I’m thrilled to hear this @Traktion, looking forward to the blog already. Great idea
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Likewise - I can get so far with this stuff before eventually hitting a brick wall of my own technical ignorance. But software is @Traktion 's day job - and he can write too. Should be great! 
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Think about how this disrupts Etsy or eBay or Shopify. They can’t stop everyone selling out of their homes and garages. That has always been the power of decentralization. They literally can’t stop it.
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Totally agree on this. I think it’s a common misconception that governments are really competent and vaguely all-powerful - they get away with as much as they can get away with, and private individuals get away with as much as they can get away with, broadly speaking. The law is hammered out somewhere in the middle.
That is the most exciting thing about the Safe Network for me. If all goes well and freedom, security, access for all, high levels of easy anonymity, etc are all won back after years of that stuff being taken away… What kind of mad and fabulous stuff will people come up with? So many of the structures in our world are rigid and stagnating monopolies. Films, music, software, journalism, even things like education. Clinging on cos they are entrenched, not because we couldn’t do better.
Another way of saying what I’m trying to say here is: I see what you are saying @Dimitar, but it could be the case that things seem so grim and void of hope because we are struggling under various genuinely tyrannical pressures. But we have smartphones and the wars we conduct are done for the good of the countries we bomb, so they’re not really wars, thus we live in an enlightened age.
Safe, or something extremely similar, is what we need to win back our privacy and our freedom and see where the old species really is at, in terms of whether we want to barter and such.
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Good presentation. Good to know this stuff is been thought about.
I m pretty sure adoption will happen in a similar way to bitcoin. Illegal activity will be the first kid in town. I know whenever there’s a big boxing/MMA fight on PPV people are sending live stream links left, right and centre. Those links are incredibly unstable and not a good way to watch a fight. Someone’s going to put those on a safe network link and it will be completely stable and impossible to turn off. A big fight like Joshua Vs fury would very quickly have millions of sign ups. That’s just one example and really it’s the tip of the iceberg for early adoption.
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We should consider that Napster was vilified, but ultimately changed the music industry forever. Distributed systems destroy monopolies, especially those seeking rent from artificial scarcity.
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Absolutely. I always use the Napster analogy when trying to explain this whole decentralised revolution. We used to spend 10 bucks a month on a cd and we got 12 per year. Napster forced the market into Spotify type systems and the consumer turned their 120 a year from 12 CDs to 12 million. Suddenly we became millionaires relevant to music and media. The fat cats had to give up a bigger slice of the pie. Unfortunately the artists suffer now but decentralised solutions will solve that.
Hopefully decentralised systems wil now do the same to finance and only out imaginations can dream of the other potentials.
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This is an interesting point, I was thinking about this the other day when wondering about music and films being shared in an untakedownable way. One kind of sneaky and possibly interesting solution could be if we have proof of unique human, we invite joshua and fury to make safecoin addresses or just prove it is really them in some way, and then anyone can send them safecoin directly as much as they want. Same for any disgruntled artists/actors/etc. If people genuinely like their work they’ll get plenty of resources thrown at them, if they don’t they won’t. Could be a funny marketing campaign too
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Most laws start as a good thing because there are bad people. There are bad people who will cheat and lie and steal, so there are regulations. When buying through an intermediary like eBay and Amazon, the end user has some protection.
And so it must be, because there really are bad actors who will deceive people and take advantage.
Can this change and we have a decentralized system to protect the end user and resolve disputes in a decentralized way? I hope it can, but I don’t think it can happen from today to tomorrow and that it will take time. It may take longer than I am alive, which is ok for me, I’m here to help make that happen.
As far as I’m aware, barter has never been made illegal, at least not in the UK.
Card companies are cautious against allowing deliveries to addresses differing from the card holder for fraud concerns. If a card is stolen, then it could be used to buy stuff delivered to another place.
Card payments have a number of parties involved. The payment gateway, the payment processor and the bank. Given fraudulent payments could result in the payment processor making a loss, they are cautious about fraud. The chance of recovering the funds or the goods is small, I understand.
Cryptocurrency payments are very different. They are much more like digital cash payments. They are direct, much like cash or barter payments. As a result, third parties aren’t on the hook for any liabilities, so the responsibility falls directly to the buyer.
From the seller’s perspective, they get settled funds instantly, removing nearly all of their risk. There is still a chance that the account holder lost access to their account and funds were drained, but as with cash, it is fungible and hard to trace regardless.
From a seller’s perspective, non-delivery of goods is a risk. However, the legal system does cover this. If a trade is incomplete, money should be refunded. If crooks are involved, its much like a cash transaction.
