Yikes, we’ll have to move to London too:
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Apparently it gives users privacy, security, and freedom… there must be some subconscious links between these guys and MaidSafe!
I have no idea how similar they are in terms of technology & economics, but on the surface it seems similar to the Safe network proposition.
If they have strengths / weaknesses compared with MaidSafe’s approach to a decentralised internet, it could be worth collaborating.
Strange that nobody developing that would come over to the forums here though, or that none of the 8,000 community developers are also interested in the Safe network… there’s no way they could be unaware of MaidSafe if they’re in this space surely?
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My thoughts exactly. The Internet is a big place. Maybe Maidsafe and Blockstack actually are unaware of each other. Or maybe the projects are too different, even though the goals look alike at first glance. It would be great if somebody in the know could comment on this.
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So there is Hashgraph, Blockstack, and Substratum all competing with Safe Network.
Time is becoming more important, hopefully the competition results in a stronger product.
It would be good to get a summary of similarities and differences between these projects.
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I don’t think they are all ‘competing’. I’ve taken a cursory look at most of these projects and they are not the ‘same’ as SAFE and not competing on the same playing field. Blockstack says you ‘own your own data’ but then you don’t really. You can just verify its authenticity.
“The top-most layer (layer-3) is the storage layer, which hosts the actual data values and is part of the data plane. All stored data values are signed by an owner key defined in the control plane. By storing data values outside of the blockchain, Blockstack allows values of arbitrary size and allows for a variety of storage backends. Users do not need to trust the storage layer and can verify their integrity in the control plane. Our design benefits from the performance and reliability of the backend cloud storage systems.”
The key feature of Bitcoin is ownership/censor resistance, not performance or trust. That’s what makes it a success and a disruptive threat. The same will be true of SAFE imo. That’s the real unique functionality. The incentives model is also crucial to making something a success or not. As far as I can see not one of these projects is really anything like SAFE.
@happybeing had it right imo. Find out first if it is an ‘autonomous network’. If it isn’t then you’re going to need to dig deep to find out just how censor resistant it actually is (there’s no place for gatekeepers), why people might flock to it, and how disruptive it could be.
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From reading about Swirlds, the scope seems rather different to safe net.
It appears that Swirlds is concentrating on making transactions fast while proving secure identities. It still seems to be about publishing transactions to a public ledger, but with a more scalable and identity oriented twist.
This is no bad thing, ofc, but safe net has far higher ambitions from what I can see. Safe net seems to focus more on storing mass data as comfortably as transactional data. This is a whole different ball game, imo.
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good to know about alternatives as there are many
Competitor previews looks good
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Swirlds currently focuses on permissioned hashgraphs which essentially is like permissioned blockchains. The Hashgraph is a decentralized ledger and projects that use a blockchain could in theory use a hashgraph instead, they try to solve the same problem with a bit different data structures. It’s basically like a blockchain, but more scalable, though it still need to prove itself in the field I suppose. They have some documents with some ideas on how a hashgraph-based public ledger could work, so I guess there will be some public hashgraph at some point. One way to do storage with hashgraph would be to make something like filecoin, but with a hashgraph instead of a blockchain.
Substratum seem like they’re trying to solve a different problem than SAFE, they want to make traditional web servers and make something that’s pretty much like hosting things on Amazon’s cloud, except decentralized where it’s people home computer’s instead of servers in a data center.
Ethereum with swarm and whisper is much more similar to what SAFE is trying to do than any of these projects.
edit:
Then there’s holochain, I need to look a bit more detailed at what exactly they’re trying to do though
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I’d say maid is similar to i2p and storj. But obviously just better than all the rest including those as its all encompassing technical application storage network and with all the obvious built in benefits like autonomy privacy etc.
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The babble project is interesting. It’s a ‘pluggable’ solution according to the website and it looks like they’ve got patents. I wonder, as MAIDSAFE is only now getting around to developing datachains, if they will have to compromise on their solution as they may run afoul of patents on pre-existing technologies.
Data chains is a published patent, it was filed over 18 months ago 
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When, where, under what circumstances will decisions be made to defend the patents. I know your view has been expressed but I dont think I ever clearly understood.
I dont know much about patents but assume legal battles could be a crippling endeavor.
We would be unlikely to attack anyone with a patent, but us having them means nobody can attack us, well easily. When I say attack I mean any litigation/charge etc. . However a large corporate that say included our code/innovation in their OS for a large advantage would be a different case. Other Open Source projects, then no we would not use patents to prevent that, we are more likely to try and help them 
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It is also worth noting that all patents have been assigned to the MaidSafe Foundation, so the Foundation is the owner and licenses the patents back to MaidSafe (the company), royalty free and in perpetuity. So the trustees of the Foundation would be involved in any such decisions. Interestingly, and as a result of assigning the patents to the Foundation, anyone trying to restrict MaidSafe (the company’s) freedom to operate by threatening litigation would need to sue a Scottish charity, something that most PR departments should be extremely concerned about.
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- Closed source (trust us but don’t look)
- Permissioned
Thus
Evil. (IMO)
The “trade-off” is that I must TRUST them. I’m sorry, I have zero trust to give and I WILL NOT believe in black box crypto. Opensource or go die in my world. Maybe somewhere they will have a use case, my businesses will not travel that road.
Memority ( https://memority.io/ )
- Status: alpha - prepping for ICO
- Expected release date: March 2019?
- description: fully decentralized and secure duplicated encrypted storage system
- white paper: ( https://memority.io/docs/whitepaper_memority.pdf )
- news link: ( New Data Storage Platform Intends To Become The Safest Way Of Storing Information Online )
I noticed on their feature comparison chart they didn’t include the SAFE Network … but had storj, SIA, & Filecoin listed as decentralized competitors.
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Just heard about this one … Ivan on Tech did a ‘paid promotion’ show where he had the nerve to call these guys the ‘real pied piper’ !@#$ man I nearly blew my lid … I don’t understand why Ivan doesn’t care to talk about MAIDSAFE! I’ve asked him to more than once. It’s not like he doesn’t know about it.
Anyway - here’s the project website: https://nkn.org/
And the Ivan on tech video where he interviews the team:
Honestly not sure how “similar” this is, heard whispers of it for a little while.
Done zero research at this point, hoping to dig in a little later today.
Launching tomorrow.
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Just to follow up briefly Jacob (previous member of this community @notional)
Has done an audit, he thinks it is not safe and launched too early.
Edit:
They have halted the chain due to Jacobs concerns. wow. Never a dull moment.
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