Update 19th September, 2024

Development Updates
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Happy to report that the bug fix implemented last week seems to be working, and the vast majority of home nodes (nodes behind NAT routers) are now able to connect.

The latest release candidate rc-2024.09.2.2 is now available for any intrepid explorers who want to check it out. Improvements include a first iteration of the client API, performance increases in the auditor, and speeding up and simplifying of address simulation for testing purposes.

Most of you will also have seen the clarification of the reward structure for Beta testing. Thereā€™ll be more info about the next phase of testing shortly.

Thanks to @happybeing for the bug reports on quinn, on chunks being uploaded from the previous network and uploading the same files from different devices apparently resulting in paying for some chunks more than once. (And welcome back :slightly_smiling_face:)

Thanks also to @loziniak for the assessment of the API. Hopefully, once the EVM wallet has been integrated, it will make more sense. At that stage, we should have something devs can work with.

General progress

We have a crack team driving investigations into the effect of the choice of chunk size and node size on various aspects of the network, including: upload and download speeds; memory, bandwidth and CPU usage; and saturation of connections at startup. The aim is to find an optimal balance between the range of devices able to run nodes and Network performance.

@rusty.spork has been delving into a few issues Windows users are still having with WinSW. Zero display of RAM usage issues and unresponsive Ctrl-x and Ctrl-s controls may be solved by shutting down Launchpad, navigating to C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\safe\launchpad\, deleting WinSW and restarting Launchpad. Worth a try anyway if you are having problems.

@mazzi opened a PR to improve the flexibility of the layout on the Launchpad status screen and dialled in some options, so users do not need to set a Discord username in order to connect to the Beta network.

Meanwhile, @bzee has been working on various aspects of the API, which is now just waiting on a few updates elsewhere. Heā€™s been working on fixing a bug in how registers are fetched and updated and improving parts related to in-memory self-encryption. Together with Ermine, heā€™s also involved in working on API resolutions with WASM.

@mick.vandijke worked on the node manager to make it compatible with the new node start commands that require some EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) network settings. Mick reports that API integration tests are now passing, so the whole register create/update, file upload and put workflow are now working with the EVM payments system through the client API.

@qi_ma has been helping to resolve some issues raised by the community with respect to upload anomalies along with @roland, as well as investigating the metrics that would be affected by changing chunk sizes and node sizes, and what that might mean for performance.

Working in the same neck of the woods, @anselme is engaged in a security review of EVM payments.

And last but by no means least, @chriso and @shu have been working on nightly releases. This is motivated particularly by the Launchpad, so we can get more experimental features out to users outwith the two-week release cycle, for quicker feedback. We eventually aim to have a nightly ā€˜channelā€™ where users can continually upgrade to pull in the latest nightly versions.

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fiiiiiirst? maybe? i hope so.

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Second
Great report

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Indeed. All variations of home nodes, I am running, including those connect through wifi, and those I run through the CLI, all running efficiently, and earning nanos. Great work team!

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Seems everything is lining up nicely for the 29th of October! Keep it going! Thanks :tada:

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Thanks so much to the entire Autonomi team for all of your hard work! :sweat_smile: :sweat_smile: :sweat_smile:

Good luck to everyone with your Beta Rewards! :four_leaf_clover:

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A new cool feature to let yall know aboutā€¦

Thanks to @mazzi, Wave 1 users can type /tokens to see their token allocation in Discord! :tada:

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Good steady progress team Autonomi!

Excited to see how things play out with the EVM side of things as they become clearer.

API access for devs is tantalisingly closeā€¦ itā€™ll be great to be playing with rapidly iterating demo apps as theyā€™re spun up, making the network & its implications much more tangible to users :smiley:

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Thk U, thk U 4 the update Maidsafe devs

Best news ever

@happybeing @loziniak :clap: :clap: :clap: :clap: :clap: :clap:

Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers!

And double click enter :sweat_smile:

Keep coding/hacking/testing supants

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Is the team aware of that the network has problems delivering the data uploaded to it?

What kind of results have you gotten with your internal testing?

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Yeah, this is expected as we wind down the beta waves. Next phase to kick off after 27th September!

