Non consensual mining scripts for the benefit of the website owner are not a good idea IMO, and I doubt this community would stand for it. First thing I want is a blocker for such things.
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I’m not saying use a script like that for the purpose of a site owner, personal gain or as a sneaky method to finance a project. I’m talking about using something like this to empower a community and a cause. It depends on what angle you look at it and the motive of the heart for implementing it.
If you said “Hey lets mine on this site because no one will know” vs “Hey if we implement this technology we can go further” I can obviously see the line of moral between the two.
Looking at it from your possible perspective.I can see how this could seem to be against the laws of transparency depending on how you use it or again the intent of secrecy behind it. In the world we live in most people just want the blackbox experience. Few people read the terms of service and even fewer care they even exist.
I think if we look at it in two scenarios what do you think the outcome would be?
a). Welcome to the site we use a nonintrusive embedded javascript mining technology as an advertising alternative to keep our service free and advancing
b.) Can we use your hardware to monetize your visit in a noninstrusive way? Use says yes run it, if the user says no they see ads.
My question then is: Would something like this, not be moral in a world where the internet is evolving beyond simple packages and hardware? If yes how is cryptocurrency moral if it has the potential to disband governments?
Posing it as moral is not helpful IMO. As a user I would not want either of those options and would work to defeat them, just as I reject sites which want to monetise through advertising. Its an individual decision rather than a moral question for me. I can argue the morals or otherwise, but I don’t think it is going to resolve anything. So my choice would be to do what I want, and where that conflicts with how a site wants to exploit my interest in their content or service, I will work against them. And this is something I personally would not want.
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Understood. I just had to ask because most people I have encountered in the opensource world are all moral based as if there is a war waging and not just business being conducted. Your opinion is accepted (i say that since we’re not face to face).
I have another question. IYO how do you picture an internet business earning money?
I’d rather not try too hard to save the existing kinds of business. I’d be happy for services on SAFEnetwork to be built and deployed by people who are not trying to maximise profit, and I think that removing the immense cost of scaling, and having users pay for the service creates a wide open playing field where - if I’m brutally honest - I think it would be a benefit if big business struggles to find a business model that can fund their costs and generate adequate returns (compared to other uses of their investor capital).
So rather than consider how facebook could live on SAFEnetwork, I would ask what do people need and would anyone provide it, and if they need some funding to do so, how might they achieve that. Either funding to develop, or funding to cover costs with some left over to live on and save for the future. Its a different proposition and I certainly don’t have the answers, but ideas like Pay the Developer and Pay the Producer (PtD and PtP) are examples of how we can think about it. Tipping another. Other models are available - subscription, purchases, cross selling etc (all with frictionless zero fee transaction costs including for micropayments). Lots of options, and I know advertising will be tried too, but at least it will have to use a different model - more consensual, and much less ability to track and target people.
Nice. Very nice. I’ve been tracing some of your posts and I know you are very busy. I would also like to ask one last question. What aspect of the internet do you dislike most? I just picked up on the tracking - what else?
I don’t go for most, favourite etc. The main things are the ways it is either used actively to exploit and disempower people, or the ways it lacks the ability to keep people safe (eg secure from hacking, identity theft, actual theft, surveillance etc). There’s no one thing, but a collection of areas that are failing individuals, organisations, government and business, and putting them at risk. Though of course there are examples of perpetrators in all those categories.
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What did the current internet do to bbs, gopher, usenet…
They are still alive, though 
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Nothing really.
But people will gravitate to the App they like best. So if the datagathering App is the one they want then they agree to give away their data. But if they don’t then they stay with an App that doesn’t.
Opensourced Apps will be the main stay of non data collection Apps and people often check out these to see if any “call home” functionality is built in. Also permissions will need to include one that forbids an App writing data with its own credentials. Any App writing with its own credentials is open to being abused by any hacker who sniffs out the credentials from the app itself.
Obviously it can. So people will gravitate to the non-advertising Apps and the non-advertising Apps will get a lot more rewards. People power and the choice will be in the hands of the user.
