Booting the safe network in a safe way

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How can the SafeNetwork be started in such a way that we can ensure that it is decentralised from the get go. For example, lets say that I am a government agency with 2PB of storage connected to the internet backbone and I wish to disrupt the network. So I partition the storage into 10TB portions (200 vaults) and spoof their IP addresses so that my vaults appear distant from one-another in the hope that the network distributes data between them. Meanwhile the community maybe only has 100 vaults on day 1 of network launch, meaning that I control 66% of the vaults, a majority of the network’s capacity.

If you think this is a bit unlikely or far-fetched, then please have a look at this New FATF guideline to prohibit anonymous p2p transactions or hosting - #11 by peca. So it’s reasonable to assume that these organisations already have plans in place to attempt to damage or take control of the network at any given opportunity.

How could this be solved:

One way to solve this might be by giving the mainnet application to several trusted people that are physically far apart in order to “seed” the network in different parts of the globe. It could be people that have contributed to the community for >1 year or people the team know personally etc.

Another way could be if Maidsafe initially sets up a couple thousand vaults that exist before the release of the mainnet. Then as the network grows these nodes can be switched off as Maidsafe takes a more handoff approach to the network after launch (as they should) ala Bitcoin.

Both of these ideas could be combined to improve security and give the best start during the very important “beginning”.

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This would be obvious since there would be so many sections too quickly for it to be natural growth.

A network reset would be in order if this happened.

Also the last beta release candidate will likely turn into the live system. So the testers would already have the jump on any government department or large business putting such expensive resources to this purpose.

There is no useful purpose in requiring physically distant. The network does not us IP addresses to determine what section you would be placed in. The network uses XOR addresses and these are assigned by the network itself in a random fashion.

If the last release candidate is successful then it almost guaranteed that there will be 1000’s of nodes already. Storage size is not a determining factor in how many nodes there will be. Connection speeds and CPUs will be a greater determining factor as to how many a particular person could allocate.

There are some 8000 members of this forum, over 200 who regularly visit every day or two. With the announcement of the this upcoming testnet I’d expect there to be over 300 nodes and its not even a consumer product yet with all the one-click node install or client install. Once those things exist I’d expect over 10 to 100 times that from the people in this forum alone.

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