I’ve been off the forum for a while and thus may be off key. But am concerned by the suggestion, if not drive, to have custom hardware developed in order to ease entry of nodes into the SAFE network.
The greatest barrier to entry for most people, especially in the third world, is the steep hardware requirements in order to acquire bitcoins. The end result is an economy by the geeks, for the geeks. If maidsafe starts having highly specialized and custom hardware requirements, then what difference would there be with the rest of cryptoland?
On a personal level, the hardware machine has already successfully completed its 51% attack on cryptoland. Which is why its an uphill task trying to force through adoption through the provision of solutions for theoretical problems. Its my anti-prayer to the Hardware goddess, please leave maidsafe alone… please!
I wouldn’t worry about it, farming is in large part dependent on speedy content delivery, so bandwidth and latency (and thus physical location) are big factors. The advantage you get from having specialized hardware to reduce power costs and disk-read speed are not big enough to marginalize the casual farmers who have their systems turned on anyway and virtually make no additional costs from running a vault. Mining Bitcoin eats your CPU/GPU, farming SafeCoin doesn’t impact your system’s performance nearly as much. You can easily do it in the background while gaming/working.
There is no way SAFE farming can become ASIC-dominated like Bitcoin.
Yeah, the only specific hardware proposals that I’ve made or seen, were things that would lower barriers to entry for people who had money and sympathy for the network, but not the time or aptitude to learn how to set it up, or who were laptop replacement people who take their primary computing device on commutes with them (creating lots of downtime), and so would prefer to have a hard drive with the minimal CPU requirements pugged into an ethernet cable at home.
Yes I can confirm that, we were informed this would happen and then the goalposts started to move and we dropped it. Its a pity as there are opportunities for large scale uptake for sure. I prefer the people do this themselves though and we will help where we can. In terms of hw I still like the linux on a usb drive and similar to allow even the tech poor the ability to get on line and even farm,
It’s generally important to remember that the token distribution is different between SAFE’s proof of resource and bitcoin’s proof of work. Bitcoin’s blockchain mining becomes monopolized because of the large block rewards and dependence on processing power alone.
While no system involving humans and money will be perfect IMO, the granularity of SAFE supports fairer access.
I would still not be comfortable with any maidsafe specific hardware. In the sense that if there would be any hardware that is optimized towards generating tokens at the expense of the general purpose hardware already available in userland, then we would just as well get out now. @ioptio fairer access is not an option. the only option is “Fair” access. Are we going down the defeatist lane most crypto projects seem to have resigned themselves to? This reminds me of this age old question: Would you rather immediate short term profits or long term and lasting profit? Would you rather change your life or change the world?
Privacy security and freedom for all the worlds people is what I am working for I believe most here are, so this is not a concern for me anyway. This is not an ordinary project of any kind I think The profit I seek is one where disease gets cure, people stop starving and we are all able to look after each other a lot better, money etc. all follows value, as long as we focus on value we need worry not about financial gain. Unless we go mad that follows by default and safecoin is a great way to ensure that. The vision is a definite no debate target for me personally though, 10 years has proven at least this is the case for me and all in all its more than worth it
As mentioned before, the advantage of custom hardware for MaidSafe would be minor, it would mostly be a convenience. I get it, you hate what happened to Bitcoin, but there are many factors in this system that protect it against monopolisation/centralisation that are not present in Bitcoin (or other blockchain technologies for that matter). There really is no reason to be worried about custom hardware that makes farming slightly faster.
If someone provides more storage to SAFE and has a better internet connection (high bandwidth, low latency) than someone else, the former has an advantage over the latter where farming is concerned. Whether that is fair, fairer, or unfair is a matter of opinion I guess. I think it’s fair.
It seems we are stuck with centralizing forces for the foreseeable future, be they latency, or no access to new lands or more people. As the de-growth people say we have an overgrown world. Even without a developed developing world, relative to opportunity stuff is built out and things are getting tight politically. That means we are going to have to find smart decentralization within a centralized framework.
I think a project like this will have all sorts of uses. It’s up to us to make sure the initial “official uses” are the kind which live up to a certain standard. There will be people who will use SAFE Network in ways which most sane people disagree with and it will be important to have a mechanism where the voice of the network can be expressed.
Maybe some sort of voting will be how this happens.
The profit I seek is one where disease gets cure, people stop starving and we are all able to look after each other a lot better, money etc. all follows value, as long as we focus on value we need worry not about financial gain. Unless we go mad that follows by default and safecoin is a great way to ensure that. The vision is a definite no debate target for me personally though, 10 years has proven at least this is the case for me and all in all its more than worth it 