Wiki: Who will use SAFE and Why?

There is so much I still don’t know. You are probably right.

Anyway, back on the point of whether dedicated hardware is desirable, I suspect that there will always be some friction in terms of the install on your core computer. Additionally, the move to desktop replacement laptops, means that a lot of people take their primary computer with them wherever they go, which means a lot of downtime and would prefer to have a device which they can plug in right next to their router and leave on 24 hours a day.

It would certainly be able to destroy entire farms or assist in the profitable “encrypt & ransom” undertakings.

Of course they are. If I can nuke your 2nd HDD I don’t need to “access” your vaults.

My comment is slight OT, but many on the forum have been refusing to consider this fact - you can’t at the same time be not bothered by downtime and predict good earnings based on very high vault hit rates.
In other threads I guesstimated not more than a 1% hit rate per day (I think it’ll be much lower, but 1% is my upper limit) and that would mean you could be offline just a little bit and not miss getting your hits. But if your vaults go offline 10 mins per day and your hoped-for hit rate is 3% per day, that should cost you in hits/earnings and rating. Or you could go offline 10 mins per day and face no consequences if you get 3 GET requests per day.

Having said that we can’t know how things will really work because the most important factor is how MaidSafe programs the system.

I think even guesstimates are useless until at least beta. We have no clue for what kind of data SAFE will be used in practice. If it’s mostly used as a streaming/file-sharing (replacement for torrents/youtube/netflix) platform the average get/put ratio will be significantly higher than if it’s mostly used for cold storage.

Actually, if we could get some indicative numbers on how much digital data is stored world wide, and how much data is transferred per day over the internet world wide, then we could make a (very rough) guess.

Yes @kirkion, while it is true that hardware designs coming out now and in the close future may be highly efficient and thus provide an incentive to optimize and specialize, we would be going down the route BTC went… This would greatly impact on adoption by some of the major hardware clusters since you would need to convince them of the need to upgrade/buy optimized hardware in order to join the network. Imagine a government department wanting to justify its user hardware purchases by factoring in farming as a counter to depreciation. Imagine whole school districts being able to justify the addition of computers to their schools, that allow them to create whole 360 degree Learning management systems running on the same computers. How would that happen, if the costs of acquisition and integration suddenly went up due to a custom hardware requirement? Don’t you think scam come to mind?

Maybe some of us do not really believe in the ability of the system (the one we all bought into) to change the entire computing industry, but I saw the dream, and it is my humble belief that maidsafe is supposed to be a cure, a real alternative to the current online business model. I understand that there may be pressure from some sections of the financiers, but whats to stop us, the “masses” from buying them out if it has to come to that, so as to retain the initial focus? Yes, Greed is the fuel that runs capitalism, and yes Greed is the fuel that is burning capitalism. I do not want to burn.

Except that it won’t. The very nature of Safe means that all vaults are essentially equal. It isn’t a first past the post, winner takes all. Rather each actor gets what they put in.

Again, this is not a hardware requirement. This is simply a way to allow people who have money but not technical skills to participate in the network. Why should they be barred from participating?

Again, Maidsafe is a step further decentralized than Bitcoin is. Specialized hardware is a plug and play solution not an optimized ASIC solution.

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I agree and I mentioned that in the other thread (Feasibility of datacenter farming (and the risk of farmer centralization)).

Yes. But because anything that’s not cold (in terms of MaidSafe’s caching algorithms) should be served by the caching layer, farmers won’t see most of that action (they’ll see 1/4 of the first cached hit and then nothing until cache expires and gets requested again).

Personally I plan to use MaidSafe for off-site backup of my data, so my private content will (hopefully) be requested precisely 0 times.

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Is serving from the cache actually rewarded? If so, then any farmer will on average compensate the missed ‘direct’ gets by serving cached data from it’s close nodes. If not, then farming will indeed be significantly slower.

I believe it isn’t.
I argued against that in many comments on this forum (one example below), but I guess it is what it is.
It doesn’t sound like something that would be difficult to implement, but I am also against mission creep so if it wasn’t planned for v1.0, so be it.

A more important question is who will denounce the use of SAFE Network and why?

As for Tor, since SAFE allows anonymous communications, as it was suggested by Blindsite2k, activists and criminals will likely to join the network. Because of that, governments should denounce the use of SAFE, specially those from countries where citizens are strongly censored (China, Russia, etc.). As a second group of whistleblowers, security agencies and cie would likely keep an interest on the development of this project and may (and surely will) denounce the use of SAFE because its lack of controls on its content.

So for the main purpose of this topic, another group of users may be those who will keep an interest on this project for a social security purpose. Since we may or not want them to become a part of SAFE network, I don’t know if we should add this group as future users.

Nobody will denounce nothing.

In China they simply block things.
You are free to access gmail.com… if you can get around the state firewall.
If you get caught to distribute stuff they don’t like, that’s a problem. But that’s always the case there regardless of what means of communication you use. They don’t denounce phones and they won’t denounce MAID.

I may have misunderstood the meaning of the word “denounce”. I took it more like “criticize” or “ban” by blocking. You are right saying that they will surely just don’t talk about it and block it since they will not know what data you will share with this network.

But what about government and security agencies in countries like USA, France or whatever? If the network get really popular, what will they do? Will they denounce it like they try in France with the HADOPI law for peer-to-peer sharing.

To denounce is to declare that it’s bad, so as long as there’s no law against it, who cares what they say (I’m talking about the user perspective; the Project will of course want to be cast in a positive light).

But your example from France is about law. That’s different, that’s about breaking laws (if you do whatever is not allowed).

