I am considering building a news style blog/magazine.
I want to get an idea how large we think SAFE will become in the first years. In general. Not specifically users of the network or the coin but generally interested in the technology or anything related. In other words, how many people might read the website and subscribe? Is what I am trying to gauge.
This forum has about 8.6k users. But only a few hundred regular active users. I consider these folks probably the die hard enthusiasts. From podcast metrics, reddit and Medium I gather this is probably somewhat accurate, a few thousand people globally interested and a few hundred active participants. Investors or traders in the currency probably reflect the same a few thousand either invested or traded historically but only few hundred regularly trade.
remember right now its diehard enthusiasts that want to watch a project develop over years. Pretty soon with Fleming we will have a real product with use cases in the immediate right now. When that happens it gets hard to predict but it could potentially balloon really fast if the tech catches on due to people saying hey this really improves my life.
I want to get an idea how large we think SAFE will become in the first years. In general. Not specifically users of the network or the coin but generally interested in the technology or anything related.
I put 30000+. The world is screaming for this technology. You can read pleas on tech sites with million+ readership. The second SAFE has a working example to point at, the “generally interested in this technology or anything related” will easily exceed that.
If however you were interested in a smaller “in group” that is interested to the point of actively participating in a SAFE community, I still think that 30000+ is conservative for “a couple years” after an MVP.
Basically I’m looking at it from the angle that it’d be a SAFE network dedicated news/magazine style of website. The reason I said Generally interested in this technology or anything related is because the hypothetical website will publish articles about privacy, security, cryptocurrency, technology etc.
However I am also a realist and for me the beginnings with something like this and a limited budget means it is somewhat relient on the goodwill of the die hard enthusiasts plus some to read, subscribe, share and maybe even contribute articles.
I personally think that number sits in the 1-5k range for about the first year. Once that base is built with regular readers and subscriber numbers growing those other interested parties begin to visit with more generic but still related articles being written.
Can the use-cases be listed? I’m unsure if Fleming counts as just another testnet or not … as it seems updating without resetting won’t come until Maxwell, so Fleming at some point will go away as opposed to just transitioning into Maxwell. At least that how I understand things, someone please explain if I’m wrong.
Have a talk to Sotros25. At the last Meetup, she indicated there were a couple of developers who had never heard of SafeNet. Suggest you brainstorm how to identify and throw the hook out to this population given existing mechanisms didn’t work. What the hell do they read or see is the question.
listing the hooks available at any point in time would also be helpful: Some ideas:
farming (attract farmers - attract miners in other crypto’s over to farming - we’ll need a real network coin for this, so won’t happen until post-Maxwell),
apps - at any point in development there will be various apps available and hence a certain crowd to target for each app.
storage - IMO, Fleming may be unstable for this, so I don’t think we can market this right away, Maxwell should bring stability and but without a real network coin I don’t know if we’ll have permanent storage at this point.
concept - we can always market the network concepts to developers and I think this is the only solid direction to go in for the time being. Everyone else will want a solid product.
Perhaps communication apps on the network might come available in Fleming, and these could be marketed in terms of having easy to use secure communication.
Any others?
I wanted to clarify all of this as I think it would be detrimental to growth long term, if we promise what isn’t yet available … I’m not a marketer though and don’t really know what all the dynamics are.
Might also be good to think about timeframes here too.
My current thinking is that Fleming is in early 2020; Maxwell late 2020; and hopefully full network with real coin in 2021. I’ve been wrong multiple times before.
I think David said after Fleming the key work is/are Network Restarts and Upgrades. Your guess is as good as mine but the recent Capital raising seems to indicate 12 months minimum and 18 months maximum to MVP launch.
My take is MVP in 2020 at the earliest and 2022 at the latest. I don’t view the latest re-organization and funding effort as bad for delivering the network “soon”, but quite the contrary. I think the development team sees the finish line and is putting in the final push to get there. While there can and will always be new challenges, the pace of progress has only continued to accelerate.
If it takes until 2025, this project will be officially dead. Whether it’s better, greater, more useable or whatever, there will be too many other products to use by then and this will have taken 20 years! to deliver.
I agree and it needs to be easy for developers to just pick up and plug into. The good news is the new API that Josh and Gabriel are exposing is far more simple than even the previous (I am told). David and the team know how close they are and the time sensitivity which is why, on top of the need to get to profitability, we see this massive push. We’ve seen more progress in the last three months even with thinning of the team than we have in the last three years. Big things needed to be done and a big team was required but now it’s each team members drive of seeing how close launch is, a positive and supportive community, Nadia’s excellent planning, and David’s leadership that is letting this pick up speed. It’s coming folks. I think @Josh made a pretty darn good prediction though we know these things are hard to predict.
I suppose my only concern is, we need real Safecoin for Maidsafe and third party app devs to be profitable and draw more interest (after API’s, proper documentation, and examples of course). If we get a test Safecoin that is carried over from Maxwell to launch then we’ll be fine. If we have to wait for network upgrades and restarts then people may start moving on.
Fleming in my eyes is our new Alpha 2 but with true decentralization and all the bells and whistles. We get to develop with more flexible data types, easier API’s, test Safecoin (that probably won’t carry over I’m guessing) to show how the new digital economy will work, and a chance to see Maidsafe lay the foundation in the new world of apps that will access and take advantage of all these new features. Fleming is nothing to scoff at so I hope the world at large will find it as interesting and promising as we do.
Well I can’t list all of them cause I doubt I thought of them all. I do agree it does not include permeant archives. Think like news media though. You have a video that will have relevance for a short window and maybe theres like a boob in it or something. Some reason you can’t show it on youtube. Or speaking of boobs maybe you just wana share some porn. I mean in less you are in love with those hoes I think its good enough to just have it up for a little while to be enjoyed.
Anyways my point is there are still some types of data that Fleming would provide a useful mechanism for sharing short term if that’s the lifespan of the data anyways.
This is why I think for me as a non Dev it’s so important to get the word out. The more people find out about, they come here, their interested, they ask questions and many have gone into development.
So you see, we all have roles to play. I know from just a little forum post @neo followed the bread crumbs and came here.
If folks sit idly by waiting for this to take shape… I don’t know what to say. We all need to do whatever it is we can with whatever smarts, know how, time and resources we have.
At the end of the day though, while you’re correct, it’s hard to promote something that doesn’t exist and then whether fair or not people find out that this has been in progress for 13-14 years. I guess my point is while I believe and think this will come together, if product doesn’t start getting delivered quickly from here on out this will die the ultimate death. At some point you can’t cover up that there is no network. I’ve seen people point to Amazon, Apple ect. and how long it took them to gain huge ground. The difference was that from day one Amazon sold books and Apple sold computers. So you didn’t wait 15 years to see if they even had a product. I honestly think there is very little the community can do to promote at this point.
