Introducing our latest White Paper and… Autonomi

Hi All,

As you’ll have gathered from the roadmap, and the recent excitement on the forum and in Discord we are pleased to share with you today the latest version of our network white paper!

VIEW THE WHITEPAPER HERE

You will continue to see more communication around it as well as some further iterations, as we go through the various phases, including beta and then on to the rocketship itself! So keep an eye out for those… and of course we’ll let you know as any new sections are added, or further detail dropped in. As well as further, and more specific, documentation to complement it too.

Our aim as always, is to be as open and transparent as possible—agreeing with our early community members, that substance should always be more important than the marketing sizzle.

That said, we still need that sizzle! So we are sharing a taste of that today too… Introducing you to our network’s new brand: Autonomi

We hope Autonomi not only connects to our future but also demonstrates a fundamental link to what the network has always been.

I know for some of you, it will feel a little strange saying goodbye to SAFE, but I hope, as things roll out across those phases you’ll feel it reflects the mission, the value, and what this technology we’ve all championed for so long will do for people.

As you can imagine, after 18 years, there are many platforms and considerations (including the product itself) to work through! We will be starting with the key touch points for new folks, like X/Twitter, LinkedIn, and of course Discord.

(We’ll make sure to reference MaidSafe, and the Safe Network, on those established platforms for continuity, and clarity of course.)

We will also soon begin using the brand in advertising, as well as for conversations with partners, and key opinion leaders. And of course, as you would expect with the launch later this year, exchanges too!

I believe @Rachel will be posting a link tomorrow to capture any questions on the White Paper, we will make sure to gather these together ahead of the stages so we can address them together on Tuesday.

Chat to you all soon.

Jim

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first haha xD

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Im (a) number 2!!!

Toodeloo the noo - off to cook dinner

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The name is interesting. Not too bad, but at four syllables, I’m gonna shorten it. I think others will too.

Okay, second glance, maybe not. I was pronouncing it weirdly when I first saw it … now I get how it’s pronounced and it flows off my tongue much better.

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Am I last again? :wink: So I wasn’t wrong yesterday:

It’s very good! :point_left: :ok_hand: :blush:


No Safe, no wave.

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‘this currency is referred to as ‘network token(s)’’ → Autonomi Network Tokens = ANTs

Ha! Love it! :smiley:

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Yes thumbs :+1: to the white paper, and ANTs, clever. Love it, the ball just keeps rolling. Great work all!

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Subdivision names?:
Milants (1/1000)
Micrants (1/1,000,000)
Nanants (1/1,000,000,000)

Edit: Just letting my imagination go a bit here …
@JimCollinson – perhaps you can do a video humming Henri Manici’s Pink Pather theme … nanant, nanant; nanant-nanant-nanant-nanant

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This is a great read so far, with good emphasis/repeated statements on the key areas.

50% of the storage emissions will be distributed over a period of 16 years, while 90% will be distributed in approximately 53 years

I’m a bit confused by this vs the diagram with 70% over 30 years:

They allow buyers to pre-purchase native Nework tokens ahead of launch

Minor typo: Nework = Network

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Just caught the edit in the video, changing “shaped by us” and “controlled by us” to “shaped by you” and “controlled by you”. Good call.

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So if you download a copy, you’ll gain personal autonomy … and a personal copy of Autonomi :laughing:

There may be a marketing slogan in there somewhere.

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Noting typos:

kets
throughput of its close group
price lowers (price reduces?)
the network (is not always capitalised)
4,294,967,296 (232) → 2^32
subdivided 109 times → 10^9

I think this could be rephrased to read better: And with the underlying content addressable network and only requiring validation (rather than consensus) for data storage, the larger the network the more operations it can handle concurrently.

I noted other possible changes but stopped making them partway through as I’m not sure they would be wanted or acted on. So I’ll leave them out for now along with factual questions - only one!

Overall I think it is a very well written WP, pitched perfectly, well structured and understandable - although I read it as someone familiar with everything here so maybe not the best person to judge all that. Anyway, I like what you’ve achieved here.

:clap: and thank you everyone. I know how much work something like this involves.

EDIT: adding my sole question, or area I don’t understand here:

I’m confused by the “emissions”. AFAIK this isn’t implemented yet so presumably is at some stage of design. But what I am unsure about is how you can say the 30% is issued in a single genesis, and that there are also 70% emissions. Is it just phrasing? If the emissions mechanism hasn’t been designed yet these questions seem undecided. If it has, please can we see how you get to a single genesis for all tokens and emit 70% of them over time. There’s also the question of how this happens without 70% of tokens sitting around somewhere open to attack. I think I asked about that a while ago and was assured it was ok, and would be answered in the WP but it isn’t.