And finally there’s the execution of said laws. With Torrent you can easily tell what’s being downloaded. With MaidSafe it’s going to be much harder (see related discussion elsewhere on this forum) and if you shutdown your client you should be well protected. So they would find it very hard to actually catch someone.

Legitimate uses for MaidSafe are many and I don’t think they’ll try anything out of ordinary. In what we consider “free” countries they’ll bust a few losers every year just to make a point, that’s all that will happen.

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Criminals and illicit users of any network are always sorted and removed. Look at any system. Crime is actually also perception it depends on the laws that are applied. Anonymity has only been an issue within the digital realm;

Hopefully SAFE Network will fully afford anonymity therefore, the environment can evolve free from being stalked away by intervening entities.

Also, that the people will realize the value of social networks that are more thorough with resilient connections being made, versus spam - and connectivity based on algorithmic marketing of profiles.

If criminals are likely to join maybe we can encourage a fork of SAFE Network so criminals don’t have to use the mainstream SAFE Network?

I think the biggest barrier to mainstream adoption will be the fact that people are more afraid of crime than the amount of risk they face from it. People will sell themselves into slavery to protect themselves from mythical crimes because they don’t actually run the numbers to determine the probabilities of actually facing each scenario.

It’s another manifestation of attention scarcity as well as lack of knowledge of the actual risk. If the risks do come then I would think by that point criminals will either fork the network or they’ll be pushed to the fringes.

The fact is SAFE Network is open source. If necessary it can be forked. It probably will be forked if criminals start to take it over or if criminals decide they want the features of the network.

If I think about it like a criminal would I don’t see why I would use the mainstream SAFE Network when I could fork and customize it specifically for my criminal organization / operation.

If the network works as planned, there will be no margin in forking it, and no more downside to having criminals use it (along with everyone else) than there is just having criminals in society as a whole.

The advantage is that the criminals who gravitate to positions of power in government, etc., will have a harder time keeping their crimes hidden or controlling what people hear or see, and thus think. The fear of Big Brother will be largely lessened. That’s huge.

There will certainly be outcries from politicians, vested interests, etc., just like there has been anytime they lose traditional tyrannical advantages. But theirs protests will be impotent . . . and actually make them look foolish.

Calls to “ban Bitcoin”, or “outlaw bittorrent piracy” or “make running SAFE software illegal” are even less workable than “alcolol is now illegal, so of course everyone must stop using it”–unenforcable and stupid. I really doubt they’ll go there. But if they do, it will just make the network prosper in other places to the disadvantage of places that try it.

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Years ago a popular fear was that “they” will block the Internet. Then it turned out it was completely unlikely because it wouldn’t work, it’d be too expensive (in terms of damages to legal business and the gov’t) and finally they prefer to collect all data on everyone. There is no danger whatsoever that MaidSafe will be blocked.

Alcohol, on the other hand… I live in constant fear of worldwide alcohol prohibition so I consume all I can while I still can.

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I can. Hide in plain sight. Also more apps would be developed for the mainstream. And ALSO what defines a “criminal?” Is a criminal someone who believes in free speech? An animal rights activist? Are we talking about rapists and murders or some guy uploading a lolicon manga or banned book? Are we talking Chelsea Manning or the Pikting killer here? And what about people who are incredibly antisocial but haven’t been convicted of crimes? What about cops that kill innocent people? Politicians that take million dollar vacations on tax payer money and pass corporate welfare laws. Dirty lawyers and even your run of the mill abusive spouses. I mean we have this word “crime” like it means anything at all. In a good portion of the states it’s a “crime” to collect rainwater for god’s sake. In the EU I hear it’s a “crime” to sell heritage organic seeds that aren’t registered with the government. I mean really we’re going to start talking about criminals being made into fringe groups here? Are you serious? Crime != antisocial. Legal != socially acceptable. Wake up people.

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Oppressive government can just ban Maidsafe by threatening the death penalty or long prison sentences to anyone who is caught using it. If for example pedophiles were to start using SAFE Network and it seems like most of the content is child pornography then governments would appear justified in threatening long prison sentences or even the death penalty on anyone who uses it. If you think about it people already go to prison for possession of child porn without even having to he directly involved in the creation of it.

I’m not saying it will happen like this but I am saying we should not fear forks. Forks will be what can keep SAFE Network alive by allowing it to evolve into different forms if it is attacked. So saying criminals would want to use the banner of Maidsafe to hide in plain sight doesn’t make much sense when they can come up with something which is like a virus which infects computers and takes resources for a criminal SAFE Network fork.

Criminals wouldn’t have to run any files. Zombie computers would be infected with a virus and they’d have a SAFE Network. Not only that but they could fund the construction of the network by randomly encrypting people’s precious local files and then charging a decryption fee.

Honestly I don’t see how SAFE Network benefits at all from certain elements who will ultimately use the technology. If they fork it then that would probably be better for everyone because we don’t want pedophiles to use SAFE Network even though there is a chance they will. If things get bad SAFE Network will run out of farmers due to media propaganda, anti-marketing campaigns, or perhaps there might even be false flag sabotage.

The point is we need to actually think about all the different possibilities. We should make SAFE Network easy to fork so that the overall beneficial social utility would survive propaganda campaigns. Forks are going to happen just as they happened to Bitcoin but with every fork the community might be a bit different and of course there will be some people who eventually will make a fork specifically for criminal activity because they themselves would be able to control every aspect of it, develop it in secret, and disguise it’s functioning.

Governments will probably simply just monitor anyone who downloads SAFE Network. Criminals who use SAFE Network would download it? Forks on the other hand wouldn’t be so easy to spot.