miners more, but the miners still cannot make blocks big enough to hold all of the transactions that want to be processed. The only mechanism they have is to disincentivize demand, Nothing to increase capacity…

Moreover, the issues at core are all political. The miners have cheap subsidized electricity, but lousy internet, thus the politics bend to their convenience. The problem at hand is silly, but it has been at hand for years now. 10 MB blocks are transmitted millions of times a second all over the world. Technology isn’t the bottleneck, a bad economic model, and bad political choices are the issue.

Good economic models need to have that capability. I don’t think MaidSAFE does.

Bandwidth may be plentiful some places. Electricity may be plentiful some places. Disk space may be plentiful some places, But all of that is at the whim of the provider. What happens when it’s not? What happens when China bans or blocks it, for example? And all of the sudden 40% of the capacity goes away? What happens when another provider offers more $$$$ for space, and hardware marches to profit? Will the network have the resiliency? Will it’s economic model be able to incentivize the replacement of capacity? Will it be fast enough? To keep up with all the changes? Once the code is in the wild, we don’t get to re-engineer it on the fly to handle these situations. It has to work, or it won’t work. It really isn’t a programming issue.

It’s complicated, and maidSAFE hasn’t demonstrated to me that they have adequately thought all of this through.

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I agree… But every level of complexity adds a potential layer of failure, and failure isn’t an option.

Attempting to use blockchains for all distributed problems is not the answer.

Agree as well. If you read that into anything I said, I think you misunderstood me. My mention of bitcoin is only for learning from it’s failings and troubles.

Monothlithic may have been a bad word. But maidSAFE has always been a “eat the whole elephant” more than a “one bite at a time” there are advantages to both approaches, But the more common one is to string together existing trusted components to compose a viable product, not to write the whole thing. You have got to do what you’ve got to do, but the complexity and necessity of long development times, Is going to give a lot of people pause to diving in whole hog like Warren suggests.

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This is where the customized hardware path has to be thought out.

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I was kind of with you until these questions tbh.

Banning SAFE would probably make it more popular, not less, given it is anonymous and useful and easily accessible. How could they ban it? As far as I know the great firewall is no match for SAFE. You can’t shut it down and banning it will only publicise it - there were more speak-easies per capita in NY during prohibition than there are bars today.

SAFEcoin is a utility first and foremost. The vast majority of users are not expected to ever buy or sell crypto. That’s one of the biggest barriers to mass adoption for all the other crypto projects. SAFEcoin is useful and will be desired because it is the only way to store or serve data on the network. In essence it makes the network free for all users who are able to contribute resources to it. People won’t flock in or out of decentralised farming because of fiat value of their 2 safecoins - which they need to dl their films, store their data etc. Very few users will know how to buy or sell their coins, nor will they much care about the $20 fiat value next to the utility value. There is no other way to interact with the network.

Agree that it’s complicated, but it’s not their responsibility to demonstrate anything to you, it’s your responsibility to find the answers to questions you have. They’re engineers, they’re not writing papers and making models to prove a theory, they’re proving it by building it. I feel like your worries about GET imbalance and the economics are a little misplaced. I’ve spent a year and a half playing these things out in my mind too and I do have foggy areas I’ll confess, but the things you mention above don’t worry me. The incentive and economic mechanisms are insular so the problems you raise are valid, but I suspect they’re far less important than you make out. And issues with politics and upgrades are all solvable and far easier to solve than most of the problems that have already been put behind us.[quote=“jreighley, post:23, topic:13498”]
I agree… But every level of complexity adds a potential layer of failure, and failure isn’t an option.
[/quote]

Actually, I would say the SAFE model is far less complicated than all the layers being built on other DLT projects or even the current internet. It is complciated because it so different and has a lot of innovation, The system itself is beautifully simple and elegant really isn;t it? Far more so than most of the systems we use today imo.

That’s true for sure. That’s why the internet and blockchain have become such a mess. Instead of holisitic design people have taken the easy route and build on top of shakey foundations, sticking plasters on top of bandages. Why does that make more sense for a system like a decentralised internet? I’d rather see 15 years spent on a holistic design myself. Does it matter if people pause or have good justification for doing so? All that really matters is ‘will it work?’

