Thanks Dug for the update on how the event went - great stuff, and hope to watch the discussion online. Not necessarily for you to answer (unless you want to), but was wondering if eventually there will be competing systems to the Safe network (although not the same quality!) will people choose different storage solutions, or is it inevitable that in anything technological people coalesce around just one solution - ie how Google has become the de facto search engine? Perhaps initially based on quality, and then based on inertia or simplicity.
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I would hope that the SAFE network will be one solution to decentralisation and we really want others. For instance I could imagine the trade offs of many network, such as slow but persistant/permanent or computationally focused networks, perhaps storing data on another etc. I think what we all want is true decentralised price seeking networks that are not in anyone’s control as we know today. There is also things like matrixorg, SOLID, signal etc. who could all benefit from a decentralised backend such as SAFE or perhaps Filecoin could provide. If everyone could publish Safe Network it would help, but then also we all need these networks to agree on a common API/RPC set of calls that would allow transactions (data/comms etc.) to easily allow users to switch networks or even use more than 1 in early days etc.
Those interop things are difficult though and will be until the first true decentralised solution exists. Then we can make tweaks and interact with many more solutions out there.
There ye go, politicians answer 
PS SOLID is one to watch, it is likely their apps will allow easy network switching, but you really want access to data to remain and all that jazz.
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We were discussing this very thing at the Brighton meet-up last night. Lots of synergy, how can we coordinate efforts across these different projects.
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Thanks Dug. Hope the video comes out soon. I am interested in understanding the Dev community’s awareness of Maidsafe and their reaction to where SafeNet currently is in project development terms.
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Are you saying that Filecoin is a serious competitor for SAFE? Never heard of them tbh.
They have several tricky issues to solve: privacy, surveillance, DDoS/censorship etc all come up regularly and I generally bite my lip these days 
I’m hoping that Solid can really get people and developers interested in the user ownership model and that querying semantic data will grow new ways of building things, and that each project will strengthen the other because IMO they are very complimentary. We don’t depend on that, but I do think it would be a good thing for SAFE and our users if the technologies come together in various ways.
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First time I’ve seen that older man emoji! Don’t bite your lip. Beat them with your walking stick til they see sense!
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Filecoin is the incentivization layer for IPFS. IPFS is sort of the go to decentralized storage solution these days, at least in the Ethereum space, but it has no guarantee of data availability. Filecoin hopes to address this by making contacts between users and providers (I think kind of like Sia, Storj, etc?). So the way it works is/will be pretty different from SAFE.
Swarm is also on the horizon in the Ethereum space. It has kind of fallen off the map in that you don’t hear much about it these days, but I’ve used it to build a decentralized website before, and I think they’re still developing. It is supposed to be the go to thing for Ethereum web3 in the future. It’s based on ‘swap, swindle, swear’ incentivization, where you just have to pay if you’re downloading way more than you’re seeding.
Other tangentially related protocols that I know of and didn’t mention yet are Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) and dat.
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Don’t want to sound too much like an evangelist but there appears that there will be little or nothing that the Safe network won’t do well, and hence everything else will be ‘me too’ or mildly iterative. I don’t think I have ever seen a post about what network won’t do well… just curious if a posting exists. Or perhaps my imagination of what other things may or could exist, based on the network or other platforms, in the future, is somewhat limited.
Ps. Thanks David for the note and background - appreciate you guys are super busy!
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I believe that the Enterprise Safe function/product(?) you described in the Impossible Network article will be a key feature in “rebuilding a network of interlinked communities of trust”. How/where does that fit into the current roadmap?
Your comment re true decentralised price seeking networks is interesting. Could you give a little further explanation of what you mean/see here? 
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No as far as we are aware it all seems fast, we don’t have real world figures though so it could be amazing fast. I suspect slow writes and fast reads. What I was eluding to though is all networks will have varying advantages/disadvantages as they roll out. So some may be fast and some slow, due to them doing more checks or whatever. So users should have the choice of what network has the functions and performance they wish to have etc. Not saying SAFE is anything right now and nothing to compare with, but for instance if a network was out that did no security checks then it may be fast but not private, some may like that.
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I mean fully decentralised, no servers or even knowledge of who stores what etc. To be the best I feel they should price seek automatically, not have some price setting mechanism where consumers will get confused in the plethora of “offers” folk may make. To me that is just a new fresh hell, so automatic price seeking on a global flat plying field would be my preference. I want the poorest people on earth storing in the same way as the richest. I would love the poorest developers to compete on an even playing field as well. So no human price setting IMO.
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Lovely update Maidsafe devs.
Unfortunately due to my setup, I can’t test the cli’s 
“So no human price setting IMO.” I just can’t wait to be in this economy vs the black 
in the current.
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Snapp is mobile or desktop? Or both, and if so, which one first?
I felt like having things in the browser made sense. And you guys don’t have to try to figure out that whole flowchart yourselves. Coders and companies around the world will make different options like that one day, once you guys release the network to the world
Desktop app first as it’s currently being worked on and to be iterated upon. Mobile is on the project board likely for planning but will almost certainly be a native app as well. I think their approach is spot on for on boarding, management, interacting with the network and other SAFE apps.
Native mobile apps are more inline with the general smart phone mental model than accessing apps through a browser imo, so wats being done here seems like a solid approach. Mobile browsers are more for browsing pages and information rather than apps.
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I’m a little confused about what the goal is with the apps. We have the SNAPP, Mobile Browser and Mobile Wallet App all in the works. I recently came across another project that “includes private email, private chats(group and PM), private crypto, private wallet, censorship resistant websites, and a private internet browser. All wrapped up into 1 piece of software.” Do we not want a full suite of features like that available for SAFE? Maybe I am missing something.
Which one?
It is a tricky one, we want to give developers a start and allow them to fill up the ecosystem. So if we do an all in one app then it kills the app developers efforts to a great degree. So right now we are doing the infrastructure and hopefully making it easy for devs to see how to use the APIs etc. and we are using the CLI and examples for that.
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I think SNAPP is definitely the best focus up front to get users on board and it should be the goal of community devs to be an app to be managed from SNAPP once that milestone is hit. As Maidsafe rolls things out those features will all be addressed individually I would assume based on the project boards. Perpetual web, private communications, identity management are all in there and then some. Additionally any app that tries to do absolutely everything all in one go is bound to have some feature bloat or be confusing to a user.
That’s really appreciated and I imagine that makes it a bit hard for Maidsafe to gauge what exactly to tackle sometimes. Given the anonymous nature of the network many devs are not going to openly say what they are developing even outside of worrying someone will steal their killer app idea. I think there are quite a few folks with ideas waiting in the wings that we won’t know until launch.
The road ahead is very clear and well defined for Maidsafe and it looks very promising to me.
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Apparently, @feinberg is referring to Utopia. Unfortunately, Utopia is a closed source project. More details here:
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Yeah that dashboard is overwhelming imo. The UI is reminiscent of another time but not something that the greater majority would feel comfortable adopting. Will be looking more into this project though, thanks for sharing.
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