[ANN] IPO of MaidSafe: Entering the Future of the Decentralized Internet

[Coinler]

is it possible to have maidsafe network in such a way that storage space, cpu power and bandwidth can be rented?

e.g. i want to upload 1tb of data to maidsafe network for safe keeping. so i should pay a daily rate per mb of storage on the network.

e.g. i want to rent some cpu power from maidsafe network, or bandwidth to do some ddos testing. i should pay in safecoins for the use of these services. based on how much resources id like to use and for how long i want to use them.


or is it going to be strictly about accessing content? meaning i can store 1tb of data indefinitely for free as long as i dont access it. just upload and it is stored for the next 10 years let's say until i access it then i pay a few safe coins for downloading? i ask because if theres no rent cost a user can host say 20 tb of maidsafe data for users for years but gain no income because those users just uploaded and dont download or access their uploads.

as a service provider aiming to maintain a 24/7 uptime, how will i mitigate my running costs if users dont access their uploaded content hosted at my node?

[1714079595]

1714079595

[1714079595]

1714079595

[1714079595]

1714079595

[zeeman]

That's just a tiny bit too complex and convoluted to pass the smell test.  Actually it reeks of Rube Goldberg over-engineering.
Remember how the elegant simplicity of BitTorrent's tit-for-tat beat the layers of Gnutella cruft, and how TOR's onion routing (and i2p's garlic routing) won the race between private internets-within-the-internet?
I don't see that kind of breakthrough here.  If you can't explain it without sounding like jl777 explaining SuperNet, there's a problem.
I can describe the basic ideas of Bittorrent and TOR to my mom and dad.  Maidsafe?  Not a chance.  The best I could do is "Maid is like Freenet, except you have to pay to upload and without the 10 years of proven security."
For a science fair project, Maid has been in development far longer than comparable experimental software, many of which are based on Bitcoin blockchain tech and already in production.
EG: https://zeronet.io/ (thanks https://torrentfreak.com/play-p2p-impossible-shutdown-160301/).
Sorry, still not clear on how Safecoins can be anonymous+private+unlinkable without using ring signatures.
So users are required to pay in order to store data.  That sounds like SIA and Storj.
There are persistent rumors Maid has some unique value/selling proposition, but it continues to elude me (and not for lack of searching).

I really have no problem explaining it to friends and family. It's a P2P-internet where all data is "chunked" and encrypted and everybody stores pieces. All connections between users are encrypted as well so there's a lot of security. You can store data just like on Dropbox but you can also store websites and register a domain like zeeman.safenet which everybody can request user their browser. The network it based on Ants where all Ants have their own role without central organisation. Still though, they help each other out and work together to make sure everybody get's their data.

On BitTorrent you always hope that someone is providing a file as a seeder, on Safenet you'll always have at least 4 seeders (more likely 6) for each MB. And the seeders have an incentive to keep their connection open to make Safecoin. So download an episode of Breaking Bad from years ago and for every GB you'll have about 6000 seeders. The link with Freenet is logical but not right IMO. On Freenet you hope (just like BitTorrent) that there are seeders. In the case of Freenet you hope someone requested a file before you did in the last few weeks and that it's in cache somewhere. If it's not in cache it will be gone. On Safenet once uploaded, a file will be there forever if the uploader didn't took it off. It will be there for years. And again, for every 100MB. you'll see about 600 seeders that have the chunks available. And instead of BitTorrent where you need to provide upload to get downloads, these seeders (Farmers) are paid for by the network.  

And about Safecoin, they use ring signatures if you like. Remember, to your close nodes in XOR your just an address. And as one of the users from that 32 nodes group you can't do a thing. You'll always ask for them to do it. So they GET your chunks for you and pass them to you. They decide if you can upload (PUT) a chunk to the network or not. And they sign everything you do. Without about 80% of the group signing a request you can't do anything on the network. And you can't pick your own group or address. It's like a virtual IP-Address that's given to you by a group of nodes.

