There is a lot of technical Jargon in the developer updates. For the layman I’m just trying to figure out whether the safe network will be most likely up and running within the next 3 years. I’ve been a big Maidsafe supporter for a long time, I even bought $10,000AUD worth of Maidsafe coin back at its peak 
(still sitting in my omniwallet 
). David has mentioned a few times we are close since at least around 2018 odd. Just wondering if folks thought we could see it up and running by at least 2023 odd?
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This is a frequently asked question and its answer lies in the general question -“Why software engineers cannot estimate accurately and reliably enough how long the completion will take” - So I will tell you a “fictitious” story … 
Imagine being given the task of going from Sofia (The capital of Bulgaria) to Plovdiv (the second largest city in the country declared European Capital of Culture for 2019) by bicycle and you have to say how long will it take you to get there. You calculate average speed and give an approximate 24-hour estimate with one night’s sleep on the road, because you have been riding a bike for years and consider yourself a resilient person. You leave, but:
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“It’s raining heavily at four o’clock and you have to hide.” - You stay under a tree for 1 hour until the weather is fine.
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“By eight o’clock you’re starving, but you decide the sandwiches you carry in your backpack won’t be as edible as you originally thought.” - You go to the nearest village to eat like a king (sarmi, moussaka and ayran). You lose another 2 hours.
- It turns out that you can’t stand the food and now you have to look for a toilet, only you are in the middle of nowhere, and a lot of cars are flying around you. Because you are an experienced cyclist, but for shorter distances - you did not think to get toilet paper. You spend 1 hour looking for enough hidden shrubs and large and soft leaves.
- You do not feel so well from the food poisoning and the rest of the way you go at a 20% lower speed.
- On the way you have a cramped calf - another 2 hours to rest and hydrate.
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“Your bike lasted all the way, but imagine if it had broken?”
- Exactly 2 km before you arrive in Plovdiv, you get a call and and you learn that you have to go through Pazardzhik to get a very important item from a very specialized store. You go to Pazardzhik, but it’s too late - the store is closed and you have to spend the night there. Another 16 hours lost.
You arrive in Plovdiv after a total of 56 hours, because you lost more time to find the people you have to meet there - it turns out that they gave you the wrong final address … It was not this hill, it was the other! 
In general, the same happens in the software development … 
In short
Software development is work with incomplete information - features of the task, the code already written, problems and questions to which not only do you not yet know the answer, but you do not know that they exist. 80% of the work is filling in this incomplete information. 
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Three options:
- It’s up and running
- It’s totally dead Bc funding has run out and VC and PE money is never gathered.
- Bitcoin is at 150k and the project continues to try to be perfect and since btc has reached such a level and the monetary holdings were primarily in bitcoin, the development continues.
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The way I see it is that this project is running out of major mistakes it could make, so within 3 years should be easily doable.
On the roadmap for Safe Fleming Network, you can see that there’s 2 parts left, but the way I understand it is that one part needs to be completely rewritten (a major mistake).
So that makes three parts left before what I as a developer that wants to create applications on Maidsafe would call launch.
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If a testnet is out in the next couple of months and the bugs ironed out from that, why wouldn’t we have a beta release by mid 2021 with upgrades as we go after that?
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I have to admit when I read they were working on performance in the last weekly update, my heart sank a bit. I have no problem with performance related work once I a proof of concept test net in my hands. We saw months of performance related work before, and nothing came out of it so I really hope the cycle isn’t repeating.
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Having followed progress since the ICO (spring 2014 so 6,5 years) and having seen the project being touted as “close to finishing” all along the way (last few years mostly by the weekly update commentators but earlier also from dirvine) I would personally guesstimate it´s 50 / 50 if the project is able to launch the main network (with safecoin) within the next 3 years or it will just take longer.
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Of course I do not really doubt Dirvine. He will make it happen no matter what. I feel quite confident in that. Just the timing is quite “flexible”
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I am hoping for the best. But I dont think the chance we get a working safe network is very great. There is no test network for everyone to see. This means to me that the core functionality, the core ideas, is at best a theory and the chance of them being even viable is low.
Nothing is more important then the core ideas, everything else is not important. Yet we see all sorts of such unimportant things in developers updates. And for some reason also mobile phone stuff. All that is completly irrelevant until such time that we see the most crude version of the core ideas actually working and failing and being imporved in a test net open for everyone to see. Before this I would rank this enitre project as a fun thing to follow, but not in any way an investment.
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Yeah, just yesterday, I read this: https://letstalkbitcoin.com/maidsafe-a-wildly-successful-crypto-crowdsale-debacle
I no longer think in terms of time and space left to finish. It’s all subjective to me now. That’s why I no longer blame anyone for being impatient, testy, negative.
If I lose my belief/patience, I’ll just abandon the project without a word.
I believe the network will have to launch within the next 3 years if this community is supposed to give a toast. If there are no signs of heading that way, I think we’ll implode in about a year. One by one. Nobody wants to donate their entire life to a pipe dream.
I kinda relate. So much front end stuff, so little network to use it on. Still, it seems the focus is solely on the routing part lately, thus we should see things happening soon. And if we don’t, we’ll see things are not happening, which is a thing too. And we’ll be seeing it, lol.
