Maidsafe is working on a decentralized network

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Freenet</a><p><pre><code> Freenet is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant communication. It uses a decentralized distributed data store to keep and deliver information, and has a suite of free software for publishing and communicating on the Web without fear of censorship.[4][5]:151 Both, Freenet and some of its associated tools were originally designed by Ian Clarke, who defined Freenet&#x27;s goal as providing freedom of speech on the Internet with strong anonymity protection.[6][7] Freenet has been under continuous development since 2000. </code></pre> I ran a Freenet node for quite a while. I eventually stopped for two reasons:<p>1.) Freenet is really astonishingly slow. Think ten kilobits per second of transfer, and tens of seconds of latency. It doesn&#x27;t fit the www user interface very well at all. It would probably need to maintain a dozen copies of every file in order to attain a reasonable amount of throughput. Bittorrent has it beat cold for mildly illegal files, (copyrighted music, movies, etc) which means that Freenet&#x27;s users mostly use it for very illegal files, thus:<p>2.) Man, it is absolutely full of child porn. If you donate 10 GiB of disk space to Freenet, then you can be sure that at least 5 GiB of that is going to be dedicated to child porn.

I would like to point out that maidsafe is objectively a scam.<p>Operation of the maidsafe system as advertised relies on a number of provably impossible technologies, like purely algorithmic proof-of-identity.<p>They gave a presentation at a recent Bitcoin conference in DC. I asked a few basic questions about how they planned to do certain things critical to maidsafe&#x27;s operation (that no one knows how to do, and many think are impossible), and their answers were so obscenely stupid that anyone in the room with relevant technical knowledge was laughing.<p>Example: &quot;How do you plan to prevent bots from gaming the data transfer payment system?&quot; The answer was something like &quot;Oh, it&#x27;s way too hard to make a bot. There are too many steps.&quot;

Repeating my comments from another thread:<p>I thought like this once.<p>Futurists have a tendency to imagine a world of changed human behavior and it&#x27;s compelling to do so. The reality is that the future rarely arrives as sweeping change, but rather as metaphor and specialization.<p>Whereas you can imagine others adopting new patterns of behavior because you understand the underlying reasons why such behavior is reasonable, the metaphor through which you explain this change is not readily understood. Why, as a User do I want this? If the answer is control and privacy, you might be barking up the wrong tree (time and again we&#x27;ve shown that those are not things consumers want or are willing to pay for).<p>If you want to drive dynamic change in the world, you have to change the underlying structure of complicated systems while steadfastly avoiding changes in user behavior. It turns out this is quite hard.<p>I applaud your efforts but encourage you to avoid the rabbit hole of endless specialization and to improve the marketing metaphor&#x2F;rhetoric.

Maidsafe makes some big claims about their cryptography and verifiable behavior that was panned in this &#x2F;r&#x2F;crypto thread [1]. Can anybody add some thoughts to this?<p>1. <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/crypto/comments/24zext/what_does_rcrypto_think_of_maidsafes_self/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;crypto&#x2F;comments&#x2F;24zext&#x2F;what_does_rcr...</a>

<p><pre><code> “Our network knows within 20 milliseconds if the status of a piece of data or a node has changed. It has to happen that fast because if you turn your computer off the network has to recreate that chunk on another node on the network to maintain four copies at all time.” </code></pre> What do they mean by that 20ms figure? That can&#x27;t be the entire network, since trans-pacific latency is something on the order of 100ms

I wish these guys luck, but I&#x27;m becoming increasingly pessimistic about the idea of a 100% edge-only decentralized network that is really robust and useful.<p>I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s just a matter of putting the engineering effort to bear. I think there are fundamental mathematically-based barriers here. Try this paper for starters:<p><a href="https://www.zerotier.com/misc/2011__A_Little_Centralization__Tsitsiklis_Xu.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zerotier.com&#x2F;misc&#x2F;2011__A_Little_Centralization_...</a><p>The CAP theorem is also very relevant.

