Agreed, Safecoin is the way to get the idea to the masses, adoption rate determined by chosen demographic. My initial thought without thorough market research would be the female population and their dedication to a bright economic future for the family.
SAFEcoin will likely not sell the network to techies for sure, they will follow like sheep once success is real for their peers, just human nature. Might take a big player to start name dropping, thats why I was suggesting Maidsafe approach a big browser company with a heads upā¦get them interested.
Definitely donāt want to see Safecoin promoted as an investment, but rather as an economy.
The move to partner with an educational institution in Scotland was an excellent one, we can see the enthusiasm that those Brisbane students broughtā¦are you still there guys?
But it IS the time when the attention of developers and implementers who can help bring to a functional state, with real apps that will then make the public grab, including safecoin wallet implementations, multi-sig contract apps, etc.
It is not time for the broad public yet. If we excite some, they come, what do they find. Only a few will be like you and me.
Not saying that we shouldnāt talk about it and answer questions, do articles, podcasts, interviews, etc. Itās just time to push to get the geeks who can see involved and helping make it happen.
Iām sure that the broad marketing is being considered, but canāt be activated till we at least have a stable network in beta (minimum) with at least test-safecoin that might then turn into real safecoin, or not. When it is easy enough for people like me (yes, even for me itās not easy enough to do much messing with yet) and others who know even less, then itās time to uncork the broad push.
Now, we need more geeks. The ones who can grasp the network as a whole and start exploiting its potentials.
My thoughts are for the recognition of an economic āSafecoin Network (safecoin.io)ā and itās technical counterpart āSafenetworkā
There should be no reason that pace of development should prevent the formation of a Safecoin community and the potential for more female involvement due to the pervasiveness of PR within business in general. Females are dominant in the Public Relations industry and their involvement could be a big boost for the project overall.
Safecoin Network: Focusing on all aspects of business, trade, commerce etc
Safenetwork: Focused on development and all things technical.
The business opportunities that SAFE will provide need to be recognized asap, those with foresight will grasp the chance and start to develop ābig pictureā plans in preparation.
I think this is a good article. It articulates the technical risk facing Maid and once these are de risked the market will do a 180 degree turn on itās appreciation of Maid.
I wonder if MAID had an extra $100 million to use, whether it would accelerate development schedule. IPFS appears to be the main competitor and blockchain is said to be a world changing technology. I imagine they will grab a lot of market share if they launch within 18 months.
Definitely too early to start marketing to the masses. All decentralised projects and cryptos are still at the āinnovatorsā stage, the exception being Bitcoin which I guess may have just about sneaked into āearly adoptersā by now.
Agree. Iām not convinced they are not interested in SafeCoin, but I would say itās not the prime motivating force. Thinking about how to get more of them on board I wonder if something like this could work:
MaidSafe offers a small amount of MAID for each new forum member who creates a website on Alpha 2, subject to restrictions. This would have two effects:
It would show people how easy it is to create a safe:// site;
It would get them invested in MAID, albiet in a small way.
The restrictions would be:
Have to join the forum as a new member and reach Trust Level 1;
Have to read a short background article on the project and answer a few simple questions on āHow Tosā;
Have to be verifiably unique (email address / IP address);
Have to create a safe:// site and post it on the forum;
A time restriction - Iām thinking this would run for a couple of weeks.
We could also have a bigger prize for the best site.
What would success look like? Well if say 100 people got involved and 2 or 3 interested devs stuck around and worked on other projects and/or spread the word that would be great. We could publish details of the best sites here and publicise them via Twitter and Reddit, then if it works out the exercise could be repeated to increase momentum.
Difficulties that spring to mind are that it would probably have to be administered manually (unless someone can think of a way of automating it), that entrants would have to set up a wallet (eg Omniwallet) to recieve their MAID and would need some Bitcoin in there first, and that there would likely be complaints to deal with due to non-arrival or late arrival of MAID etc.
This certainly needs more thinking through, but how does it sound as a concept? , or
Itās an interesting idea and worthy of consideration, Iām just wondering what then? How do we hold their attention after they have run the alpha, created their site and received their MAID. If there were more apps they could use and potentially with persistent data it would possibly be easier to keep them engaged? Maybe is not a case of if we do this, but maybe more a matter of timing. I do like the idea though.
On the messaging subject I think we will have different message focus for different audiences. So while I see most groups being interested in safecoin, the focus of developers for example may be the network and the functionality then can access via the APIs. Thus far tech journalists and technologists have been more interested in the network itself, but we me need to focus on safecoin to get more attention from traders. Horses for courses.