If and only if Maidsafe decided to sell, then what? The network is autonomous and Maidsafe would be in the App building stage and also be one of the contributors to the core code fixes/update. If Maidsafe was sold then its status in all this would have to be rebuilt and if a giant bought it then it becomes irrelevant to the network by virtue of being “voted out” by all the other contributors.
And as @happybeing said. Why would the foundation sell out?
They will and people power will prevail and the app people prefer will get the usage and rewards. We will have to have some education along side SAFE introduction to tell people that they can have no advertising and freedom from having the data scraped by every company.
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If this were to happen, what would become of Safecoin, and how would that impact anyone who held Safecoin? With something like Bitcoin, despite mining-induced centralization, there is no way for anyone to “buy” the entire ecosystem. It seems the same cannot be said of Maidsafe and it’s tech.
On another note, I had a fairly long conversation with a colleague of mine yesterday about how Safenet will impact “internet giants.” Internet giants that run on the freemium model are apt to dislike the fact that SAFE would leave data in the hands of the consumer. Losing control over consumer data would force them to find another way to monetize their business, and it’s difficult to get people to start paying for what they’ve always perceived as free.
I’ve been asking myself why someone like, say Facebook, would want to utilize SAFE. The only benefits I could see that would compel them to do so would be enhanced security and lower storage costs. However, it doesn’t matter if you have the lowest costs on earth if you have no revenue coming in. Perhaps, if freemium based companies were to adopt SAFE, they could require users to use their website in a “public” mode, if that is possible.
On the other hand, I think that SAFE would be a great platform for institutions (e.g., government, hospitals, financial firms, etc.) for who security and cost concerns are paramount, and revenue streams are active (i.e., flow from transacted goods or services) as well as app developers who need a place to build and test in a secure and inexpensive way.
I’m still learning about SAFE and it’s many use cases, so I’d appreciate it if anyone could call out the benefits to a company like Facebook or Google that I am overlooking, or perhaps propose another customer segmentation framework.
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Nothing would happen. Maidsafe will not be controlling SAFEcoin nor are the owners of it. The network is in the hands of the users of the network and the network is autonomous meaning no one controls it.
The only way changes are made to the operations of SAFE is through software updates and that is in the hands of those (millions → billion) people who run vaults. Unlike bitcoin which is controlled by the few any update to the network has to be agreed on by the users as a whole.
So if one tries to update the network software but most deemed it unsuitable then that update dies. If the update is accepted by the majority then the rest will need to update to it at some stage. Updates of necessity will need to be interoperable with the previous version at least because the whole network cannot be updated at once. So there will be plenty of time to update or not. Any update that is not compatible with previous version will simply be deemed bad by the network and those nodes rejected.
Ha that is changing already in the last few years and so seamlessly that you didn’t noticed. Ever wonder why the “play store” exists. Not for google or apple to be nice to consumers since their phones/tablets would still work fine without it and be a great benefit that people would still buy them in the same quantities. No its to change the charging model from free to freemium and then further to get people used to PAYING for usage. Very important point here.
And this is why SAFE charging miniscule amounts for you to store data and being TOTALLY free to use/browse will be adopted by the masses. They are already being conditioned to paying. They pay for streaming, they pay for advert free apps, they pay for ingame tokens/whatever, they pay their service provider, they pay and pay and pay. At least with SAFE they will just pay to store data/posts/emails and that will be in terms of thousandths or millionths of a cent, instead of cents now for stuff.
For most (non-kids) they are already used to paying for using android/google in various ways and its automatically taken from the credit card they register with google when they first use their phone/tablet. I refuse to though.
Definitely and there are some planning for this. Very early stuff for now.
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Sure, this applies if Maidsafe would decide to sell after the network has launched and has a userbase. But what if a giant would decide they want to buy Maidsafe before launch? I mean, if it could really disturb their current business models that much, it would be a smart defensive maneuver to buy Maidsafe and try to alter the course the network is going, right? Or even one step further, they might want to delay or stop the network from launching alltogether.
I know this is all very hypothetical, but if the network really has the impact the way we all think it will have, then surely the giants won’t just sit back and watch the show, right?
To my understanding, (enough) money always seems to have a way of aligning goals and principles. 