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Well, I’m still a believer. 
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The Safe cult is stronger than ever!!!
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I have been around for 4 years. Have heard close many times. So just wait. 3 years? 3 months? Who knows 
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Thanks for the insights all, sounds a little like Steve Wozniak starting Apple without Steve Jobs. I fundamentally think the idea behind Maidsafe is good, I’ll keep holding my coins (why not 
but it looks like I shouldn’t keep my fingers crossed haha. The world kind of needed this type of a technology yesterday and I’m loosely assuming there isn’t another team out there whose solved the same problem as it would probably be as big a deal by now to be at least as recognised as Ethereum. In my opinion the kind of person who spends their life pursuing an idea like this is at least good at heart. Possibly the issue is that this problem just isn’t solvable in this way or maybe we don’t have the infrastructure or technology to support it yet. Either way I’m sure David’s had a few sleepless nights to say the least. I myself admire the tenacity as I’m sure it’s been difficult over the years to try to create something of this scope (sifting through like 14 years of code must get challenging). Lastly, sure it sucks I’ve lost some money here and I also sold a lot of other people on the idea but it at least let me think about ideas I wouldn’t have considered otherwise. I’d say I’m better off overall for being involved 
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Thanks for this response, I agree but I think the closer I got to the end of the journey the more accurate my prediction would become as less things could continue to go wrong.
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Thanks for this really easy to understand response
I hope BTC gets to $150k haha
I think it will launch in next three years. Too much has gone in for nothing to be launched 
Can you imagine getting a network finished that will rely on everyday users computers/ease of access/ease of use and lack the interface to open itself to a more broad group? Also this “mobile” UI that covers so many consumer/prosumer cases for the network is not just for mobile. It serves also for desktop in the Safe Network App as it is a less intrusive off to the side access point to the network until they can dedicate more resources to desktop specific UI. The reason they went that route is the web increasingly is accessed via mobile and like I mentioned, the way they designed the Safe Network App allows it to serve a double purpose. A lot effort went into how to present and fully leverage the benefits of a live network for the average user. If we had a live network and so many here not being technical it would have seemed incompetent if they didn’t have these things sorted and ready.
They also focus a lot of effort on Command Line Interface and figuring out how best to write API’s for developers. So several tracks happening at once.
If you imagine it as several different train tracks all running parallel, they need all these tracks to converge to a single Fleming/MVE (minimum viable experience) track so that as many people as possible can climb aboard.
I started off as a spectator, then a cheerleader, then involved, now I’m just kind of back to cheerleading at the moment (although there are still UI improvements we are making as well). In the past it has seemed like we were so close and to be fair we were with whatever implementations we had at the time. Doesn’t sound promising when I say it like that but back when it was C++ there was too much code, then they convert to RUST (thinking long term), they also had many self made unique libraries (way more and bigger than now) that took a lot of resources to build and maintain and relatively recently they started utilizing other existing tech such as QUIC and making alterations on top (as quicp2p), also PARSEC. PARSEC had some great minds behind it and there was a lot of ambition and promise behind it but it was also unknown territory as ABFT really hadn’t been fully achieved and this network has high and unique requirements compared to say just a digital currency. So will CRDT help solve some of this? Well it has been around and is more proven and aligns with how David has always felt the network should resolve things, on the other hand PARSEC was strict global order and used for too many purposes and was resource and memory heavy even though it was asynchronous and eventually consistent. Hind site is 20/20. So there is a big contrast to where we were and where we are now. Then we were in a huge crypto bubble that kept on going up, the team was growing, to compete there was marketing, then the holy grail in the space of ABFT consensus, you see how that can happen. We were trying to compete in a hype machine and it lead us astray for what we needed. AFTER ALL OF THIS THE PROJECT IS STILL DEVELOPING AND STILL HERE. We almost have a test net that is as close to Fleming as we’ve ever been, a network coin implementation, even dynamic store cost is being worked on. You can’t say that isn’t progress.
As for in the next three years? I surely hope so. We can’t wait for what might seem like forever. We could be supportive and jump in and help though. We could be ready to seed the network with apps. We could be crazy and wild speculators and fill our bags with a high risk investment. We could blog about it or share links to this forum on social media. Or we could wax poetic about it never happening.
Btw, @Fruico this isn’t directed at you, I just quoted a quote in your reply.
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To complement the above post that actually tries to be positive with the infinite possibilities that exist to be positive yet no one here taps into them: I’d worry/anticipate more about the next 3 months of pure excitement as they work on how to implement non-PARSEC stuff, etc., now with less than 8k lines of code, vs. the 16k-ish they had with “PARSEC & before the major refactor”—plus now more refactors that could bring it to some even smaller amount of code.
I’m “selling” by 2022 if nothing groundbreaking happens, because I’m just THAT confident—that something really good will be happening, even if it’s just the “visible proof” that it all can work—that selling by then is literally a paradox that can never exist, therefore I can state my greatest fear (i.e. “selling”, though it’s not like I can’t just farm anyway) with confidence.
Threads like these never state the content that disproves their worries, for some reason.
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