"Zeta" SAFE Launch? (MVP)

Autonomi Network Token
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I’ve kind of asked this before, but wanted to make a dedicated thread. No pressure, just a thought I wanted to articulate again.

Since the MaidSafe company has grown over time, would there be enough people (or maybe only one person) who could make not an alpha, not a beta, but a “Zeta” network that is basically a completely bare-bones MVP of the core features? Perhaps the most important is one with Zeta-SafeCoin, so people will get excited, earn sustainable income, and therefore be able to dedicate time to decentralized SAFE projects. This is what it takes to tap into the tens of millions of programmers out there.

It doesn’t have to be pretty. It doesn’t even have to be impressive. It just has to be slow, decentralized, ugly code, but allow people to make Alpha 2 style apps and earn some sort of token from it.

From there the whole world might wake up to SAFE, at least in a small way, in random pockets of the world, and the project could actually start influencing people’s lives, and spark their minds.

The project could take on a real life of its own, development could take things in many progressive directions, and MaidSafe could continue on theirs with less pressure.

Just what we have right now could be rigged up nicely enough, adding in the token. We already have the functional community net.

If any of my apps could even earn fake Zeta-SafeCoin, I for one would be able to get more excited and put more of my life straight into it, and have that time be justified. I’m sure others as well. Even Rust Engineers :wink: Some sort of exchange rate would emerge, even if it’s hilarious at the very beginning. Everything is.

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That cannot be done yet as there is no safecoin code been written yet. All that has been written is the PUT balance value in the account details.

Until Maxwell (alpha 4) we don’t even have the proper mechanism to make a mickey mouse version of it yet.

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Thanks for the insight, could you explain this part more?

I was totally ready to get (politely) shot down with this thread. I just wanted to open it so I could reference it in the future, since this idea comes back to me sporadically over time :stuck_out_tongue:

But interested to learn more about this :point_up_2:
I guess I’m still of the (very dated) understanding that “safecoin is a trivially small amount of code to whisk up,” from very early discussions a long time ago… Even though I did kind of doubt that.

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Yes Maxwell (alpha 4) is the alpha after the upcoming Fleming alpha 3 network. In Maxwell we will have vaults at home again with most of the protections needed for safecoin. And David has even hinted that there might be testsafecoin with Maxwell, but that is not necessarily certain.

The process of coin spending/transfer has to be devised into an RFC etc.

But for a mickey mouse version you still want the protection against it being hacked or people creating their own coins. And until Maxwell we will not have that.

SAFE builds up as layers. Crust, Routing, Node functions and so on. The code for SAFEcoin will be trivial compared to most if not all the other modules and even trivial compared to a lot of other programs.

The problem is that it relies on the layers underneath it to exist. These layers underneath are not just for SAFE coin but some of the other important operations. For instance some of the obvious layers & functionality are PARSEC, Data Storage, Messaging, etc

So until they are at a point where they are secure and not needing this invite system as well then SAFEcoin cannot exist safely including test coin and mickey’s even though the code is nowhere the effort of the other modules.

But also just because it is easy does not mean it doesn’t need the shit tested out of it and this may take more time than we realise.

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I think it’s interesting to consider, though I don’t have the technical knowledge to know what’s feasible.

I think what your aiming for is a rough & ready showcase of all of the main features, but not with all of the final benefits. I like the idea & think it’s worth exploring if it’s possible.

Relaxing some assumptions / dropping some key benefits of the final network may enable a fun network to play with at an earlier stage.

E.g. take the existing Alpha code that’s working on the community test, but:

  • add a blockchain node / wallet to it, to run ‘zeta coin’ token
  • link zeta coin wallets to Safe Network accounts
  • add ‘zetacoin’ code requirement to pay for put balances

Sticking a blockchain in it has some obvious problems, e.g. possible loss of privacy, slower transactions, not-free transactions, need for very basic tokenomics but this wouldn’t be important for a temporary play network, and it could solve the need for invites & allow a basic economy for resources.

Does anyone who is familiar with the code know how hard it’d be to create a very minimal mock Safecoin implementation that utilises an external blockchain with balances of the token linked to Safe Network accounts?

If it’s not a lot of work to stick a blockchain link into the current code to bypass the need for invites / rate limits, prevent spamming etc, it could be a fun network to play with ahead of full network availability & a good upgrade to the current community network.

If it is a lot of work, then there’s little point if it’ll be superceded by the Safe network its self in short order.

Also, I expect it’d need to be possible to hack something like this in the community, as I’m sure MaidSafe are fully focused on delivering the actual network.

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I think blockchain wouldn’t make sense here,

The thing about SAFE is it already has the decentralisation. It already has the network of nodes (vaults, etc) required to make sure “coin” balances etc are persistent and “coins” don’t overlap. Blockchain didn’t, so it needed a blockchain :joy:

So this Zeta-SafeCoin would be a much simpler thing than adding a blockchain. There’s really no need for a blockchain for ZSC, and it would only be a hindrance.