But if you want more info you might want to join the forum. Lot of discussions about the questions you have. I had them as well some time ago, but I jumped in and I think it can be done what they say. Although we need to see proof over the coming months when people run Vaults from home. My expectation is that even without Safecoin the network works. Just like nobody got payed to run BitTorrent and seed some files.    

[zeeman]

is it possible to have maidsafe network in such a way that storage space, cpu power and bandwidth can be rented?

e.g. i want to upload 1tb of data to maidsafe network for safe keeping. so i should pay a daily rate per mb of storage on the network.

e.g. i want to rent some cpu power from maidsafe network, or bandwidth to do some ddos testing. i should pay in safecoins for the use of these services. based on how much resources id like to use and for how long i want to use them.


or is it going to be strictly about accessing content? meaning i can store 1tb of data indefinitely for free as long as i dont access it. just upload and it is stored for the next 10 years let's say until i access it then i pay a few safe coins for downloading? i ask because if theres no rent cost a user can host say 20 tb of maidsafe data for users for years but gain no income because those users just uploaded and dont download or access their uploads.

as a service provider aiming to maintain a 24/7 uptime, how will i mitigate my running costs if users dont access their uploaded content hosted at my node?

No, not rented. You pay to upload data, say a picture of your dog only once. And it will be there forever. If it's 3 mb. it's chunked into 3 pieces, each chunk it stored by 6 Vaults. So 18 Vaults will hold your data.
When one goes offline, the group notice and find another Vault to store your chunk. When you store "structured data" that is data that you can change, you'll pay some more. But same idea, pay once and it will be there forever unless you take it off.

There is talk of getting Safecoin to do calculations using your CPU. But this will take time, first they want the network up and running.

You can acces your data as many times as you want. Even if you upload a Hollywood blockbuster movie public to everyone, you pay once and everybody can watch it for free forever. When data becomes populair there's a bigger chance the chunks are in cache as well next to the nodes that have it in a Vault. So data becomes faster when more people request it.

Chunks are spread over the Vaults depending one XOR-Address (who is closest to the hash of the chunk in XOR) so you could see it as random due to the structure of the addresses on the network. So when you offer 1 TB. you'll might see your Vault filling up with over 1 million chunks of data. You hope as a farmer that some of these chunks are requested so you make some money. If you don't make enough money, you might put down your Vault and when enough people do this, the network notice it's running out of space so the reward for every MB. delivered to the network will go up. And in that reward is all your cost, from storage to bandwidth to whatever. Otherwise, why would you run a Vault and store data for the network?? Maybe some people will just to support the network, so I think we'll see very low prices to store data on the network. Will be way below google drive and other is my expectation.  

  

[Coinler]

is it possible to have maidsafe network in such a way that storage space, cpu power and bandwidth can be rented?

e.g. i want to upload 1tb of data to maidsafe network for safe keeping. so i should pay a daily rate per mb of storage on the network.

e.g. i want to rent some cpu power from maidsafe network, or bandwidth to do some ddos testing. i should pay in safecoins for the use of these services. based on how much resources id like to use and for how long i want to use them.


or is it going to be strictly about accessing content? meaning i can store 1tb of data indefinitely for free as long as i dont access it. just upload and it is stored for the next 10 years let's say until i access it then i pay a few safe coins for downloading? i ask because if theres no rent cost a user can host say 20 tb of maidsafe data for users for years but gain no income because those users just uploaded and dont download or access their uploads.

as a service provider aiming to maintain a 24/7 uptime, how will i mitigate my running costs if users dont access their uploaded content hosted at my node?

No, not rented. You pay to upload data, say a picture of your dog only once. And it will be there forever. If it's 3 mb. it's chunked into 3 pieces, each chunk it stored by 6 Vaults. So 18 Vaults will hold your data.
When one goes offline, the group notice and find another Vault to store your chunk. When you store "structured data" that is data that you can change, you'll pay some more. But same idea, pay once and it will be there forever unless you take it off.

There is talk of getting Safecoin to do calculations using your CPU. But this will take time, first they want the network up and running.

