Weekly DevUpdate :safe: 16 March 2015

Development Updates
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Hi all!

This week saw the start of a new dynamic in the MaidSafe team. After thorough investigation by @dirvine into the value of Rust as valuable system language, a special-ops team started on a three-week mission: front-end developers are tasked to beat the core c++ developers team by transposing the implementations in Rust !

Core development meanwhile continues (in C++ :wink: ) uninterrupted tying the last pieces together in routing: Testing Connection Manager and Sentinel, as well as finishing the Zero-State join. As new routing is far more advanced, while having been simplified, the vaults network is a ‘seemingly’ trivial addition - vaults now only deals in higher logic - , and this work has already been done !

So testnet3 comes really close now: all the pieces are implemented and they all converge in MaidSafe-Routing.

Keep watching us closely as no-one is getting any sleep anymore :slight_smile:

Here’s the transcript of last Monday with many thanks to @justine_mclevy for writing it ! Transcript Monday 16 March 2015

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How close? I want my cookie now! :wink:

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slaps hand you have to wait and not be greedy :smiley:

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Nick: Discussions with Monetas

Announcement

Zug, Switzerland 2015-03-17

Muharem Hrnjadovic, who joined Monetas in April 2014 as Director of Engineering and has built the Monetas technical team, is assuming overall leadership of technology. Chris Odom, the former CTO, will explore new opportunities

Monetas is building the most advanced decentralized platform for financial and legal transactions. The Monetas system is being developed independently of the Open-Transactions system authored by Chris.

Coincidence? :innocent:

Monetas is building a powerful, open, standards-based platform that will enable digital finance entrepreneurs to build amazing new products and services.

By introducing breakthrough technological innovations and dramatically lowering the cost of doing business, whole new classes of businesses become viable…

  • Global remittances at a fraction of what they cost today
  • Community currencies on a fully-featured, reliable, secure, open platform
  • Virtual currencies for online games with advanced features available nowhere else
  • Digital currencies immune to political interference, inflation, and devaluation
  • Crowd-funding platforms that are truly borderless and globally accessible
  • Digital escrow services that are highly secure and require no intermediary
  • Electronic contracting services with automated algorithmic contract execution
  • Electronic voting systems that offer provable security and privacy
  • Micro-payments to solve resource allocation and tragedy of the commons problems for digital infrastructure services such as mesh networks and decentralized storage
  • Social networks that are decentralized and peer-to-peer, where you retain full and exclusive control over your information
  • Prediction markets that surface information more efficiently and accurately than opinion polls or any other method
  • Financial markets that are jurisdictionless, globally accessible, and highly liquid

…and many, many more.

As the platform develops and a new generation of entrepreneurs builds applications and businesses not possible before, a new ecosystem will arise with a highly robust, resilient infrastructure of products and services that are decentralized, peer-to-peer, and beyond the control of any person or entity.

This will deeply transform the world and create undreamt-of freedom and prosperity…

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Are the discussions with Monetas regarding the possibility of Maidsafe hosting Monetas as an alternative to their mobile phone Network, or alternatively to discuss a partnership with Maidsafe the company?
I recognise the second reason would be none of my business and prob not the case anyway as there would be no need to mention in Dev update…so it’s probably the first reason? :smile:

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No they are just us being pals with them and wishing each other well. Nick and I met Johann in Amsterdam last year and we had a great time. I think there is a good level of respect there, but until we both launch proper nothing is likely except good wishes for now.

Just kindred spirits for now, later I would happily work with people like that though, they have great vision to and appreciate the enormity of what we are doing in project SAFE and the SAFE Network.

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Yes, I’m impressed too…just been reading their blog articles, very informative and insightful. :smiley:

http://monetas.net/blog/

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Nothing to do with me @chrisfostertv. As David says, Johann is a very principled decent guy and I’m hopeful that we will find something to work on in the future, but both companies are very focussed on building our their respective platforms right now.

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Travelling to Zurich (talk on wed) “Discussions with Monetas”

If I’ve gone down the wrong track and the discussions were never scheduled or never occurred, then I apologize for making the inference.

In part…I made the inference based off an answer David gave to a guy querying what frameworks do we use to describe our existing reality in the area of property, promise of production future energy, peer to asset etc (June 2014)

I was surprised that Monetas…a Blockchain based technology, was discussed rather than native capabilities of SAFE:

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Not at all Chris and you are absolutely correct that I did go and meet with Johann and members of the Monetas team. My comment above was partly tongue in cheek that it wasn’t my fault that Chris had decided to move on.

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Gotcha…unfortunately there’s no favicon for that expression :smile:

The talks that you guys have with a Monetas, the NHS etc etc…leads me to Post launch and the concept that Maidsafe relinquishes control to POD’s.

I wonder about the attack vector from within…a Google, Facebook, Twitter, NSA whomever…funds a bunch of POD’s and effectively controls the core.

Not much talked about regarding the POD structure and how the control is effected. Is it a 1 POD - 1 vote or 1 Developer - 1 vote or…?

We can see how the Bitcoin Foundation is running into the arms of regulators and it’s happened in very short order.

What mechanisms are in place or slated to be implemented that prevent such a situation with the SAFE Network?

So back to the ‘discussions’ that Maidsafe has had with other parties over the journey…I look at it as Maidsafe Post launch…the company that needs to fund itself. I can see Maidsafe being overun with requests to do stuff like help with porting the NHS system to SAFE, help a major financial institution make the transition etc etc

I can see maidsafe expanding rapidly to meet the demand for consulting services and coding. In effect Maidsafe will reap the fruit of their labor post launch…the early investors are rewarded, the foundation is funded, the network is more awesome than would have been possible years ago (crowd sale, 90% refactor, RUST etc)

We then have the possibility David walks away and does something else before a complete knowledge transfer has been possible. 2 years for Devs to get the system…maybe less now with the refactor and RUST?

