Hello everyone, I would like to compile the popular misconceptions that reporters and casual users make when they attempt to research about this project.
It is really frustrating to see these replicated over and over, even when recent efforts have been made to make this information accessible.
I thought that it may be useful to list them to see how to plan a more effective communication strategy, and to have a reference to link to those searching for a quick and dirty answer:
MaidSafe’s SafeNetwork is NOT blockchain based. (Not even indirectly related)
SafeCoin is NOT going to be based on blockchains.
(SafeCoin is going to live on the SafeNetwork, it is an integral part of the network’s security)
The MaidSafeCoin is NOT meant to be the final cryptocurrency of the network.
(It is a proxy token, essentially an IOU for the future SafeCoins for when the network launches.)
The SafeNetwork is NOTjust a decentralized storage cloud.
You can’t even compare it with Dropbox, Google Drive or Mega.
(The SafeNetwork is the internet itself, where you can have convenience of the above mentioned projects and every service on the existing internet, but without servers or companies to serve them. A cloud owned by nobody, and accessible only by you. A network that doesn’t need companies to maintain it, but a network that maintains itself.)
SafeNetwork is not equivalent neither in scope nor design to IPFS, Storj, Sia, Tahoe, I2P, Freenet, TOR.
The SafeNetwork may cover every use case of all those projects combined and beyond.
Clarification: MaidSafe is the company, SafeNetwork is the name of the project.
If you guys find some extra around that is consistently replicated, let me know and I will update this.
First off, I think this list makes for a great FAQ, so thanks for starting it.
Might we amend this to say SAFE is more expansive in scope and design than the other named technologies. “Not equivalent” might lead one to suspect “not on par”, or “less than”.
The reason you find yourself having to explain so often what it’s not is that nobody does even a remotely decent job of succinctly describing what it is.
… and, to reply to myself, most of the other comments are perfect examples of not explaining. Great, it’s a “platform”. What the hell does that mean? It’s the “new paradigm of the Internet”. No clue what that means either. It’s “more expansive in scope”… well in what way?
How about just listing the major services it provides in one sentence? “The SAFE network is a decentralized peer to peer system that provides services X, Y, and Z and is planned to provide V and W in the future.”
I do agree that there is room for more consistent and concise branding/marketing at scale, although I do think that MaidSafe is really doing a lot more of this lately. When I host meetups, I use these two graphics to 1) explain what the SAFE Network is and 2) what it will enable as a platform.
I think that the point of calling it a platform is that there is no way to define what V and W will be, and it would be too limiting to narrow the utility to X, Y and Z. Not everything can or should be boiled down into one sentence.
Maybe, but if you don’t describe what it does and how they can use it, then nobody will be interested enough to find out more about it.
And you get about one sentence’s worth of attention. If you can’t make somebody care in one sentence, then you lose, period. “It’s a platform” is not a sentence that will make anybody care. I probably see 4 or 5 vague announcements for new “platforms” every DAY.
This question has already been addressed. For the rest of the presentation from which those slides came, see here (note, this is from 2018; I’ve since updated the slides with new roadmap info, but don’t have my personal laptop with me)
Perhaps you’re a very literal person… That “spaghetti” is the logo for the SAFE Network.
Isn’t MaidSafe (for any chosen capitalisation) two acronyms stuck together? Massive Array of Internet Disks and Secure Access For Everyone? What is the ‘correct’ capitalisation… I dunno!
It’s the ‘new internet’. That’s way more descriptive than ‘platform’. I think platform is not an especially useful description.
There’s actually some flexibility with how to approach this.
The most important thing is just to ensure that spelling is consistent.
I’ve personally been using:
Maidsafe = company name
MaidSafe = non-company reference to project
SAFE Network = the network
For “MaidSafe”: as @mav points out, this is two acronyms stuck together. Normally you’d capitalize acronyms, but in this case it results in a pretty large, visually hefty word: MAIDSAFE. Aside from being an eyefull, there’s nothing to indicate that this is two separate acronyms that have been combined, as opposed to a single long acronym. IMO “MaidSafe” is a good solution to those problems.
At the end of the day, there’s guidance about how to approach these things, but no real hard-and-fast rules we need to worry about. Just need to try to be consistent
Don’t get me wrong, I think this thread is good, but we risk falling into obscurity if we get fixated with definitions that are inward looking. Half of the British population refer to a vacuum cleaner as a Hoover, and a lot of Europe refer to a hand tissue as a Kleenex. Google is the word for search, and Tesla will shortly become the word for electric car.
God only knows how people understand me as I use SAFE, Maid, Maidsafe, safe network, interchangeably.
Ps. Don’t get me even started on a Platform - this is where people, outside this forum, place objects on, or if they can afford it, where people walk to their boats. Let’s work out making sense of PUTs and GETs - which would at least be a start in helping the mainstream understand.
For me the greatest conception or misconception of the Safe Network is ‘Dark Web’. At the Brighton meetup I explained to a member of staff working at the bar why I was here, and she instantly replied - “so you mean Dark Web”. This was also repeated by family members that have no technical knowledge beyond SMS. This will be the single toughest challenge for the Maidsafe people, company, or advocates to justify - long term. There are three options to this from a wider public perspective - 1) own it, perhaps based on a tight definition, but the wider benefits to society are greater. 2) It is completely not - it is a completely different thing. 3) since the Dark Web was created, many years ago, we did not have censorship, data loss, x,y,z, etc, and given that times have changed, society needs another solution. Ps. Aware that this topic is also discussed elsewhere…