Small sidenote: to be clear, I’m not questioning principles, motives and the integrity of Maidsafe, the foundation and everyone involved. This is just me thinking out loud. 
Defensive patents is what.
The foundation holds the patents and if a commercial entity bought Maidsafe then the foundation can easily refuse the giant use of the patents.
Of course the foundation could go against its goals and allow commercialisation of the patents.
But of course since its an opensource project the devs who resign could fork the project and continue development to have a network “owned” by the people rather than the giant.
Libre Office had a situation that the sponsoring company tried to take control of the project and the developers said bye bye and lo and behold the sponsoring company said “sorry we will stop” and brought that opensourced project back from the brink of failure.
But of course for Maidsafe to sell it has to WANT to sell. A giant cannot just come in and buy Maidsafe since the foundation owns most of the shares.
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I know, I know, It’s not as easy as I’m making it sound.
Sure, if not for Maidsafe, then somehow, someway, someday the technology will survive as intended. But I still can’t help but wonder what the giants would do when they realise (if they haven’t already) the potential of the network.
Somehow, I can’t help but think it won’t come to that. I don’t know exactly how, but my gut feeling tells me the giants will want to influence/do something to the fan as soon as they see the dung that’s flying towards it. 
IMO, for the giant: it’s either publically downplaying the effect of the fan, stopping the fan, or buying/altering the fan, the dung or it’s trajectory. Maybe by making another fan because they want to have all the dung themselves? I don’t know. But waiting for the room to be covered in feces and acting afterwards, is not smartest approach I think.
tl:dr: I’m worried we might underestimate the giants, but hey, who am I…
I guess we’ll have to just wait and see.
And, from what I understand, strict Scottish laws concerning what charities and foundations can and cannot do will prevent some of the more onerous scenarios regarding the future of MAID from taking place.
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Probably best buying the fan.
Fan, diapers, paracetamol.
The full prepper pack 
Giants rarely notice gnats. Let’s face it, most of the serious crypto devs who know more than anyone about the world of crypto know next to nothing about MAID. I’ve chatted to a fair few well-known and respected people in crypto about MAID and not one of them seemed to have any grasp of what SAFE really is or the potential it has. Most were sceptical without having a basic understand of what SAFE was. Several thought MAID was the final token and it was just a coloured coin that would be used for storage of data on a blockchain (Roger Ver and ‘JP’ lead dev from Exodus were both surprised to hear about SafeCoin).
If those boys don’t understand SAFE or see it as a disruption for blockchain then what makes you think that very rich and powerful CEOs are taking months to understand an ‘in-development’ project? There are over 1000 ‘crypto’ projects out there. It took me months of full-time trading and researching in 2015 (when there were only a couple of hundred projects and MAID was in the top 10).and I stumbled down this rabbit hole by chance and luck as much as anything.
The giants were laughing at and ignoring bitcoin for years when it was a $5bn cap and had a functioning product. I doubt any of them could possibly have noticed a $250M dev project that takes weeks to understand. Don’t presume that guys in nice suits are clever or deserve their places at the top of big companies. Success breeds arrogance and complacency. Big companies are also slow and resistant to innovation and change. Someone posted a good link to an article about the innovator’s dilemma the other day in here, it’s worth a read imo.
It’s all conjecture, but personally I doubt any of them will have cottoned on yet. Most likely by the time they do it will be way too late. It will be impossible to adapt to SAFE and it’s too big a paradigm shift for anyone to accept until it is staring them in the face. David would never sell out on his dream this close to giving the world digital freedom, he’s not in this for the money (he gave all of his shares and a lot of control over to the charity). It doesn’t take long to realise the motives for completing this project are strong enough that they are pretty much unstoppable at this point. This is a big part of our fight for the future and staving off an orwelian dystopia.
tl;dr Giants are arrogant and slow, we are tiny and unproven. By the time we’re proven it’ll be too late for them. David won’t sell out on us. This project MUST succeed, the stakes are much greater than money…
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You could say a typical David vs Goliath story then
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Or maybe Googliath …
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Well a googol is certainly a giant number.
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