You can acces your data as many times as you want. Even if you upload a Hollywood blockbuster movie public to everyone, you pay once and everybody can watch it for free forever. When data becomes populair there's a bigger chance the chunks are in cache as well next to the nodes that have it in a Vault. So data becomes faster when more people request it.

Chunks are spread over the Vaults depending one XOR-Address (who is closest to the hash of the chunk in XOR) so you could see it as random due to the structure of the addresses on the network. So when you offer 1 TB. you'll might see your Vault filling up with over 1 million chunks of data. You hope as a farmer that some of these chunks are requested so you make some money. If you don't make enough money, you might put down your Vault and when enough people do this, the network notice it's running out of space so the reward for every MB. delivered to the network will go up. And in that reward is all your cost, from storage to bandwidth to whatever. Otherwise, why would you run a Vault and store data for the network?? Maybe some people will just to support the network, so I think we'll see very low prices to store data on the network. Will be way below google drive and other is my expectation.  

  

this is just my opinion, but i think because of the enhanced security and redundancy maidnet could be more expensive than google. companies pay good money to secure their data and keep data backups.

but back to the original post,

ok so i pay the network to upload data and the users that actually host my data get paid in safecoins. but then i can download from the network free of charge? so i can access the data i uploaded repeatedly over the course of a year at no extra cost?

[zeeman]

this is just my opinion, but i think because of the enhanced security and redundancy maidnet could be more expensive than google. companies pay good money to secure their data and keep data backups.

but back to the original post,

ok so i pay the network to upload data and the users that actually host my data get paid in safecoins. but then i can download from the network free of charge? so i can access the data i uploaded repeatedly over the course of a year at no extra cost?

Maidnet  +1   it's confusing, but Maidsafe is the company and The SAFE Network is the name of the network. but I'll use both Safenet and SAFE and whatever  .

Companies and forums use security walls when you try to get in. So passwords etc. Safenet works different, they say; "servers can't be safe, so let's secure the data instead of the servers". So chunks of data are encrypted and decrypted locally on your machine only. That's where the security comes from. So they don't have to hire big datacentre's, and security teams to protect against DDoS attacks etc. The networks uses P2P to spread all the data over the network and because it's all encrypted it's already safe. No DDoS possible as well. The only thing you could do is DDoS one or 2 nodes in the network but you don't have a clue where all these nodes that form groups are in XOR. So you can't target a node, a group of nodes or pieces of data.

They use "MIO" to speed up the nodes locally so nodes can handle over 60.000 messages a second. So extra encyption layers and all these messages that are crypto signed shouldn't be a problem when it comes to speed. But we'll have to see what happens when we have a couple of thousand Vaults at peoples homes.

Yes, you can download for free, that's the idea. Maybe they make a change to that, but they want people to use Safenet, that's why. And when you pay some Safecoin to store a file, you are not paying to the ones that's storing the chunks. You actually "burn" Safecoin so the addresses of the safecoin become free again. People that deliver data to the network get payed when they deliver a chunk from their Vault and the random Safecoin address that's picked by the close nodes  is free. So safecoins are recycled in a way. And when a file becomes populair nodes will deliver it from cache instead from a Vault so nobody makes money on it. All nodes in the network cache up to an x-number of chunks that come by. So when you request a chunk, and it's 5 HOPS away, the Vault makes money once. But because these 5 HOPS have cached that chunk now, when you request it again, or somebody close to you, it's delivered from cache from one of these HOPS. So data becomes faster when more people download it. And as a Vault you don't win the lottery when you have a very populair chunk  .
 
Here are some videos about the technical details:

1.1. What is the SAFE Network?
1.2. XOR Distance and Basic Routing
2.1. Recapitulation of Lecture 1
2.2. Visualizing the global connection patterns in XOR Space
2.3. How do the Overlay (XOR) Network and the Physical Network relate to one another?

Video about Safecoin:

The Economics of Safecoin



  

[Coinler]

And as a Vault you don't win the lottery when you have a very populair chunk  .
 


