SAFE's Impact: Speculation, Anyone?

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My prediction and main passion for the SAFE network is saving the health care industry. My evolution with this concept has been happening from several different vantage points.

  1. Over the last year I have set up various cloud based electronic health record (EHR) sytems like OpenEMR and have used several other closed sourced systems professionally.

  2. Even though they have led the way in electronic medical record systems, the main hospital system in my region of the USA has been trying (Forced) to transition towards a corporate EHR system.

  3. I have been researching the EHR environment because of MyHealthSAFE and it is now so apparent that a lot of the problems people have with health care systems start and finish with EHR’s.

The cheapest “HIPPA/HITECH/etc” compliant cloud server option for running a simple self-controlled small medical practice EHR I have been able to find is $600/month with the market average of $2,000/month(Money going out of health care). With the transition of the regional hospital system to high cost corporate EHR speaks volumes to the horrible state of our health care; my opinion is a dominant reason for this is because they are forced to mitigate risk since the caretakers of personal health information (PHI) are being held liable (Unfortunately should :disappointed:) for data breaches with already reported settlements in the tens of millions (more money going out of health care) and here in the USA we already have >120,000,000 individuals already with documented breach of their PHI.

The above reality alone is more than enough to get the entire non-corporate (rebounding currently) medical community to use the SAFE network over night. Since I have been following MAIDSAFE for over a year I have the benefit of already being moved far beyond the above stated problems; it is a no brainer and is as good as done.

My speculation is the individual patient will have the ability to take back their personal health information (Current best case scenario is it is only being held hostage from patients, worst case…well I don’t even like to think about it) and the currently adversarial/cynical climate between doctor and patient will quickly start to heal (pun intended). The selfless, honest, dedicated health care providers (healers…I personally know a lot) not motivated by money will finally be able to get back to focusing on doing what they live life to do and lead all of our medical care into the direction it needs to go and improve the quality of life for our communities. The parasitic corporate entity that have forced themselves in between the sacred relationship of healers and the ill in need will fade away from the light that will reveal the strings, smoke and mirrors.

Right now the small town, private, independent medical providers are being decimated by the corporatization of health care because they have created an EHR system (until the SAFE network) so complicated, insecure, expensive (IT and legal costs) with little to no interoperability (because of propertization); not to mention the corporations changing the rule book (regulation) daily. Furthermore, there should be no reason a company or government needs to have access of what is supposed to be a secret between doctor and patient (see Hippocratic oath). Sure if they need to “insert the generic reasons they give,” but it will be the patients who will dictate how their PHI is used.

I think the SAFE network (even the concept) has already made a bigger impact on the world than we can even understand at this point.

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What’s stopping people from freezing Safecoins and trading ownership of the coins on the market ala side chains?

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You question makes me think that you do not understand how the network works or how safecoin functions in it. Therefore you are asking a question that doesn’t make any sense in relation to the SAFE Network or safecoin.

If I’m wrong, please lay out a little more context so that what you’re looking at can be understood and answered.

If I’m right, I recommend a study of https://safenetwork.wiki . It’s not real long but it is pretty thorough. Should give you pretty good grounding in the basics of both the SAFE Network and safecoin.

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I’m not 100% sure what you are meaning, but it may help you to know that we came up with the concept of ‘minting’ safecoins which is highlighted in section 6 of the safecoin paper. The owner of the coins could create an open transaction without an intended recipient and store the coins on an external device (such as a USB) and trade these via any means, giving the successful bidder the USB stick who would then acknowledge themselves as the new owner to the Network.

Please note that the we are currently working to remove the Transaction Managers from the network, however, I believe that this functionality will still be possible in time.