I was thinking about something similar to this the other day for a replacement (or evolution of) wikipedia. If you wanted to store all of human knowledge and history in some sort of archive, it would be enormous - but build it on a p2p basis, everyone having a slice of it and that slice being replicated on everyone&#x27;s machine. Access would mean that you have to agree to hold on to and serve part of it.<p>But I don&#x27;t get how that could work for applications, especially in security sensitive applications.

Servers have a lot of nice features that are hard to replicate in a totally decentralized environment - I say this as someone who experimented a lot with different peering structures for a hobby project.<p>And indeed, this too seems to rely on persistent nodes, though they don&#x27;t say in what capacity (whether they work like torrent trackers or if they actually relay content).<p>In an increasingly mobile-flavored network where one person has many devices it makes sense to have servers. However, that doesn&#x27;t mean we all need to get behind the mega silos of Facebook and Google. The early internet actually got this right, both technologically and topoligically.<p>The problem is partly cultural since we have gotten used to the all-or-nothing, anti-federation approach of Web 2.0+, but it&#x27;s also due to the inability to deliver and change features in a timely manner. But if, say, Facebook UI innovations were to stagnate (and some say that they already have), it would become more feasible to implement a slower-moving federated service.

This sounds good but there are some problems that I think can&#x27;t be solved.<p>1st: What if a user wants to flood the network with meaningless data?<p>2nd: Latency-critical applications, especially on geographically distributed peers.

Does anyone have opinion about the MaidSafe self-authentication paper? <a href="https://github.com/maidsafe/MaidSafe/wiki/unpublished_papers/SelfAuthentication.pdf?raw=true" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;maidsafe&#x2F;MaidSafe&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;unpublished_papers...</a><p>I came across it a while ago somewhere but still haven&#x27;t read it.

It sounds like they are reinventing Freenet. Badly. Not realizing how hard some things are. Instead, they make big claims. Where&#x27;s the code?<p>Not that I think Freenet is terribly good.

Like FileCoin, this is very interesting but is any of those networks ready to be used <i>today</i>? Even in some limited capacity? Right now, it sounds like pure hype.

I find it very hard to believe that datacenters, not programmers, are the most expensive part of running the Internet.

Something like this has already been done with I2P minus the cryptocurrency aspect.

I thought RUDP was just a draft spec from 1999. <a href="https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-sigtran-reliable-udp-00" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tools.ietf.org&#x2F;html&#x2F;draft-ietf-sigtran-reliable-udp-...</a> Is there a more recent standard?

It&#x27;s all fun and games until the government decides you&#x27;re hosting child porn on your computer, even if you didn&#x27;t put it there.<p>So, they&#x27;ll have to come up with some means of centralized censorship, which is going to hack off the devout civil libertarians who would initially support it. And the vast majority of internet users aren&#x27;t going to care until someone tries to explain to them how the internet is using their resources for storage.<p>Then the fun starts.

So I&#x27;m a little confused here - let me just ask something;<p>How is this going to work?<p>The answer seems obvious, but look at the battle raging over net neutrality right now. With a decentralized infrastructure, it&#x27;s going to be a lot harder to get around the prospect of paid peering then it&#x27;d be with Uncle Google and&#x2F;or Amazon paying their way into your home.

An alternative approach is something like sandstorm.io

Can anyone suggest a better (i.e. more neutral and accurate) title?

as long as it&#x27;s not overpriced like AWS, I dun care. Otherwise, no, give me back my cheap server.

So all of your users data is going to be stored in random places? I don&#x27;t see how anyone thinks this could feasibly work unless everyone is suddenly cool with loss of trade secrets, the wholesale giveaway of intellectual work, and complete loss control over data&#x2F;content.<p>Unless I&#x27;m missing something?

This is the internet all over again. Remember &quot;online services&quot;? BBSes?<p>Some form of this was bound to sprout as the internet became feasible to regulate and demarcate. It started with BitTorrent because people wanted to pirate music. (Maybe before, but torrents are impressive in that they reside literally nowhere).<p>This is going to happen. Maybe in 2014&#x2F;15, maybe in 2020 when people are having their prostates probed by the NSA&#x2F;Europe&#x27;s right to forget&#x2F;Brazil&#x27;s lei de mídia&#x2F;yadda yadda yadda.