  

thank you. i get it now. though it wasnt the angle i was thinking it was, this direction provides many more possibilities with regards to web hosting services.

so basically you earn more, the more resources you provide to the network on a continual basis. so we're looking at maintaining uptime efficiency, and upgrading resources based on demand for storage and upload capacity.

next question.

will the network be able to host and retrieve information from within databases uploaded to the network? in the instance that we upload a website that relies on storing, retrieving and adding new records to one or multiple sql databases. will this be inherent or something we could see as a feature on safe network in the foreseeable future?

[zeeman]

And as a Vault you don't win the lottery when you have a very populair chunk  .
 

thank you. i get it now. though it wasnt the angle i was thinking it was, this direction provides many more possibilities with regards to web hosting services.

so basically you earn more, the more resources you provide to the network on a continual basis. so we're looking at maintaining uptime efficiency, and upgrading resources based on demand for storage and upload capacity.

next question.

will the network be able to host and retrieve information from within databases uploaded to the network? in the instance that we upload a website that relies on storing, retrieving and adding new records to one or multiple sql databases. will this be inherent or something we could see as a feature on safe network in the foreseeable future?

Yes, you earn more when you provide more. But there will probably be an optimum for the size of a Vault. the Devs want everybody to have a chance in farming. So maybe it would be more economic to run several Vaults but same idea. The Vaults will be non-persistent for the biggest part. So when you connect and disconnect all your chunks are gone. So the farmers will run 24/7 Vaults when they want to be most economic.

David Irvine (founder of Maidsafe) thinks SQL isn't the smartest thing to do in SAFE. The network uses 512-bit addresses where you have the option to create "immutable data" like a picture, or "structured data" like a reply on a forum which you can change when you made a typo. And with 512-bit addresses the number of chunks/datafields is actually unlimited. So you pick a random address, pay to become the owner of that address and upload whatever you want. You can make it public, private, immutable, structured. Just whatever you like. The Devs have provided a "Safe Launcher" which allows Apps to use SAFE without knowing your details. There will be an App-environment as well, so you log on to SAFE and see your Apps show up. Devs can build whatever they want with this system without SQL. Someone is building a (protocol for) Forum. Here's the link.
Feel free to join the forum. Lot of these questions are answered there. 

[mamamae]

Thanks thats the best explanation i have heard until now , for MAID /safecoin system

That's just a tiny bit too complex and convoluted to pass the smell test.  Actually it reeks of Rube Goldberg over-engineering.
Remember how the elegant simplicity of BitTorrent's tit-for-tat beat the layers of Gnutella cruft, and how TOR's onion routing (and i2p's garlic routing) won the race between private internets-within-the-internet?
I don't see that kind of breakthrough here.  If you can't explain it without sounding like jl777 explaining SuperNet, there's a problem.
I can describe the basic ideas of Bittorrent and TOR to my mom and dad.  Maidsafe?  Not a chance.  The best I could do is "Maid is like Freenet, except you have to pay to upload and without the 10 years of proven security."
For a science fair project, Maid has been in development far longer than comparable experimental software, many of which are based on Bitcoin blockchain tech and already in production.
EG: https://zeronet.io/ (thanks https://torrentfreak.com/play-p2p-impossible-shutdown-160301/).
Sorry, still not clear on how Safecoins can be anonymous+private+unlinkable without using ring signatures.
So users are required to pay in order to store data.  That sounds like SIA and Storj.
There are persistent rumors Maid has some unique value/selling proposition, but it continues to elude me (and not for lack of searching).

I really have no problem explaining it to friends and family. It's a P2P-internet where all data is "chunked" and encrypted and everybody stores pieces. All connections between users are encrypted as well so there's a lot of security. You can store data just like on Dropbox but you can also store websites and register a domain like zeeman.safenet which everybody can request user their browser. The network it based on Ants where all Ants have their own role without central organisation. Still though, they help each other out and work together to make sure everybody get's their data.