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If you don’t insist to use a decentralized exchange, there are no problems whatsoever to trade safecoin. (I know decentralized would be way better). The exchange just runs a node, and if you want to trade on the exchange you transfer safecoin to this node, and it “remembers” that it owes you a certain amount of safecoin, so if you sell 1 safecoin for 1 bitcoin, your safecoin balance goes down and you bitcoin balance goes up (but only in the trading engine of the exchange) and just when you withdraw (which the exchange will only allow as long as you have enough balance) will there be a transaction on the safenet or the bitcoin blockchain. I understand that safecoin is different from other altcoins, but I don’t understand why it would be different w.r.t. centralized exchanges. There are no centralized exchanges that work with paper wallets, and every exchange has to run a full node for any cryptocoin that it wants to be tradable on its platform…

EDIT: of course the exchange will store a large fraction of the coins as minted safecoin in “cold storage” as a precaution against hackers, but this is only in the function of a “safe”, not to “hand them over the counter”…

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Speculating as a layman I say what I think and it is, are you kidding? In a time of every individuals data collected and in the hands of criminal syndicates named governments, who dictate how the world works - any quality social conscious community with the word Safe in it, in the blink of an eye - 1 nanosecond later is going to have a tsunami of people who 1) love truth 2) recognize it when they hear it 3) might understand or want to learn how we live in an interactive universe, that is choked by those who name themselves governments will want to know how to get in. Yep, long sentence. Simply put, please be ready in case the hordes - let’s just say 90 million who have quit looking for work in the USA who are off the books in terms of USG data. Really you should quit being so modest. This is the foundation of the future. As we say, tie-on, the ride’ll be fast. Thanks for asking for opinions.

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I’d say another major impact is the decentralization of scientific papers and the media. Given that scientific journals, like the big media companies, are controlled by just a few corporations.

http://yournewswire.com/nearly-all-scientific-papers-controlled-by-same-six-corporations/

And given that such research and media could be crowdfunded and crowdsourced it would be independently created, decentralized and more reliable. I also suspect more topics would be researched than what are currently being pursued.

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Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future. Niels Bohr :wink:

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Consider this article. … How much of this kind of thing could be solved with SAFE?

I remember someone doing calculations on how much safecoin would be worth per gig over the first year or something. It was something like $14/GB for the first year. Can’t seem to find the post. But if that’s right even at a measily 100gb downloaded per month (and most ISPs allow you a larger cap than that) that’s $1,400/month. Even half that or a quarter of that would be a decent chunk of change to someone living on welfare. $700 or even $350 pays for a lot of groceries and makes a big difference. So even if those figures are wrong they still mean that there’s a good chance safecoin farming could be a game changer to those on low income.

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Today I had a conversation with an employee from a major health insurance company in my country. He’s part of an IT research team within that company that looks at new innovations and technology and figures out how to apply them in practice in their field.

We talked about EHR’s and privacy, and to my surprise his team had concluded that a system in which the patient is the sole owner of their data is the only way to go. He said that other options are simply not going to cut it, they are not future-proof in their view. He of course couldn’t make any guarantees concerning the decisions the business will take, but at least they will get that advice. I briefly mentioned the concept of the SAFE network to him and he replied that that’s the proper direction to go in.

If I get the chance in the future I’ll try to introduce SAFE some more, to see if his positive attitude persists.

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How about the end of Communism in China?

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If you want to call this communism… for me it’s more oligarcho-capitalism, pretty much the same as in the US, just without a constitution and with more obedient people… (and without pseudo-democracy)

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I was assuming that because a user is charged safecoin to store data, that users can own safecoin and presumably thus not spend safecoin. In which case, exchanges could simply require users that wish to participate in an exchange to install an app that would prevent user X from spending safecoin amount C until user Y sent user X a message to send safecoin amount C to user Y, thus in effect, making the safecoins in question available to an exchange by freezing the safecoins. However, this was an assumption so I checked the white paper on safecoins linked just to make sure that the safe network didn’t do things in some uncooperative way.

After checking the white paper on safecoins, I believe you meant that the safe network allows people to trade safecoins on the network and effectively take safecoins out of use, thus making this idea redundant, or you thought I was talking about freezing people’s bank accounts like the thugs in blue do. If the latter is the case, then I apologize for my lack of ability to clearly articulate my point. If the former, than I’m not sure where the problem is.