Not bad. Not bad at allā¦I like the idea, although I do think that you will attract a lot of people who arenāt genuinly interested in the network, just the MAID. (And only if thereās enough MAID to gain/win)
Plus, the restrictions would kill a lot of the initial motivation I guess. And you donāt want this to be a party for just the current forum-members.
Lastly, you want people to fully see and understand the possibilities of the network when making a website. I donāt see how you can achieve that (now, as is). If there is a way to achieve this, then I indeed think that letting people experience it for themselves, (whether or not it is combined with a MAID-incentive) would be the best way to get people interested .
Thanks for the link. For anyone with any doubt that simple blockchain based file store is sufficient to tempt enterprise applications over should read this. This is big boy stuff which needs a proper, scalable, secure, well designed platform. Anyone who thinks hacking together something together in a few months sorely misunderstands the scope of the requirements.
Moreover, the huge 100m+ fund raisers to achieve something basic is a sort of bubbly, vanity, madness. That would be a team of 1000s of skilled engineers working for many years on the thing (certainly by global salary standards). Give me a small, humble, skilled team lead by visionaries instead any day!
Agree 100% with this. Alpha 2 is a great platform for devs already and Java bindings will help enormously too in attracting enterprise level devs and CTOs over. It may still be a little too soon for the less thrusting businesses, but this Is a war of mindshare and getting spare dev time spent on safe net instead of blockchain is important.
As for general public, definitely not ready yet. Even the average crypto enthusiast doesnāt get maidsafe or safe net. They canāt grok the time scales, nor why it needs to be so complex - they just want it to work already and make them a crypto millionnaire.
Ofc, we should welcome enthusiasts here with open arms, but marketing to them probably wonāt work. It doesnāt hurt to seed those who are technically minded and have some vision too though.
200,000,000 is a huge number. An average dev gets around a $50,000 salary in Europe and less outside of it (and US ofc). Run the maths - 4,000 devs for a year or 1000 for 4 years. Netflix has about 3,500 employees, so even assuming they are similarly paid, it gives a sense of scale - 200m is a huge amount of money for a blockchain project and it may drown them.
People must remember that we are living in dot com style madness with some of these project. Money is literally being thrown at stuff, whether it needs or deserves it. This is not normal and not needed to build successful projects, IMO (unqualified opinion, but still!).
ā¦ the huge 100m+ fund raisers to achieve something basic is a sort of bubbly, vanity, madness.
Mental picture: warm air lifting roofs for those dollars to join a damp swirl? Maybe start giving them alternate boy/girl names like they do for hurricanes.
I think these huge sums of money will kill many projects. Teams can scale too quickly (adding the wrong type of resource in the wrong place), it can attract advisors whose motivations are mis aligned with the founders (money vs vision) and in some cases the core team can lose their motivation if the project/company awards too much to a founding team.
Personally at our stage I donāt see having a huge amount more resources would get us through the next few alphas any quicker, in fact I think that adding more people and resource at this point would only slow us down.
I may be wrong but I believe that many app developers may be silent about their projects because until they can get a lockdown on their domain and know it will persist they put their app at risk exposing it too soon. Again I might be wrong there but I also see that as a particular moment in time to take advantage of momentum. If marketing was scaled up and pushed out around the time of persistent data (so app developers could secure their DNS) then their could be a wave of new apps, marketing, and momentum. I think the tools for easy development and some Maidsafe Ltd apps should be ready for this moment in time as well.
Yes, timing is everything. Not sure what a dealbreaker persistent data would be, but I get your point that there needs to be something to see. No point in doing it til the necessary basics are in place or it will alientate more people than it attracts.
For sure. In fact most would be like that, but Iām not thinking about a huge amount of MAID, just a token amount to attract attention and get people to the first stage.
Everyone loves free money. Where I work we run lots of market research surveys, and itās amazing what a difference offering a Ā£2 voucher per survey makes over a prize draw. Those who are really not interested would be put off by the TL1 requirements, while at the other end of the scale those who are interested and skilled will be easy to spot and could be encouraged to hang around and at the very least become active forum members.
And you donāt want this to be a party for just the current forum-members.
No Iām thinking it would just be for new forum members.
It would be a cost-benefit equation really as it would be a hassle to administer, but then again it could attract a good deal of attention/publicity and hopefully pull in some skilled developers who would see enough to want to take it further.
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or 
Nick said the S word