MaidSafe Distributed File System

cleaning out an old drive, I found this pdf of the paper introducing the MaidSafe Distributed File System from 2010.

https://filebin.net/21k4bfuffpqo66v7

Skimming it, I think its pretty much still relevant, what have I missed?

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And then there is this pdf on the Maidsafe take on DHTs, also from 2010

https://filebin.net/h96gu8jnujvs3b17

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This was the reason I first started to follow MaidSafe, I found a link from a variant of UDP as MaidSafe used the technology…

If I remember it got to literally hours before it was to go live and was withdrawn.

12 years later we continue to wait patiently…

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For which we should be grateful. I don’t remember the exact circumstances ^ but launching and failing because of a flawed premise would quite likely have been the death of the project.

Always better to find your own errors before the competition does…

^ I’m thinking this was before the switch to Rust? When the project was using C++ we had literally 10x the lines of code we had a few months after the switch and there have been some quite spectacular simplifications/optimisations since then.
Launching the project then, even if the underlying logic was perfectly sound would have been a security and maintenance nightmare so rather than a missed opportunity, I prefer to look at it as a hail of bullets we dodged.

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I am remembering this correctly, yes?
Or am I exaggerating a bit?
The reduction in LOC was absolutely huge by any standards.

Also at that time, as now, there were many many hackers quite fluent in C++ as opposed to the situation with rust then and to a lesser extent now. Do not underestimate the advantages of security by obscurity as part of the overall security precautions. There are simply fewer competent eyes to scan your code.

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