I had an interesting conversation today with a non-tech person about the safe network. He is a highly qualified retired phd electrical engineer, very cautious and risk-averse, but also quite politically outspoken.
Most people just want their files to be easy to access and not corrupted. They usually don’t care about anything else [such as privacy].
It’s obviously not how I feel (or probably you or most tech enthusiasts feel) but these perspectives are important since they reflect how ‘most’ people will see safe, and thus the kind of challenges that are to be faced.
I think it would be interesting to compile a ‘real world’ list of anecdotes that reflect how ‘the market’ feels about the safe network.
Got any anecdotes yourself from a broader demographic?
I think in many ways privacy and security are treated the same way, sort of insurance type stuff. I don’t care about X as it will never happen. I do not like insurance (well the industry, not the initial idea and not because it was Scottish )
So folk don’t care about security, till they are hacked or ransomware etc. The whole Internet fell foul to this and it’s why we have the current design. Initially hackers were not considered an issue.
Privacy was even less considered and now we have terribly dangerous market forces all leading to eventual “control” of people, so folk say I do not care about privacy, but I definitely do not want to be controlled ( a conundrum). Sometimes I think the privacy issue is not understood correctly, it’s not about secrets, it’s about being controlled.
So to your point about anecdotes, in investor meetings I had this a lot, folks say I don’t care about X and the thing I asked was generally, Ok but do you care about your child’s right to X and that funnily enough altered the opinion.
Just a few days ago I went to fix one if my friend’s chrome browser since it got infected with one of those ads forwarders which are really anoying.
When I was working on it I asked her why she kept all the passwords in the browser, you know that feature that the browser can remember your passwords, and she simply said…well, because I otherwise don’t remember them when I need them. So I asked, what if you loose your laptop, and she said…well I just reset the passwords of my accounts.
So after that I was thinking two things:
1- she doesn’t even know the risks in keeping them there, so why would she ever care about using something like SAFE unless something bad ever happens to her data, I mean a bad experience like what @dirvine mentions.
2- how will I be able to help her if she one day called me saying she forgot her SAFE’s account password so she wants to reset it.
Yup. I mentioned the same thing somewhere, and then it got split into a separate thread. My point was that SAFE needs to offer (strategically, to encourage adoption) something superior for a common everyday need (e.g. file storage, video sharing, chat, you name it) because the privacy and security features won’t be enough to gain mass adoption, even if those are the very things that make it a game changer.
You need privacy and security for crypto currencies. Making them instant and at little or no cost helps too!
There are lots of current technologies which also require these things too - privacy, security, speed, low cost. From the non-consumer perspective, all of these are critical for delivering what consumers then use without thought. However, these problems are very real and currently have different solutions to achieve it.
Updating both infrastructure and the services which run on it, is key for safe net. Arguably, if it meets all expectations, the very concept of needing infrastructure and services will shift.
The anecdotal end user from the OP may have heard the word “bitcoin,” but has no idea what it is. SAFE may well be a force in changing that, eventually. As for now, cryptocurrencies are simply not part of the way towards mass adoption.
They use it without a thought no matter what. Security is costly, so let’s just do enough to not get hacked all the time. Privacy is even lower down the list, as our clueless end user will go with whatever is shinier anyway. It’s usually just a lucky coincidence, a side-effect, that what’s done for security covers some of privacy as well.
Oh, by the way, can you remember when Facebook chat messages were still going across the world in plain text? Though chances are you didn’t even know that’s how it was at the time. Well, nobody cared. I rest my case.
As for the rest, I’ll link a post here from the other thread, because I don’t want to go off-topic too much.
EDIT: Yes, it keeps coming up; SAFE may indeed get adoption in the back-end faster. It will be interesting to see how the customer v.s. service provider thing will play out in the long run. I wonder if we’ve seen anything similar to this; it’s hard to even guess where things can go.
Last week I got a SMS from my father: “Hey son, I need 2 BTC, could you send them over to me?”
My reaction to his SMS was:
Wow, my father, who sent his first e-mail 3 years ago, already know something about Bitcoins!
F***, my father got Cryptolocker!!
Haha, he has absolutely no idea, how much 2 BTC are worth!!!
Later that day he asked me about SafeNetwork:
Dad: “Will this network prevent such Crypt-sh**-lockers from spreading?”
Me: “Probably not…”
Dad: “Then it is not safe, it is private!”
Me: “Well, your files will be safe, they will be encripted and distributed…”
Dad: “…stop jibberish, tell me this - could I have my computer files back-uped on this network? Could you recover my computer from there and circumvent the locker?”
)