I’m a GNOME developer and recently got very interested in MaidSafe. Being a FOSS community, there has been a lot of talk about privacy and security in the GNOME community, especially after Snowden revelations. However, we still depend on online third party services to provide a connected user experience. We do like to depend only on FOSS-based services and that IMO is a good step forward, but it still doesn’t enable complete privacy and security for our users. So I think SAFE can play a big role here.
Realizing that, I submitted a lightning talk (they are a series of 4-5 minute talks) about MaidSafe to our upcoming annual conference, GUADEC. I can’t fit a lot in that time so idea is simply to introduce the project to GNOME community and get people interested/intrigued about MaidSafe. I would appreciate any or all idea about what you think I should cover in this small introduction.
If there is enough interest, I’ll try to get the conference folks get one of the MaidSafe team members invited for a keynote next year.
Have you seen this video?
You could do a lot worse than simply playing that at your audience and answering what questions you can and fielding the ones you cannot handle over to here.
Or summarising the contents of the video in your own words.
Also emphasize that proximity in XOR space is totally unrelated to geographical proximity for a network of more than a few dozen nodes that are themselves in diverse locations. Remember that each node can be carrying out different roles at any time - as a manger of some sort and/or simply as a vault. This is directly analogous to ants who may swap roles as food collectors, sentries, garbage collectors etc depending on the chemical signals they receive from other ants returning to the nest.
Because I cant find the link right now, some kind person will doubtless link you to an excellent TED talk regarding ants that explains this most succinctly.
Self-Encryption is quite magic. People “log on” to a decentralized network. Their username and PIN (+ salt etc.) will provide people with a personal file. Their password will unlock it. In that file there’s extra encryption keys and a data-atlas to find all the other files. But the software will do all in the background, so users actually feel if they log on to a network just like the old internet. No wallets to be stored locally, never give your password to become member of a SAFE-site or App. All is in that personal file. All nicely in the background.
SAFEcoin is consensus without a blockchain. It can be used for micro-payments as well. It will even allow thousands of transactions per second without the whole network needs to process every transaction. And all without transaction cost. It’s like digital cash, which you transfer from person A to person B.
DNS … Decentralized Name System I think this is also quite magic. So no longer you send coins to some very big and weird address, you just send coins to “Zeenix”. Same for mail/messaging. In the network people register their name and the software will use these good old addresses in the background.
Cache … When a lot of people request the same file (Gangnam Style!) due to caching the encrypted Chunks, the video will load quite faster (less HOPS).
Yeah, I think I have seen that video before. Thanks for making sure though.
I can’t simply play a video or answer questions actually. As I said, it’s a very short talk so no time for questions. Since its a series of unrelated quick talks, usually you have to submit your slides on a pdf beforehand so video might not be a possibility. I can however, take notes from it.
@BenMS Shoudl be able to help there, he has some slides probably OK for a lightening talk. He is deep into some routing code these few days but will surface soon, well long enough to hate me for putting him forward again
Also consider where to suggest people go to learn more. http://MaidSafe.net is the obvious place, but for a technical audience, the https://safenetwork.wiki/ might be more suitable.
That is a great idea indeed! I think I should mention that towards the end.
Each year we get a bunch of students working on different GNOME projects under the Google Summer of Code umbrella. The GNOME foundation tries to get all students to GUADEC and I believe they would be very much interested in this bounty program of yours. Talking of which:
@dirvine If you are not already doing so, you might want to consider participating in Google summer of code. It’s basically free interns for your project that Google pays for. In other words, a very easy and cheap way of getting new young contributors.
I think this is also quite magic. So no longer you send coins to some very big and weird address, you just send coins to “Zeenix”. Same for mail/messaging. In the network people register their name and the software will use these good old addresses in the background.