On BitTorrent you always hope that someone is providing a file as a seeder, on Safenet you'll always have at least 4 seeders (more likely 6) for each MB. And the seeders have an incentive to keep their connection open to make Safecoin. So download an episode of Breaking Bad from years ago and for every GB you'll have about 6000 seeders. The link with Freenet is logical but not right IMO. On Freenet you hope (just like BitTorrent) that there are seeders. In the case of Freenet you hope someone requested a file before you did in the last few weeks and that it's in cache somewhere. If it's not in cache it will be gone. On Safenet once uploaded, a file will be there forever if the uploader didn't took it off. It will be there for years. And again, for every 100MB. you'll see about 600 seeders that have the chunks available. And instead of BitTorrent where you need to provide upload to get downloads, these seeders (Farmers) are paid for by the network.  

And about Safecoin, they use ring signatures if you like. Remember, to your close nodes in XOR your just an address. And as one of the users from that 32 nodes group you can't do a thing. You'll always ask for them to do it. So they GET your chunks for you and pass them to you. They decide if you can upload (PUT) a chunk to the network or not. And they sign everything you do. Without about 80% of the group signing a request you can't do anything on the network. And you can't pick your own group or address. It's like a virtual IP-Address that's given to you by a group of nodes.

But if you want more info you might want to join the forum. Lot of discussions about the questions you have. I had them as well some time ago, but I jumped in and I think it can be done what they say. Although we need to see proof over the coming months when people run Vaults from home. My expectation is that even without Safecoin the network works. Just like nobody got payed to run BitTorrent and seed some files.    

[Porsche911]

Soon more about MaidSafe on INVESD.

https://invesd.org/the-next-big-trend-after-airbnb-and-uber/

Hope you guys like it

[Piston Honda]

liking MAID thus far....keep up the tech and releases.  seems the price has had a nice steady climb over the past many weeks....very good.
thinking #moon come April! make it haaaaaaaapppeeennn

[BadAss.Sx]

Soon more about MaidSafe on INVESD.

https://invesd.org/the-next-big-trend-after-airbnb-and-uber/

Hope you guys like it

Well, i don't like it...the whole article doesn't make sense other then you want to push visitors to your website. Stop doing that.

[zeeman]

Update: new clients launched

The first iteration of the testnet got wiped out and the clients for the second iteration just got released. You can test The SAFE Network on OSX, Linux and Windows.
Remember this is a testnet only so your data might get wiped out again. Also note that if you surf .safenet websites using your browser, there's still no guaranty that trackers/websites can't follow your path. The SAFE Network is still in test mode so assume it's not that safe yet.

What do you get?

• Connect to a centralized version of The SAFE Network. Maidsafe provides connections to about 50 little servers that run Vaults.
• Register your domain using the Decentralized Naming Service (DNS).
• Upload your own .safenet website to the network.
• Post the link to your website and share it with others.

Why?

• This is the first fase where people can connect to a network using SAFE technology.
• Maidsafe (the company) wants to test how the Vaults behave with test users and how it reacts on nodes go offline at random (churn).

What's next?

• When the Devs from Maidsafe are satisfied running things centralized, they release new clients where people run Vaults at home.
• This is the moment where The SAFE Network truly becomes a P2P-network and data is stored and retrieved by nodes in the network.
• Having a network where people can up- and download websites, register a domain and surf .safesite is the fulfillment of the MVP.

And after that?

• When the network is up and running it should scale without limits as new users join.
• A virtual drive/folder to store and retrieve data.
• The Devs are working on Apps (like messenger) that connect to the launcher using the API.
• We probably see test-Safecoin to test transactions/Farming. The idea is that people make money running Vaults on the network.
• When the testfase with Safecoin is over real Safecoin will be implemented. People can exchange Maidsafecoin for Safecoin at the Maidsafe website.

This is all the information from the Dev-updates and the forum. Things might change of course. More info at: The SAFE Network Forum

*** Join the testing using the link to this topic ***

The Ants are coming!

[TrueAnon]

Update: new clients launched

The first iteration of the testnet got wiped out and the clients for the second iteration just got released. You can test The SAFE Network on OSX, Linux and Windows.
Remember this is a testnet only so your data might get wiped out again. Also note that if you surf .safenet websites using your browser, there's still no guaranty that trackers/websites can't follow your path. The SAFE Network is still in test mode so assume it's not that safe yet.

