I find this very interesting and it makes more sense if you want to stay true to truly distributed systems. But I imagine that would require new hardware that would likey be unaffordable as it wouldn’t be adopted on a massive scale as say a power company and how many would likely participate? But! Then again I see with what researcher guy said is that it would be competitive to have more efficient appliances etc and would probably accelerate innovation in those areas and hopefully smart meters and then eventually be able to do as you said. Unless there is an ad hoc solution which is a high probability as well. Thoughts?
This is a feature of electricity all by itself. It automatically flows through the path of least resistance. The only difference here is how it is billed. Under this plan, everyone in that local last leg of the grid sees the same prices, whether they’re changing up, down or staying stable. If your neighbor demands an extra load that you end up sourcing, your electrons will go to him/her and he/she will pay the bill that you receive, minus the distribution overhead. That last part is the (very small) cut the local power company gets for maintaining the physical grid connections. If a nearby neighborhood demands power that you source, your cut will be also minus the interconnect equipment (and it’s losses) at the substation connecting the two of you. And as you can imagine, if you two are separated by 100 miles of transmission lines, 3 substations, and 4 transformer switch stations (much more losses), your cut will be even smaller.
The only ‘correction’ needed above is the assumption of any “fixed” price. The price is wildly variable at a very rapid rate and only settles down to less variability when the players all become acclimated to predicting where that price will trend and when. Fortunately, the billing model can be implemented in a virtual market first to allow those predictions to settle things down before actual billing is switched over. 
Actually, this is not centralized at all. This is completely dependent on end user devices to participate in never-ending, ad-hoc price negotiations. They just don’t “bid” and “ask” or anything. Every time they see a price, they decide to change their behavior or not which instantly affects the entire local grid. If it was a mistake (because someone else made a bigger change), they can opt to undo or just live with it.
For the grid operators, it wouldn’t require any new hardware to manage this system. The only difference is they need to convert all their user “grid statuses” to a variable price and put it to a URL and then configure their smart meters to watch that price as it accumulates their monthly bill. For switching power at all levels, they already have one guy watching that load and calling for more or less demand at every second of the day. This just allows him to automate his duties.
Regarding the new hardware required to make a dumb appliance smart, there’s two fronts. Some people in the home automation market are already putting that capability in major appliances while home DIY guys are using Arduinos to do it from Excel. This is the level where Maidsafe could assist in statistics gathering (from nearby grids, from regional transmission lines, from weather info on renewables, from fuel prices) to foster better and better predictions while still keeping one’s personal algorithms private. After all, you gain the most by your predictions being the best in comparison to your peers, right?
Regarding how many would participate, anyone who can save/earn enough money to justify the expense. As options open up, that pool will soon include just about everyone.
1 Like
This all sounds related to how safecoin farming rewards and an exchange could work - maybe the 2 things could be married somehow? Just a thought
I’m not familiar with that. Could you elaborate?
Sorry, just thinking out loud really, I’m not a coder. The automatic system you outline for generating price for electricity, reminded me of a thread on here discussing possible Safecoin farming rewards and exchange rate mechanisms - it just appeared some ideas/inspiration/connections could be made. As I said I’m not technical, so just throwing it out there.
This also leads me to think about paying for connectivity with Safecoin, as there has been talk of making phones/apps etc. I think @EmergentBehavior may be thinking along similar lines to me in another thread (not sure).
Anyway, there is something called Firechat that connects people near to each other to the internet. I thought at first this would have limited use but then realised that this all changes if they work with the ISP/phone networks and it is pre-installed. I think they’ve paired up with Google and Apple. A Maidsafe version of this tied to providers, automatically paying in Safecoin would be really great.
Just thinking out loud with no technical ability as I say.
2 Likes
On the other thread I was talking about having consumer products that basically abstract away the details of various projects (mine, MaidSafe, etc.) and use the cryptocurrency generated by our projects to either pay the consumer directly (in the currency of their choice) or offset/entirely pay for other services. More advanced users could have these boxes run specific projects they want to support, run multiple projects (if feasible), etc.
I tried FireChat in NYC, on a subway, etc. and was never able to find local peers.
Edit: such devices could even automatically handle taxes on crypto-income in the geographic area they happen to be in, so entirely worry-free.
I did create a project called eboxit, it was #1 in downloads.com in 1 day. This could convert any device into a fully capable internet application provider (it had mail, word proccessor, spreadsheet as well as all the vpn, firewall,smtp, imap,pop services etc.). It can happen again but similar to what you are looking at I think. But …
It did this without crypto (you bought your hardware and got all the services just for being on the network) but included a ton of stuff. My take away is that over http, or even tcp / udp alone etc. is incorrect, this is why we have decided on a solution that is ground up starting with reliable udp. You really need to control the whole thing and never ever let http smtp etc. near it as they are all based on a server based model and that leads to owners of servers etc. it gets very messy, so the ground level protocol requires the ability to NAT hole punch and more, otherwise you also end up with servers or users who have to mess with router forwarding etc.
It is important to have a reliable data transfer protocol that can connect peers reliably in a peer to peer network and that means hole punching reliable communications like tcp but cannot be tcp. It cannot be udp either as its unreliable. So the key is to start at that level, it is hugely important.
that leads to requiring a reliable dht with security, then on top of that you can provide services like data storage, communications, in fact anything you can imagine.
Then eboxit type innovation can happen again and I think this is what these boxes would be like.
6 Likes
eBoxit sounds nifty! I do agree there needs to be an evolution in the protocols used but I think there also need to be products that are able work with existing technologies as well (and ideally can adapt to new protocols as they are stabilized).
1 Like
I just cannot see how having data on two systems does not fall back to the privacy being reduced to the worst of the two. To me its a chain and weakest link. i.e. if we went from SAFE message->smtp then the info leaked (even only metadata) is more than enough to begin tracking and lose privacy.
I think this is a deep area, but valid, if we stored even encrypted chunks on dropbox for instance then we radically reduce the privacy of the data, maybe not so much the security (logical), but we do lose all physical security. This to me is a crucial aspect and we have debated it over the years and can always find sharing sate in two system regardless how little reduces the security and/or privacy to the lowest system.
2 Likes
I’m more saying that things won’t change overnight, not that Safe should use older protocols (in the same way integrating Bitmessage with traditional e-mail kind of defeats the purpose). The services would work separately but could share the same hardware.
Yes I see hardware sharing with process separation (docker etc.) as a definite possibility for sure, sorry I missed your point a bit there 
2 Likes
Though the resistance to this could be that legacy systems are not like this stuff (MaidSafe). The point may be that even though you have some kind of encrypted messaging system and it’s peer to peer; yet it is still out in the open and therefore snoopable. and easily. [quote=“dirvine, post:50, topic:1522”]
To me its a chain and weakest link. i.e. if we went from SAFE message->smtp then the info leaked (even only metadata)
[/quote]
even a meta data is enough to make your stuff no longer viable. And this is where the problem lies. I know I will use TestNet 2 to the maximum that I can ignoring as much as possible legacy systems; and also I invite anyone to interact there. I’d even prefer it to the forum 
1 Like
Well that’s why ideally these potential products should be highly configurable. I’m sure there are many folks here that would choose to only run MaidSafe on the boxes, though I might run other projects on my box too 
What about the hardware that’s been created already as part of the Open Source Ecology Project?
In particular I’m thinking of the power cube and associated devices. All of that is federated. Federated hardware means it can be integrated with other devices. Literally create a decentralized power node that can generate, store, transmit and manage power. Then attatch the note’s “input” port to a generator of some kind and it’s “output” port to a battery and perhaps attatch an interface of some kind and off you go.
1 Like