None of this bothers me immediately because I view SAFE like a new car with a 5 year warranty…you could probably leave it untouched for years and it will would purr along without incident doing what it needs to i.e breathing room for POD’s to get up to speed and take over.

So in summary, I can envisage Maidsafe expanding very rapidly as a company…how will they manage this (potentially huge) growth, whilst hopefully being mentors to future core devs and ensuring the network does not go the way of Bitcoin via the stacking of POD’s with deep pockets.

I dont think I would want Maidsafe to relinquish veto power over the network for the foreseeable future and I’m not convinced POD’s are the way to distribute keys to the castle. I would lean more to virtual POD’s ie a loose collection of Devs, unbounded by physical location or allegiances/ employment contracts.

I get an uneasy feeling that POD’s are dead in the water, even before launch…I’ve seen no sign of life from any POD’s on here barring the guys in Montreal who are doing a great job on the education side, but do not seem to be moving into core coding. I could be 100% wrong on this observation…talk to me POD’s ?

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Really interesting, but in our rust stuff which we are doing nearly off line (still public but not advertised) we already had a dev committing to code as we convert it. Only last night we had a great pull request that was very valuable. So hopefully an easier system/build system will make engagement simpler (important).

I won’t be leaving this alone as when the network is up then I really want to move it towards implementing my wwww project (what why where when) which will have the target goal of inferring knowledge based on a semantic type approach to data. It’s why I wanted maidsafe to get us to a place where logic and factual history is used to improve knowledge. I feel we should be able to feed in an illness and get the exact cure and much more. I also think politicians are not the answer to expanding the species. Anyway that’s a huge story for another day.

I worry about Pods but less so these days as I feel when we are going and not developing so fast (it’s a crazy fast changing codebase right now) then engagement will be simpler. I will happily travel round to help Pods and train people where I can. I feel that is important.

Also the language of the network again is so much more important that I have pointed out, when we are up and running I intend to describe it mathematically and for everyone to easily understand it. It is very powerful and makes things simple.

One thing we have been speaking to a large non profit we all know is making the network an international standard. So way less code and fix the core logic in a way it’s fully extensible from implementations ( I feel this is close, technically). This will provide a very forward looking. Now imagine that a standard with inbuilt currency that forms part of the logic and security. Great for safecoin for sure. With Eric looking deep into the maths behind the system this will all come together I am sure.

I feel the Pods are struggling as they are alone waiting on promises being fulfilled, it’s up to us to fulfil those promises and we will see more. Otherwise we will force it somehow :smile:

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Awesomeness…but what about the keys to the castle? As a non dev I’m probably missing something fundamental here regarding control over the codebase.

If I understand correctly, Github actually runs on the Triple Entry accounting mechanism whereby changes are logged and cannot be forged…but it’s the right to commit I guess, it doesn’t feel right any time soon to have that right handed over to anyone but Maidsafe.

I hope you can see what I’m alluding to here…maybe one day there will be a way to truly distribute the nuclear launch codes between people or AI or whatever, but right now it seems akin to a server based system and admin rights…we cant truly say that POD’s will have equal commit rights to Maidsafe any time soon can we?

Edit: It’s kind of a strange situation, on one side the physical network is fully distributed unlike the current internet, but on the other side it could be argued that control over the SAFE Network (internet 2) is way more centralized via the code base than the current internet?

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I do and think until we find a mechanism we will need to ensure integrity here. all of us have copies and can fork so I suppose it’s wild west right now, but MaidSafe will protect this for certain. The goal is true decentralisation and that will be hard, but regulation needs to be kept well away IMHO as logic has to remain the boss.

It’s a toughie we do need to solve, if we get the core logic very correct this will become less of an issue I feel though. I wont rest until this is even simpler than today. The core logic really prohibits control and centralisation already so that is great, but we will need to do more. The design of not knowing the users or nodes is actually very hard to remove which is a huge thing and helps tones. The trend would not be toward regulations and control but an all out attack (damage the code etc.).

I am sure we can keep this core logic in place (breaking it breaks the network actually). So this leaves checking there is no phone home or similar changes and with a much smaller code base this would be easier to manage.

We also need to be aware of lower level attacks like the recent Xcode malarkey where the build tools infect code in a terrible way.

I feel if we had a very secure network protocol it will help, to that end we are moving to open standards for wire protocols and serialisation, which will mean c++ rust go python etc. versions can be created. This may spread the creators and any creator who creates a system that does not follow the rules of the network will find their nodes expelled. That wont protect against malicious code but may help ensuring many more teams create more versions and truly understand the code.

Nice problem but we will solve it. I do understand for now we need the integrity and it is very unlikely maidasfe will go mad after all these years creating t, but we cannot guarantee that, so all avenues will need to be considered as I am trying to do above (badly).

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Have to build the castle first before the keys can be handed over.

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Talk to the hand…haha I love the confidence …brilliant :slight_smile:

Thanks for taking the time to provide feedback on future direction…your explanations get documented on here and provide a great resource for everyone to draw on when others come along with similar concerns.

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This is the strength of this forum really and allows us all to brainstorm in a friendly forward looking place, invaluable.

Absolutely man :smiley: it’s just a puzzle, I bet those students watching us will force us to protect them :slight_smile: and we will whatever it takes.

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