That’s one of the things that brought me to SAFE in the first place. All the benefits, and much simpler. It’s really quite elegant and powerful.

But thanks for breaking it down further @neo
Very excited for Fleming then :relaxed:

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Hacking, and people creating their coins (even counterfeit ZFC to pay for data upload etc) all sound harmless if it’s on a test or community network.

Creating their own SAFE-net style coins actually sounds pretty great. And will have to eventually be possible anyway (remember “ThanksCoin” and a PDC style test wallet were already created by the community).

Regardless, I think capable people should keep pushing the boundaries of @tfa 's amazing community-run SAFE net, and see what it can really do. Maybe they will stumble upon some way to hack some base coin-balance into it and get people excited :+1:

Imagine creating an app or website on there right now, and earning fake SafeCoin based on the amount of people who use it. Right now. PTP. (Or even just being able to let users send test tokens through a basic app. Would be really fun for them)

There’s no feedback mechanism right now for people making apps. No way to judge your success (or lack of it :rofl:). And those things really help with inspiration.

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Yes Fleming and especially Maxwell will be exciting, because they bring the basic network to life again, but this time with all the necessary components to make it survive in the wild. And potentially Maxwell will have test safecoin or a rudimentary version of it.

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Yeah, I’ve pushed out my beta estimate to late 2021. As the building gets taller, it also gets more complex

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Fiouuuuuu 2021, I am sometimes worried by the roadmap. It will be very difficult to compete initiatives like Blockstack, and all other bigs projects in the future. Even if the tech might be better, tech is not everything. All this project are already running in production and are building strong ecosystems.

They can see real limitations and issues. They are facing real malicious users trying to break, hack, compromise the network… and they can iterate based on this. This is very difficult to do such things in “restricted” or “sandbox” mode. You can plan as much as you want, it’s very difficult to predict all risks. The network is maybe facing a major problem that has not been detected.

So even if Maidsafe is launched in 2021, it might take few more years to have a “mature” network that community/devs can trust. Moreover people will probably not see the added value of Maidsafe. It will be very hard to compete.

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A Zeta network is an interesting idea, but it could dilute the focus of the development of the main SAFE network. Divided attention among developers and people following the project(s).

I recently looked into IPFS and it seems amazingly promising except for Filecoin which looks like a mess to me. One blogger put his blog on IPFS and used a local IPFS node to make the storage permanent. And when one of his blog posts became very popular with lots of views, the load on his local node remained basically the same! Seems very similar to SAFE’s deduplication and caching. Therefore I think IPFS in combination with traditional cloud storage is powerful. It would be possible to distribute say a gigabyte video to millions of viewers and the access to the cloud storage would remain tiny and thus very cost effective.

So instead of a Zeta net using SAFE I would probably look into basing it on IPFS.

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Yes to be honest, in 2016 I was very optimistic for Maidsafe and I was thinking to build an app on top of it. But today I am doing it with Blockstack. Maybe security apects and the tech are not as good as Maidsafe, BUT I will be able to have a real production app ASAP and allow people to play with it. If I am doing it with Maidsafe I will have to wait years to be able to see my app “really” live. In addition, maybe lot’s of thing will change in the API between now and the production version, the project might fail because of technical issues, etc.

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I feel it’d solve the key problems of needing invitations, and providing a token interface for farming ahead of the Safe Network being ready for this on its own.

If the Safe Network were ready to be launched with true Safecoin in a way that didn’t require invitations, what would be the need for a ‘Zeta network’ at all?

If you want something that resembles the Safe Network ahead of the Safe Network being ready, you’ll need to strap it to something / provide work arounds that make up for the current weaknesses, and ideally is an improvement on the invitation system (or just use the beta).

If not a blockchain, what else might this be?

Saying that, depending on where the problems lay, you might be right about Blockchain not being needed: if the token code its self is trivial (as we’ve seen implementations of tokens alrwady on Alpha), and whatever Safe Network code were needed to make use of a blockchain token for a resource economy could just utilise a Zeta-Net based token, it’d do the same job without the blockchain.

My thinking is that Blockchain bypasses the need for demonstrating token security ahead of that being done, but if that’s not a big challenge, the blockchain wouldn’t be needed. In this case, there wouldn’t be much (any?) opportunity to make compromises to get a rough & ready network running ahead of the Safe network beta, so will just need to wait for the current roadmap.

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Mutable Data ,…,20xrs

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Yeah this is a big part of what I was trying to say.

Training wheels are only a hindrance to truly mastering the bike, after a point.

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Yes, I think it’s a real problem. Let’s see how the team will manage all this in the future. But I am more and more pessimistic for the future of the project.

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If a Zeta net is developed based on SAFE, remove Safecoin! Why? Because I came to think that big tech companies probably find it too risky because of legal and regulatory issues to have to deal with cryptocurrencies, especially as a part of their information infrastructure. Small companies too need to be concerned about legal ramifications.

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I’m all for a ZETA launch volunteer network with a limited daily dose of points.

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