Honesty, as an end-user is there something I can do right now with SAFE?
1 Like
PT sounds there a bit disingenuous - same goes for Bitcoin: if its not decentralised, then its not… hmm. Also he seems not to understand xor space distance. Seems like cheap cynicism from someone heavily invested in his interest. If everyone was a neghead, nothing would get done.
Anyhow ignoring the video… to the question.
as an end-user is there something I can do right now with SAFE?
You could invoke your artist inner self on safe://thewall or you could upload a website to test the limits of your creative capability… learn yourself javascript and make a contribution to what will eventually become something that coach potatoes can do stuff with.
tldr; SAFE is still moving through Alpha… see the roadmap for when it’ll become useful to end users. Right now it’s for devs, investors of all kinds to shape this new something.
2 Likes
Todd’s example (the Google attack) is old but fair comment, at least on the face of it. But without running the numbers it is meaningless (for example he suggests Google could be supplying almost all the space/vaults of SAFE and then turn it off without considering what that would entail and how likely that is compared to, say an asteroid destroying the planet). Well, what if one miner supplied all the mining power for bitcoin, and then went bankrupt, or was shut down by the Chinese… Until you work through such scenarios they are just groundless negging. It’s a long time (years) since I asked him to work through his Google attack on reddit, but he wouldn’t.
4 Likes
With all respect to Peter Todd (he does impressive work in my opinion), I think his Google-intern attack scenario is a bit silly.
Lets assume that the network has grown to a decent size. I think that’s fair because all open decentralised network designs rely on scale for security. If an intern would do this, there’s no way that intern would be able to commandeer that much capacity, especially bandwidth, without it being noticed quickly. Remember that due to XOR routing SAFE uses considerably more bandwidth than the client-server model.
If it were not an intern but actual Google policy, it is fair to assume they have a profit motive and are smart about it. Providing so much capacity that Google could overtake virtually the entire network would result in farming rewards of virtually zero long before that would happen, so Google would be making a loss and would rationally stop adding capacity when they break even. (I contest the notion that because of spare capacity their cost is zero, because computers draw more power and experience faster wear and tear when the hardware is burdened. In addition, since users still need to be served Google would still use plenty of bandwidth.)
So this would only be a problem I believe if Google would purposefully attack SAFE and are willing to run losses to destroy it. That doesn’t seem very likely, as when SAFE would still be small it would not be important enough to do so, and when it’d be big enough to be that important, it would wreak havoc for companies and individuals all over the world and even Google would be in serious trouble. It would definitely be considered a cyber attack at public infrastructure.
11 Likes
I would also add that we’re not claiming to have a currency without consensus, but we are claiming consensus without a blockchain. This seems a fundamental point and it has been explained a few times, including on this post in a lot of detail.
I think however we should be encouraged by the fact that people continue to bring up the SAFE Network and some scepticism is to be expected at our stage, hopefully not for too much longer though.
23 Likes
Google could also abuse their massive infrastructure to disrupt bitcoin mining. They could also filter the traffic at their fibre backbones. They could also blow up all their datacenters at the same time and bring down the internet with it. The scenario he describes is far fetched.
I think it’s more likely that the chinese mining cartel will at some point be screwed by regulations and/or the great firewall.
5 Likes