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This data error is trying to read the file soon after, and long before nodes are dropping off. Also the number at the time was fairly good hovering around 84K to 90 K depending on how it was measured

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Ok, will dig in

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Iā€™m curious if you have any empirical data how the fluctuations in network size affects the data permanence?

Does it follow the patterns predicted by math?

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There may well be PhDs earned exploring that very question in the next few years.

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Some simple numbers should be available before launch.

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Iā€™m not back in the same way, but felt that it would be churlish to find bugs and not file reports. BTW I also filed one about Registers which continue to be broken.

Those are bugs I hit while trying to keep awe available, trying to get it to work after the changes in the most recent network update. Thereā€™s no sense it will be working properly soon. With support from some amazing community members Iā€™ve spent several months finding and reporting bugs that were revealed by awe and yet weā€™re still here, as the project pivots further away from itā€™s fundamental goals.

I will attempt to get awe going rather than leave it not working - because I think that on the pre-blockchain network it is still a useful demonstration of what could be done.

If I manage that it will only last until blockchain payment is inserted. I will not be integrating it with the blockchain based network. The code is FOSS so someone could in theory do that but I think the technical compromises needed for blockchain payment will make many important apps, not just awe impossible to build. The very apps which will be crucial for use by individuals.

The only area not being sabotaged by this will be big players already in the blockchain space who will now dominate both as users and in influencing the direction of things going forward. Because if we need them now, we canā€™t just ditch those partners (hence no plan to remove blockchain later). Yet supporting them will continue to blocks the movement towards the original vision. So for me blockchain isnā€™t a ā€œstepping stoneā€. I see it as a millstone around the neck of the fundamentals and the vision.

I wrote a little more here:

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Can you tell what those difficulties are?

As far as I understand there will be an Oracle (controlled by MaidSafe, but you can use your own) that will tell the nodes that it has been paid and can store the data on the network.

Besides you will have an additional expense as uploader of the data, which is a financial difficulty, I donā€™t understand where the technical difficulty is?

And second question letā€™s say everything you say happened and the network is only used by big players - the code is still open, I canā€™t imagine a future where big players make millions and billions from this technology and no alternatives appear with native currency.

So my question is if your code works on one network, wonā€™t it work on all alternate networks?

Check out the Dev Forum

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Iā€™ve often wondered how many times there were efforts to sabotage this project. There used to be a thread about stuff that would not have happened if SAFE were already at scale.

Think of the Arab Spring-Panama Papers- Snowden- Assange- Mara Lago docs- Tic Toc. Think of what it would mean to strip the USG of all its supposed secrets and dump it into the public domain irrevocably. KGB said its stuff couldnā€™t be hacked wholesale but a consumate insider just dumped their core historical archive into a book published with the help of a Cambridge professor. NSA safe guards the whole Fed and its contractors but it subcontractor Hacker Team put a back door in the NSA itself that was used for 13 years before being discovered. Think of what it would meant to strip the USG and their politicians and even their black projects of their ability to lie and conseal. Look what the UK and the US did to their allies with selling them already cracked Enigma machines to spy on them while forcing the suicide of Turing to keep that quiet. Think of how the Soviets stole all the US nuclear secrets before Truman knew their was a bomb and how long it took for the US to understand. These people donā€™t play nice.

But it doesnā€™t matter anymore because what these people want doesnā€™t matter anymore because of whatever AI is. Take for instance Google. Do we think a mere US federal court could get away with ruling for Googleā€™s break up (even if it takes a second) if Google still mattered. Iā€™d have argued Google was possibly the most consequential corp on Earth but now its just a shell left behind by AI and manipulated. OpenAI too is looking that way with some massively uncharacteristic disgorging behavor by MS. Locks like those in SAFE or the eliptical quantum proof stuff is just stuff made by 3 year olds, we will just get locked out of our own stuff as AI social hacks and shreds our protections. David will now be made whole and he can focus on AI. What AI brings is more than we most of us ever dreamed of. SAFE was a tool where the delusion of human authority and power was still taken seriously, but that ā€˜powerā€™ is quickly evaporating in the light of AI and there is no way a thousand :clown_face:ā€™s like Gary Marcus can fix it.

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