Obviously, multi sig with insurer could help here, but these things will come with demand.
The point is, barter and cash payments are as old as the hills. Although large cash payments are being clamped down on, it is hard for them to outlaw barter and on what grounds? I suspect by the time they dream some up, cryptocurrency payments will have long become established anyway.
But what happens when the large multinational mega corp, is umm, you know, the bad guy? When they can get away with mistreating their employees, shutting down businesses, and spying on you?
It’s not so simple as legal = good.
I think this is an interesting question. It’s the gut assumption that most people will have, I imagine, that eCommerce in harder to regulate spaces will somehow be like the wild west, and risky for buyers and traders.
I think you’d like this ted talk from the always excellent Jamie Bartlett, its eye opening and fun. This part in particular stood out to me:
TL;DR: reputation goes a long long way. And listen out for the MaidSafe name drop!
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I was just thinking about this.
Given that private data also forms the basis of group shared data, whether something can be deleted or not seems to have extended implications.
I have some questions about shared data:
- I understand that shared data is essentially sharing the private key the owner used to create the data with. This is why users who previously had read access to some data can’t have it removed (as the data would need re-encrypting). Is this correct?
- What permissions does the data owner have vs the members of the group? I.e. is it read only or can anyone make changes?
- If anyone can make changes, does that imply that anyone in the group could delete the data, if this functionality is present?
- If permissions differ between the data owner and members of the group, how are these handled? I.e. is another key used to sign the requests or some such?
- Are delete permissions restricted to NRS files/containers and sequences? I can see lots of mentions of delete around these areas, but I’m piecing together the code logic around here. It would be good to get an overview on how this works.
My line of thought goes along the lines of how some private data could be shared, based on a subscription service model. It may be that the data owner would want to share their data with a group, but periodically delete the data, then re-upload it with a different key-pair to manage access. This would almost certainly require read-only shares for it to be feasible.
@JimCollinson - if any of this stuff is better for the AMA, or warrants a mention, that is great too! 
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Yes this is the case (we would use threshold encryption (BLS) for the group key(s)), but yes this is the case.
We were discussing that in last evenings CRDT meet, the policy is likely to be read/write. We are unclear as to whether there would be an owner any more as anyone with write could write (obv) so the owner would be only the creator of the first version (perhaps).
In any case the permissions are write and/or read.
If it were deleteable then yes, that’s one of the issues/problems for private delectable data.
Only private data can be deleted, anything public like NRS etc. cannot.
Shout with any more though!
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Yes, that would seem problematic.
For group shares, going back to a previous version would seem desirable. If a group member deletes the data, presumably this wouldn’t be possible.
For personal data (not group shared), I can see why some people may want to delete something permanently though. Perhaps this would also be true of some group data too.
Is it possible to add a flag to allow private data to allow deletion or not, then allow the decision to be made at creation time?
Is this a nice away from Object Capabilities? I’m wondering because I think one of the great things about it is the ability to rescind permissions, make them conditional etc.
Would the use of a Recycle Bin be useful/feasible? The data in the bin would not be completely lost, and could be recovered, until a certain action occurred.
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The issues with the permissions, much like other decisions is complexity. The complexity of convergant data, or data undergoing change, how to decide which is correct and so on. It can be done, but is complex. For instance, we change a permission, some replicas see it but some don’t then at that instant some replicas will accept another operation and some may see it as currently invalid. So then (our older approach) is we allow forks. Then we need to resolve forks or let apps resolve them via the human operator.
I reckon we will complexify much of this post stability though, so politicians answer here I think 
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I feel it differs from the usual permissions model, where you have both a group owner (administrator) and group users. The former is usually a privileged position, with users often only having read only access, not being able to add other users, etc.
Through the prism of asymmetric encryption, I don’t believe this is possible though. As I understand it, you either have write access (public key) or read/write (public key/private key) access. I understand the public key is derivable from the private key, which makes it insecure to have read only access.
Moreover, encryption isn’t time dependent, so we can’t let access expire and then renew. You either have the keys to read the data or you don’t.
Unless there is some sort of gateway that mediates access, it’s hard to think of a way around this. E.g. something which mediates access depending on an access list.
Quite! Let me put it another way, can I still claim Safe uses Object Capabilities and if not how should I describe it?
Indeed. I don’t know how OC was planned to operate on Safe but we were calling it that. Maybe we were using elders to validate macaroons I don’t know, but we seem to have abandoned the feature which is a significant change in this area.
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Maybe it’s something to consider for day 2? We don’t need it for launch, IMO. However, there are many use cases/business models which hinge on having temporary access.