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I see a lot of good alignment of incentives in MaidSafe’s proposed model, but I agree that it doesn’t seem to be given enough thought or discussion.

The economics of the network will be a huge factor in determining its long term success, so it’d be great to see some serious resource from MaidSafe put behind accountants and economists to examine the model thoroughly.

I hope there’ll be plenty of time to shift focus towards these issues prior to implementing test safecoin.

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It really depends on how it plays out. I think everyone’s dream is a highly distributed system with individual computers providing all of the resources. That may work, but it seems more likely to me that big data will be used because Big data is much better at doing everything that needs done than individual PC’s on ISP and home networks etc. I can spin up instances on amazon, google, rack space in an instant and they are going to have faster connections, more reliability, pretty darn cheap. We see such in Bitcoin mining. It flows to the place where the political and economic incentives are strongest. (China mostly) Those companies are not anarchist rebels. If the government shuts them down they are very likely to shut down… And if they are a significant portion of the capacity of the network, the network will need the resiliency and automated economics to make that happen.

So in short - you may not be able to firewall out SAFE, but you likely will be able to control the major players that have the ability to provide capacity. These players will probably be both abundant and fickle. If they can make money they spin up. If they lose money they spin down. When the spin down, they need replaced, but if all like minded machines are also shutting down, you could get a mess in a hurry. They are paid only for delivering files. when a significant portion of their bandwidth becomes utilized by replication of files from other nodes going down, they wind up spending a lot of resources on activity that doesn’t make them money. (pay once store forever even though most files are rarely going to be used again)

The dream of MaidSAFE is very good. The realities are likely to be much more intricate and commercialized than the dream. The code is complicated, but the real world economics is likely to stress the system even more by utilizing it in ways that are not expected. If it is a good deal it will be over utilized. If it’s a not such a deal nobody will play. If people don’t play, then files risk being lost, and then you get a death spiral. The economic model needs to be capable of creating symmetrical back-pressure. Vast riches offered for free will be consumed, nearly without fail.

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I think you and me may have different visions of how the farming economics play out. I see a system which cannot become centralised like bitcoin. The economics of spare resources are pretty interesting. Whilst most users won’t care about their fiat value of $10 next to the utility of the coin, that price is the bottom line for any business. No business can operate in competition with spare resources, since their outlay, infrastructure and opportunity cost is always an expense not incurred by the spare resource. I do not see how any serious or threatening farming centralisation could happen in this context.

If farming is decentralised then you really can’t shut it down. You don’t have to be an anarchist to ignore the law, you just have to find it useful and believe you won’t be caught.

Safe farming is nothing like mining, it really doesn’t get you anywhere to use that as the basis of speculation imho.

The whole point and power of decentralisation is removing these central points of failure. I agree, if SAFE operated with obvious centralisation like that it would be vulnerable at those points, but I don’t see how that is possible given the economics?![quote=“jreighley, post:27, topic:13498”]
They are paid only for delivering files. when a significant portion of their bandwidth becomes utilized by replication of files from other nodes going down, they wind up spending a lot of resources on activity that doesn’t make them money.
[/quote]

Again, you’re looking at it as if people were primarily farming to make money instead of to make coins they need as a utility. I don’t see how you get there from the design tbh.

This really isn’t the case… if it were I’d agree with you. If files got lost because of a decent % of farmers coming online or offline suddenly then yeah, that would be a network killer. Even if they don’t go with ‘pay-once lasts forever’ in the final launch, it needs to be a pretty long time and reliable. You can probably just search the forum to read all about data republish and redundancy etc to get abetter explanation than I could give for how that will work and how it can be handled.

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The problem is you cannot force decentralization. We do have two different visions, but the vision that the market supports it the vision that will come to fruititon.