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Speaking of health SAFE will also allow people to study naturuopathy and other alternative medicines and practice them while retaining their anonymity somewhat. I mean one will have to see patients and get supplies at some point, hence the somewhat, but the aonymous communication and transactions afforded by SAFE would increase one’s privacy and security. Natural practitioners have been being assassinated as of late, at least in the states, and so it’s getting rather dangerous to practice this line of medicine openly. Killing off divergent opinions and fields of study is NOT science. Also SAFE would allow for a decentralized and permant repository of knowledge for the findings of one’s studies that one could publish to the community for others to use.

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Prediction: Mesh networks will soon be established everywhere where there is inadequate reach of the Internet backbone.

Reason:

  1. There are emerging mesh network technologies, such as libre-mesh, which can be flashed onto consumer wifi routers.

  2. The creation of such mesh networks has no economic incentives but instead relies on philosophical, political, and community/tribal concerns. But it is a truism that money is the universal motivator.

  3. Safe network is agnostic about the underlying transport: it will operate over mesh networks.

  4. Safe network introduces an economic incentive to run Safe vaults.

  5. Smart contracts, via Ethereum or a Turing-complete scripting add-on for Bitcoin such as Rootstock (rootstock.io) enable the economic incentivisation for the operation of gateways between the Internet backbone and local mesh networks.

  6. Because of 4. & 5., expect that local mesh networks will have access to the Internet at relatively high-quality of service and low cost (a small premium compared to well-serviced areas of the Internet.

  7. Examples would include: Cuba, China, North Korea, or anywhere where geographical or political limitations apply.

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Forget Korea, try rural parts of Canada and the U.S. There are huge swaths of land across North America with no, or severely limited, internet access.

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Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.

I think the safe network will empower people to labor in freedom. And going along with this quote I think we will see some truly great and inspiring things. I could see governments Of, By and For the people. I could see businesses focusing on transparency and freedom. Many on-demand workforces where people are doing what they love vs. what pays their bills. I could see the shadow dealings of our days exposed. I can also see the truly evil using it for their endeavors as well. I’m excited about the good stuff and that is why I will keep investing my time, energy and money into seeing it become a reality.

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At this stage, it seems like a glorified distributed dropbox service to me.

The ability to run a very simple website without the apparent ability to do anything dynamic (server side, there being no server concept and all) is, as far as I can see it, quite limiting.

For that and other reasons I don’t see this technology ever coming close to replacing the internet as we know it, and it seems misguided to even suggest such a thing is in scope.

This is not to say it cannot be incredibly useful. A lot of doors will open for the sharing of uncensorable content (for better and for worse; but in my opinion it’s an inseparable aspect of wanting freedom that some other people will be doing things one finds distasteful… and in some cases they might have to be stopped, but not at the expense of everyone else’s rights), something for which HTML+CSS+JS is more than enough.

And as the glorified decentralized dropbox, if the cards are played right, I believe it will be a very easy sell for nontechnical people (I’ve inquired several dozen nontechnical friends/acquaintances, almost all of them were very interested in the concept).

I’ve been following the crossroads podcast and catching up over the last year (having only just begun to follow this project in earnest), so it’s already acknowledged that making the system easy to use by default is a core tenet.

I think for such nontechnical people, the devs can take the principle even further … forget the username and password and pin, just generate them randomly for the user, and present a very simple interface through which the information could be recovered … literally just install, have access to the decentralized storage.

Of course, while keeping advanced features available for more technically minded people.

So anyway, being a newbie this might be too limited a view, but without dynamic websites (non client side) and not being able to point .safenet addresses to actual endpoints (by design), I find the functionality here severely limiting. Valuable, but limited/ing.

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In conclusion, it seems to me the majority of people will find value in the secure decentralized store concept rather than any other aspect of the network/software.

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@karnal, I believe that dynamic websites from non-mutable data is a quickly developing technology and your concerns about “no dynamic data” are rather unfounded.

GIT for example is a dynamic website driven by immutable data… It is only a matter of time before people change their bad habits and move away from “place centered” data storage and move to a more “address centered” data storage…

When we build websites we want to communicate a “value” to our user, Not what happens to be in cell 4 of row 132 of a database table someplace. A tree of references pointing to immutable values is superior to storing the values in tables and constantly erasing them and putting new ones in… It is only a matter of time before programs emerge that have all of the functionality of our current client server database driven models that use Merkle trees and persistent datasets instead.

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