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YES, TylerAbeoJordan! This blockhead pronounced it wrong too. It was the “i” at the end that dorked me up. Once I exited the cave and put my club down to focus, I pronounced it “autonomy,” and the light bulb FINALLY went off. Reminds me of an old boy-scout chanting ritual I did while walking around a campfire as part of an initiation. Will save that story for the Friends of Autonomi Summit gathering when we all converge at the appointed meeting place. :sunglasses:

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“Autonomi is able to combine the spare capacity of connected devices - anything from old consumer PCs on desks and small devices like Raspberry Pis to leftover racks in a data centre to create a new form of globally accessible infrastructure, that can be utilised by anyone.”

I noticed there was no mention of personal phones in the list of targeted devices in the WP. Was this just an oversight or should something more be read into it?

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Well, it’s just an indicative list… people could try anything! And down the line I can see mobile devices playing a part, but not out of the gate.

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When we had elders and adults there was some promotions systems with penalty for each outage. Is it there something similar ?
How long you have to be offline to be consider for the network incapable and they replicate your data to another nodes ?

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Very nice read! With a killer comparison table :skull:

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I’ve just read the whole paper and as a long-term supporter of the project here are my thoughts:

I generally like, that it is written in an accessible style and it’s clear that the emphasis was to give a basic understanding of the concept for a broad audiance. I think one of the brilliant things about the Bitcoin whitepaper is, that it found a good compromise between keeping it accessible and covering key technical aspects. In my opinion the latter is missing in this whitepaper. To be honest, I think the paper above would be a perfect content for the website’s how-to section, but from a whitepaper I expect to have a standalone paper which self-sufficiently explains technical key aspects in a neutral (scientific) language.

Things I like:

  • General content structure
  • Accessible explainations

Things I dislike:

  • “Sloppy” phrases like “something similar to DBC”
  • Mentioning of projects like Ethereum, etc.
  • That it’s hosted on Notion :stuck_out_tongue:

Points that are not covered (sufficiently):

  • Free payments: “all payments are just like any other data on the Network, payments can be made without transaction fees”. This is confusing to me. My understanding is, that you need to pay a one-time fee for each write action. If payments are treated like other data, shouldn’t this payment then also occur?
  • Payment spam prevention: If no fee is applied, how does the network prevent spam payments?
  • Incentive for adding storage / nodes: It’s mentioned multiple times, that increased prices will incentivize adding resources to the network. On the other hand it states, that all nodes are paid equally (regardless of their provided resources) to prevent centralization of storage. To me this sounds, like it incentivizes someone to run as many nodes as possible on one machine / and or data center. To prevent this you would need to have a mechanism to detect and prevent multiple nodes on one machine / IP in order to still reach the goal of decentralization, but this is not covered at all how this is done, or am I missing something?
  • Payments architecture: I understand all payments are traced via a huge DAG. How is this stored / distributed on the network and throughout the groups? How does the double spending prevention work? I think we need more details here with concrete examples e.g. how groups communicate such verification requests and how the DAG is utilized. When I think about DAGs I think about IOTAs scaling issues and how they had to implement pruning techniques, because the DAG was growing so fast and became unusable on small devices.
  • Consensus: How is consensus reached 1. within a group and 2. inbetween groups? A communication schema regarding the DAG would be helpful here imo.
  • Burn mechanism: Only a short paragraph that leaves more questions than it answers. Who is in control of the burn mechanism. Can this be utilized by everyone (e.g. choose to burn their tokens?) In which scenarios will this be used, by whom etc.? Should be covered in more detail as it obviously has potentially a huge impact on token prices.

Slightly off-topic but also kinda relevant, as token distribution is mentioned in the paper: There was a Maidsafe Loan Scheme" offer in 2019 which granted 150% token returns to participants giving a loan to MaidSafe in form of MaidSafeCoins. Payment was scheduled “somewhere” after network launch. As the paper mentions coin / share distributions I’m just wondering from there these coins will come from. E.g. Network royalities pool? Coins still held by MaidSafe? Maybe also relevant, how many coins MaidSafe is planning to hold throughout launch.

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Good thought. We have an Android version of our fast storage controller on the shelf, needs a re-spin. IMNSHO getting Autonomi to work on Mobile with either Android or Apple will only work if you have more durable add-in flash media, (we did a lot of testing the recent past and, it sucked ;/ ) and either mobile OS will need to have a decent Kernel Module with in memory flash translation to handle embedded storage and stab in flash storage, which means running all the i/o handling via io_uring for writes, reads, gc, defrag and wear levelling. The latest phones have the core and thread count and clock speed no question, to operate in memory however the add’l cost is 1GB RAM per TB of storage to get this to work properly and you end up using about 20% of the CPU core/clock/thread budget with sustained writes to flash.

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