If it is cheap and profitable to farm I can spin up hundreds of instances in a few minutes. My instances in a data center with 99.99 percent uptime and redundant connections to the internet backbone are likely to outperform your nodes connected via an ISP optimized for downloads vs uploads. I am going to deliver more files, thus get more farming rewards. SAFE only controls so much of the environment -

If it is not profitable I can shut them down just as fast. I may shut down because I feel like it. I may shut down because the government threatens me. I may shut down because some other network offers me more. When I shut down you still need to replace me… And if you replace me with somebody who goes on and offline frequently or cannot deliver packets quickly, you will have to replace them again and again and again. All at no profit for anybody. Eventually the natural flow of things is going to lead to the most reliable nodes retaining the most data, simple because they don’t need to be churned constantly. But when they do churn it will be a much bigger burden.

It is what it is. We will see how it plays out.

My problem is that if we don’t know how it is going to play out, we cannot just trust that it will play out in the way we dream it will play out. The asymmetry of incentives leaves us pretty helpless to fix it if it doesn’t go according to our dream for whatever reason.

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yeah there is no good solution, but economics always serve as a balance in a free system.
What would you want to do, allow facebook social graph and distribute safecoin as a lotery system to non anonymous users so that the safenetwork is properly decentralized ? no. it’s not going to playout…

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Firstly, you can’t just turn them on and off when it is profitable, you have to earn the rank with a reliable vault that runs for some time in order to get decent rewards. It will also surely never be profitable to switch on your data centre. It will cost you money to run it there… all the other resource providers are only paying electricity. All the other farmers will be farming more economically than you, so it should not be profitable for you to pay to farm if there is a surplus of resources to demand (which there should be). Farming payments should just about cover the electricity bill, no one would run it for profit in that kind of competitive environment vs spare resources, they will only run it because they want coins, that’s the real incentive, not financial reward. The idea of safecoin incentives is not to make a profit from farming, it is to gain access to a unique utility that people will want/need.

You are still looking at safecoin as money or a token of value as far as I can tell.

You raise a couple of good and relevant points about governance and the implications for updates to the codebase, but I still don’t feel like we are looking at the incentives and economics from the same page, so we’re bound to keep disagreeing.

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My Comcast internet has gone down at least 3 times this week. I have a web hosting accounts I pay for as overhead anyway that rarely go down. Where should I put my vault?

I realize that the money isn’t the goal… But the money is the only lever the network has to regulate itself to the goal, and it is in the position where if it is profitable it will be run for profit, and if it’s not it will lose its leverage to buy more capacity and resources that it needs. It’s a double edged sword.

Perhaps resources will always be abundant, and there is nothing to fear. But that is a pretty huge assumption in a world that hasn’t been invented or exploited yet.

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It’s an easy out to say “Market forces will fix the problem” It is much harder to plumb a artificial software market that actually siphons resources to the places that they need to be. And as it stands, i don’t think the SAFE model does allow for a free market.

The network only rewards one thing - GET lotteries. If MaidSAFE replaces Netflix and amazon prime streaming for example, The demand would be insane, Free is a good price, I will take everything I can get at that price. On the supply side though, The electrical usage, CPU usage, Bandwidth usage could grow significantly. There is no lever to slow down the GETs and all the processing and network costs that come with them. The networks only ability is to increase the cost of PUTs to generate enough revenue to compensate the farmers for their efforts – and PUTs aren’t the problem. Increasing prices make PUTing less attractive than S3, dropbox, IPFS or the like… Thus the network loses business to a more affordable option. Now it has no means to raise revenue at all.

If it is useful and has demand then people will farm, regardless of profit.

Some farmers may not care – but many connections are metered. If people computers slow down because they are too busy doing netflix job to run the user’s spreadsheet, they better be getting paid enough to compensate for that. Even if the user doesn’t care, the ISP might. SAFE is also only useful if sustainably works… The economic model is critical to it’s sustainability.

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Are you assuming it has to be perfect on day one?

Nobody knows exactly what the endgame will be, and indeed, there is no static target because the world changes and SAFEnetwork will either evolve with it or be replaced.

I think before we begin designing these aspects it is a bit early to judge. Discussion is fine, but I think it’s just a substitute for patience :wink:

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