I don’t think so, due to the way that it would be organized. An existing centralized data center easily has the technical prowess to implement SAFE vaults on their systems if they choose to do so. But one of the great things about SAFE is that the data requirements push back on centralized data centers (which ALWAYS have bottlenecks, usually of bandwidth).
A Packaged Hardware solution would be something geared to individual users who want a plug and play way to join the safe network. Something equivalent to the Space Monkey form factor.
I believe that would be adding a layer of economic and thus financial complexity onto the safe network. Why not make it as easy as possible to implement the farming on existing userland hardware? The development should minimise, reduce all barriers of entry into the safe network. If there will be a need for custom hardware, then let it grow from the custom apps that would be built on the network. Some applications within the IoT framework easily fall into the custom hardware utilising the safe network.
I’m not sure why this would be adding a layer of economic and financial complexity. Could you provide some reasons why you hold that belief?
We absolutely should, and that is (as I understand it) the goal of all current development. However, no matter how easy it is, there will still be administrative steps that need to be taken, partitioning the drive etc. These steps will mean that mainstream users, who by and large want a plug and play solution, will need someone else to do the set-up for them.
These two things, making it as easy as possible to farm on existing hardware, and developing a packaged hardware solution are not mutually exclusive. Thats one of the beautiful things about decentralization. We don’t have to pick one over the other.
Maybe I have missed something, but as far as I know it’s not required to (re)partition your drive to farm? I thought it was possible to just farm with any filesystem/partition settings you may currently have. Naturally certain partition settings and filesystems will be somewhat faster, but for the casual farmer changing this should not be necessary I believe.
My understanding was that in order for the vault to be secure, it had to take over the entire partition in which it lives. So if you wanted to use your primary computer to farm, you would have to partition off a certain amount of your hard drive to only be used for the vault.
Now if you plug in an external hard drive, and want to use the entire thing to farm, that would work.
From other programs that live on the main computer, viruses and such. It was my understanding that only the vault program would be able to interact with the vault data, and I don’t know how you would do that without a partition.
All vault data is encrypted, so a virus could only corrupt/destroy the data to sabotage your vault. I’m far from a virus expert, but if a virus infects your OS, I think it can write/delete data on any partition it wants.
Obviously some virus’s or an attacker, deliberately modifying the vault software would be able to get around this, but I didn’t think that the vault chunks would be visible or accessible to the main filesystem. If I recall correctly that was one of the reasons why it was platform agnostic.
There is so much I still don’t know. You are probably right.
Anyway, back on the point of whether dedicated hardware is desirable, I suspect that there will always be some friction in terms of the install on your core computer. Additionally, the move to desktop replacement laptops, means that a lot of people take their primary computer with them wherever they go, which means a lot of downtime and would prefer to have a device which they can plug in right next to their router and leave on 24 hours a day.
It would certainly be able to destroy entire farms or assist in the profitable “encrypt & ransom” undertakings.
Of course they are. If I can nuke your 2nd HDD I don’t need to “access” your vaults.
My comment is slight OT, but many on the forum have been refusing to consider this fact - you can’t at the same time be not bothered by downtime and predict good earnings based on very high vault hit rates.
In other threads I guesstimated not more than a 1% hit rate per day (I think it’ll be much lower, but 1% is my upper limit) and that would mean you could be offline just a little bit and not miss getting your hits. But if your vaults go offline 10 mins per day and your hoped-for hit rate is 3% per day, that should cost you in hits/earnings and rating. Or you could go offline 10 mins per day and face no consequences if you get 3 GET requests per day.
Having said that we can’t know how things will really work because the most important factor is how MaidSafe programs the system.
I think even guesstimates are useless until at least beta. We have no clue for what kind of data SAFE will be used in practice. If it’s mostly used as a streaming/file-sharing (replacement for torrents/youtube/netflix) platform the average get/put ratio will be significantly higher than if it’s mostly used for cold storage.
Actually, if we could get some indicative numbers on how much digital data is stored world wide, and how much data is transferred per day over the internet world wide, then we could make a (very rough) guess.
Yes @kirkion, while it is true that hardware designs coming out now and in the close future may be highly efficient and thus provide an incentive to optimize and specialize, we would be going down the route BTC went… This would greatly impact on adoption by some of the major hardware clusters since you would need to convince them of the need to upgrade/buy optimized hardware in order to join the network. Imagine a government department wanting to justify its user hardware purchases by factoring in farming as a counter to depreciation. Imagine whole school districts being able to justify the addition of computers to their schools, that allow them to create whole 360 degree Learning management systems running on the same computers. How would that happen, if the costs of acquisition and integration suddenly went up due to a custom hardware requirement? Don’t you think scam come to mind?
Maybe some of us do not really believe in the ability of the system (the one we all bought into) to change the entire computing industry, but I saw the dream, and it is my humble belief that maidsafe is supposed to be a cure, a real alternative to the current online business model. I understand that there may be pressure from some sections of the financiers, but whats to stop us, the “masses” from buying them out if it has to come to that, so as to retain the initial focus? Yes, Greed is the fuel that runs capitalism, and yes Greed is the fuel that is burning capitalism. I do not want to burn.
Except that it won’t. The very nature of Safe means that all vaults are essentially equal. It isn’t a first past the post, winner takes all. Rather each actor gets what they put in.
Again, this is not a hardware requirement. This is simply a way to allow people who have money but not technical skills to participate in the network. Why should they be barred from participating?
Again, Maidsafe is a step further decentralized than Bitcoin is. Specialized hardware is a plug and play solution not an optimized ASIC solution.
Yes. But because anything that’s not cold (in terms of MaidSafe’s caching algorithms) should be served by the caching layer, farmers won’t see most of that action (they’ll see 1/4 of the first cached hit and then nothing until cache expires and gets requested again).
Personally I plan to use MaidSafe for off-site backup of my data, so my private content will (hopefully) be requested precisely 0 times.
Is serving from the cache actually rewarded? If so, then any farmer will on average compensate the missed ‘direct’ gets by serving cached data from it’s close nodes. If not, then farming will indeed be significantly slower.
I believe it isn’t.
I argued against that in many comments on this forum (one example below), but I guess it is what it is.
It doesn’t sound like something that would be difficult to implement, but I am also against mission creep so if it wasn’t planned for v1.0, so be it.
As for Tor, since SAFE allows anonymous communications, as it was suggested by Blindsite2k, activists and criminals will likely to join the network. Because of that, governments should denounce the use of SAFE, specially those from countries where citizens are strongly censored (China, Russia, etc.). As a second group of whistleblowers, security agencies and cie would likely keep an interest on the development of this project and may (and surely will) denounce the use of SAFE because its lack of controls on its content.
So for the main purpose of this topic, another group of users may be those who will keep an interest on this project for a social security purpose. Since we may or not want them to become a part of SAFE network, I don’t know if we should add this group as future users.
In China they simply block things.
You are free to access gmail.com… if you can get around the state firewall.
If you get caught to distribute stuff they don’t like, that’s a problem. But that’s always the case there regardless of what means of communication you use. They don’t denounce phones and they won’t denounce MAID.