Perhaps it's a coincidence, or I'm just overly skeptical, but the dev updates for the past month or two remind me a lot of the old darkcoin updates... meaning price manipulation.

New release <whenever> ... price rises... oops, problem ... price drops... all fixed...  repeat process, etc. etc.

Wasn't it a month ago where whomever was doing the updates was acting like the MVP was going to be released almost at any time... like a week or two away? This was back in March. I mean, how could it have been almost ready to release over a month ago when they didn't even do all of this testing?

Not stating this as FUD, or that I don't like the coin. Just that the Maid devs much watch the price like anyone else ... and they can easily impact it one way or another. Just seems weird how they can't simply state a realistic release date for the MVP. They should have just said May/June, but we'll do some testing earlier. But I guess that wouldn't have the same impact on the price.

However... yes there is a however, if you are super keen to get involved in community Vault testing a little earlier - we are in the position to share Vault (TCP only) binaries that can be run from home (subject to some limitations please read before jumping in, details below). I really want to be 100% clear, this is NOT the MVP... I repeat ...not the MVP :wink: but it is a Vault running from your own computer and joining the SAFE Network (we are running 100 Vault nodes) - which is in itself extremely cool and another milestone as part of the rolling community testing release cycle.

So how do you do this…

safe_vault v0.6.0
Download safe_vault binary1 and unzip files.
To run a Vault, it is currently necessary to be either directly connected or forward a TCP port in your router and then specify the port you have forwarded within the Crust config file (safe_vault.crust.config).
At tcp_acceptor_port replace null with the port you forwarded e.g. 1234
Execute the binary (from the command line, although not necessary on Windows) - you have now joined a Vault to the SAFE Network :slight_smile:

what i dont quite get is why Maidsafe has not launched yet?

How can you simply assert there are no privacy issues involved in this complicated chain of tokens and addresses?

Has this sophisticated scheme been vetted by any reputable crypto experts?  What do LukeJr and Peter Todd think?

I make a point about SafeCoin's (possibly risky) use of Bitcoin's public blockchain, and you talk about Safenet.   

Safenet is bound to SafeCoin via a Rube Goldberg layer of chutes and ladders that may leak privacy.

Of course you'd rather talk up Safenet's internals than address concerns about the anonymity of the payment interface.

Other than some vague reference to people at universities, are any well known cypherpunks reviewing the SafeCoin<->SafeNet scheme?

Since people's lives might depend on that scheme being untraceable/unlinkable/private, I don't understand the resentment towards scrutiny.

Unless you're only here for the pump and dump....

I've got 3 issues.

1.  MAID is ancient Kad-based tech that still can't do what Freenet did 15 years ago, yet aspires to charge for the same services and presumed to collect IPO money for vaporware development.

2. MAID's old tech is being hyped by bolting on some trendy "MOAR BLOCKCHAIN" stuff via a Rube Goldberg layer of SafeCoin rigmarole.

3.  Inquires about issues 1 & 2 are met with hostility, speculation about motivations, personal attacks, and very little technical disclosure.

Now I've answered your question, please address one of mine.

Do you feel MAID is by default automatically due respect, or should it be forced to earn respect by demonstrated real-world utility?

This has been a pretty terrific week for us in many ways. Crust and Routing now appear very stable in tests. We have a droplet deployer script to start up networks quickly and churn these (kill and start nodes) in a programmatic manner. These tests allow an end-to-end test of the modules. Great news crust and routing now are at a point of feature freeze for the MVP. There are some small changes, but only to satisfy other libs, the core of these libraries are now considered stable and MVP ready (as a bonus, with Udt and home networking).

This allows us to relocate resources (not all though, these libraries will evolve) to upper layers and this really is great news. Crust is low level and interoperates with the Operating System and network (I/O) which is very difficult to get right across operating systems and networks. Having this solid is a very large hurdle. Previously this module was a black hole where things could fail in upper libraries with the constant question “is that a crust error?”. Now we have passed that.

Then routing, the “workhorse” of the network became feature complete and tested to an acceptable level for MVP (Minimum Viable Product). This again was a library that was a real developer sink in terms of resources and again had to guarantee its promises were in fact being maintained. It now does! (we satisfy the kademlia invariant with a recursive version of that protocol and managed connections, this is pretty huge).

These are like an avalanche really as we move downhill to launch. Each of these layers allows a relatively huge resource base to be applied to the upper layers. Many of the resources we had in the lower modules were very highly skilled and can now deploy to upper layers, it is a huge relief).

Now we have vaults to confirm and that is happening now with 7-8 developers on a hangout every day to check/double check and confirm vaults do as they promise. Not only do they work, but make sure they are easily extensible. This is important there to allow features which will only exist in vaults and clients to be implemented with significantly greater velocity than previous. It is a very exciting time.

Thanks for the thorough explanation.  Has the convoluted process you describe been reviewed by Peter Todd or a similar expert in adversarial thinking and penetration testing?

All those steps create a large amount of attack surface, some of which may leak or possibly be tricked into reducing privacy.

The problem is that SafeCoins are not actually safe.

They use the radically transparent Bitcoin blockchain, so they are easily traceable/linkable/public.

Doesn't that defeat the purpose of using an encrypted P2P VPN like Maid?

It would be like requiring Paypal to use TOR.  Bad idea.

As everyone who regularly follows these updates will be aware, getting the MVP out is taking a bit longer than we all expected; just now this is mainly due to bugs that we are seeing with uTP, issues that are not reproduced using TCP. So as the Crust team continues to work on these issues the decision has been taken to slightly change direction with the MVP and initially release a TCP only MVP. This may require a little more manual set-up from the user side, but it was felt better to keep the rolling release schedule erm… rolling - rather than lose momentum,as the guys are currently testing this and seeing very positive results. So to be as transparent as we always try to be: the first MVP is going to be initially TCP only, with uTP support to follow.

As you may be aware uTP is a layer on UDP that allows reliable transfer of data, while also allowing better NAT traversal than TCP. Utorrent uses this, but many in that community still use TCP as it’s 20% quicker. uTP following TCP is therefore sensible and it allows all the other libraries and the resources we were pouring into Crust to be pushed into the Client APIs and Beta features (messaging / safecoin / advanced data handling, etc). This is now where we will once more see much faster delivery of components to the community, so we are delighted and excited to be again looking at the innovations and features that will make SAFE very complete and more efficient.

It's not only the "design" of MAID forum that reminds me of Paycointalk, it's the tone.  Long on hype, short on realistic critical self-evaluation.  That was clear in my post, so you ignored the part you didn't want to see.

But it's an unfair comparison because Paycoin at least had a working blockchain, while MAID sells itself with happy talk about a new private internet yet uses uᴉoɔʇᴉq's conspicuously transparent blockchain.

If Maid was a serious effort, I'd expect Safecoin to piggyback on a private coin instead of one being analyzed/tracked/monitored by numerous private firms and .gov TLAs.

Please elaborate on how that expectation is unreasonable and makes me a clown.   

Could MaidSafe be the solution for getting uncensored Google back to China?

I think there's a 1,000,000,000 people demand for China only...

I registered "jordan" as my public id, but I don't know how I could register just jordan.safenet. Within my "jordan" public id, I've created bob.jordan.safenet and john.jordan.safenet.

I don't seem to have a vanilla jordan.safenet. How were you able to get just jeff.safenet?