What do you get?

• Connect to a centralized version of The SAFE Network. Maidsafe provides connections to about 50 little servers that run Vaults.
• Register your domain using the Decentralized Naming Service (DNS).
• Upload your own .safenet website to the network.
• Post the link to your website and share it with others.

Why?

• This is the first fase where people can connect to a network using SAFE technology.
• Maidsafe (the company) wants to test how the Vaults behave with test users and how it reacts on nodes go offline at random (churn).

What's next?

• When the Devs from Maidsafe are satisfied running things centralized, they release new clients where people run Vaults at home.
• This is the moment where The SAFE Network truly becomes a P2P-network and data is stored and retrieved by nodes in the network.
• Having a network where people can up- and download websites, register a domain and surf .safesite is the fulfillment of the MVP.

And after that?

• When the network is up and running it should scale without limits as new users join.
• A virtual drive/folder to store and retrieve data.
• The Devs are working on Apps (like messenger) that connect to the launcher using the API.
• We probably see test-Safecoin to test transactions/Farming. The idea is that people make money running Vaults on the network.
• When the testfase with Safecoin is over real Safecoin will be implemented. People can exchange Maidsafecoin for Safecoin at the Maidsafe website.

This is all the information from the Dev-updates and the forum. Things might change of course. More info at: The SAFE Network Forum

*** Join the testing using the link to this topic ***

The Ants are coming!

Good to see, keep up the good work.
I think MAID will pop on polo soon enough.

[bitthedust]

Thanks for keeping us up to date Zeeman!

[BadAss.Sx]

http://test.badass.safenet

[ethought]

Great updates!! Well done team.

Installed and operating very smoothly.

Surprised this is not being discussed more actively on this thread

[zeeman]

Great updates!! Well done team.

Installed and operating very smoothly.

Surprised this is not being discussed more actively on this thread

We can discuss more if you like. I notice we have a lot of people here on Bitcointalk that like the project but don't actively follow it. I do, and I know some others here do as well.
The latest update works quite better and faster than the previous one. David replied about the Vaults saying they're close to get it in people's hands.
The Vault is the place where chunks are stored. So the moment people start to run Vaults at home we truly have a P2P-Network. Maidsafe is building a library (or crate in Rust) for the lowest IP-level. It's called "Crust". It allows different ports and connections over UDP, TCP and uTorrent's uTP. This is what David says about it:

As @Grizmoblust hinted at this is in crust. If we have tcp and udp hole punch with the ability to auto detect which to use for every connection and on the randomised ports (which we use) it will be a very powerful wee library for a lot of projects. Especially with the anonymous and authenticated encryption built in. This has been a huge hurdle for the project since day 1, which is a shame as it's all based on known industry techniques, maybe not using a DHT as a STUN server (type), but anyway the guys there are doing amazing work.

So this is the true power Open Source has. They've put a lot of time and energy in and it's fully open and ready to use by other projects as well. Fore The SAFE Network this will be a big step. When you run a Vault all chunks in there are obfuscated and encrypted so you support the network by being one of the 6 Vaults that holds a chunk without having a clue what's in there. If you go offline, the others will notice quite fast and they'll find a new place to store. So I'm quite curious to see how this works when we have Vaults in people's hands. I'm quite curious about the speed of the network at that moment as well.

[zeeman]

Little Update

[BlockTrade]

Wendy’s (Data) Breach Reportedly Hitting Some CUs Hard

http://cutoday.ssd.thinkcreativeinternal.net/Fresh-Today/Wendy-s-Breach-Reportedly-Hitting-Some-CUs-Hard?utm_source=Fresh+Today+030316&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Fresh+Today+030316

[john312]

Hi, I would like to buy this coin and store it long term. Could you please tell me how to do this? Is there paper wallet (preferred way of storing coins)? Or can you point me to the wallet app? Will that be compatible with the network in the future?