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So. Many. Buzzwords. Can someone do an ELI5 of what this is, what this does, what problems it solves, how a non-developer is affected by it, and what it lets

So. Many. Buzzwords. Can someone do an ELI5 of what this is, what this does, what problems it solves, how a non-developer is affected by it, and what it lets a developer do that they couldn't do before? I'm sure I'd be interested in this, but at the moment I can't find a safe, secure foothold in the torrent of buzzwords. Thx.

joshuef 7y ago
As one of the devs, i'd say: It solves ownership of data, and removes the need for large data centers by securely, anonymously letting users share storage space. I'd caveat that we're still in alpha, but things are coming together very nicely. The Safe Network (will) incentive user storage and uptime through cryptocurrency, though non-blockchain based, so avoiding a lot of throughput pitfalls there. So it can also act as a storage backed currency in some fashion. It allows users to truly own and manage the permissions of their data without relying on any third party. And it provides enough flexibility for this to let folk make applications as well as store files. I hope that helps some? I'm trying to avoid buzzwords :) I know that site has any. It's also worth noting that the dev hub is a bit out of date (things are still moving pretty fast.) But the community (https://safenetforum.org/ https://safenetforum.org/) is very friendly! Let me know if I can get more specific, I'll be about for a little longer. (Oh, also there's some other links in another top level post I made that may be helpful)
- ColinWright 7y ago
  From what you say it would then appear to be a cryptographically secure distributed storage system. So I develop an app, and while my app is running I'm providing some storage space. I get rewarded for this via some mechanism I don't understand, but involves some sort of cryptocurrency. I can then store things "out there", and the cryptography means that it's secure. Similarly, parts of other people's data gets stored in my app. Is that right? If so, what happens to other people's data when I turn off my machine? What happens to my data when other people turn off their machines, or are otherwise unavailable? I don't understand what problem this is solving, or how it can work.
  - joshuef 7y ago
    >Is that right? Sort of. You don't _have_ to enable storage etc in your app. Being a 'node' can be independent of running an app. And your app can just store things on the network without having to worry about making a user share their space (and do onboarding to the network etc). > If so, what happens to other people's data when I turn off my machine? What happens to my data when other people turn off their machines, or are otherwise unavailable? If you turn off your storage, you stop earning money. The network ensures there are X (currently 8, I believe) copies of each piece of data available at any one time, so data on the network would be replicated to make up for whatever went missing as you (or anyone) turn off a node. > I don't understand what problem this is solving The problem of centralisation and data hoarding. Facebook. Google. Being de-facto forced into giving up your data as a user. It aims to decentralise this, and (hopefully) will make it easier for users to remain in control of their data, without the need for massive server farms etc. By using spare space on user's devices. The crypto currency is an incentivisation layer. (you are rewarded for participation in storage / serving data etc). I'd recommend reading the primer (https://primer.safenetwork.org/ https://primer.safenetwork.org/) to get into the details of how this will work.
    - almost_usual 7y ago
      This is pretty cool and would be interesting to use for personal projects and smaller apps. What is the vision for the future and enterprise though? There will still be a big performance hit right? Suppose most of my site is cached on a CDN with hundreds of DCs across earth. That is going to serve my site content quite a bit faster than ~8 replicas?
      - happybeing 7y ago
        There will be pros and cons in access speed. I expect some latency compared to a CDN that is caching close to the client, but not necessarily significant. And some things may even be faster because chunks are served from random locations meaning a server is not a bottleneck. So it's a bit like having a CDN for free. This should work particularly well for large files because chunks will be delivered in parallel by lots of different vaults in different locations, along different routes. Also, there will be opportunistic caching of popular chunks along the route to the client. So data that is suddenly in demand will be cached rather than overloading the vaults holding the chunks - so u have automatic DDoS protection. Because of that any site will scale automatically to meet demand without cost or extra server side infrastructure. Some really attractive bonuses there for anyone from a lone developer to a large scale commercial operation. The actual performance will I think be better for some use cases, worse for others but we won't know the details for a bit yet. I'm a developer interested in putting decentralised apps on the SAFE Network so have done some testing of the early APIs and tried deploying simple websites on the test networks, porting apps from the Solid project, RemoteStorage etc. I tried different frameworks to see how easily they could be used, how they would perform, and help others get started. For example I had excellent results with my first use of ReactStatic (see https://dweb.happybeing.com https://dweb.happybeing.com) but I was very impressed when I tried Svelte for the first time because it's a really nice framework and very fast. But any web framework should work well for many kinds of app, but I'm smitten by Svelte so will build using that for the time being. You will be able to use pretty much any language or platform though because language bindings are being made available for the SAFE API and are I understand fairly easy to create yourself if the one you want hasn't been created yet.

joshuef 7y ago

As one of the devs, i'd say: It solves ownership of data, and removes the need for large data centers by securely, anonymously letting users share storage space. I'd caveat that we're still in alpha, but things are coming together very nicely. The Safe Network (will) incentive user storage and uptime through cryptocurrency, though non-blockchain based, so avoiding a lot of throughput pitfalls there. So it can also act as a storage backed currency in some fashion. It allows users to truly own and manage the permissions of their data without relying on any third party. And it provides enough flexibility for this to let folk make applications as well as store files. I hope that helps some? I'm trying to avoid buzzwords :) I know that site has any. It's also worth noting that the dev hub is a bit out of date (things are still moving pretty fast.) But the community (https://safenetforum.org/ https://safenetforum.org/) is very friendly! Let me know if I can get more specific, I'll be about for a little longer. (Oh, also there's some other links in another top level post I made that may be helpful)

ColinWright 7y ago
From what you say it would then appear to be a cryptographically secure distributed storage system. So I develop an app, and while my app is running I'm providing some storage space. I get rewarded for this via some mechanism I don't understand, but involves some sort of cryptocurrency. I can then store things "out there", and the cryptography means that it's secure. Similarly, parts of other people's data gets stored in my app. Is that right? If so, what happens to other people's data when I turn off my machine? What happens to my data when other people turn off their machines, or are otherwise unavailable? I don't understand what problem this is solving, or how it can work.
- joshuef 7y ago
  >Is that right? Sort of. You don't _have_ to enable storage etc in your app. Being a 'node' can be independent of running an app. And your app can just store things on the network without having to worry about making a user share their space (and do onboarding to the network etc). > If so, what happens to other people's data when I turn off my machine? What happens to my data when other people turn off their machines, or are otherwise unavailable? If you turn off your storage, you stop earning money. The network ensures there are X (currently 8, I believe) copies of each piece of data available at any one time, so data on the network would be replicated to make up for whatever went missing as you (or anyone) turn off a node. > I don't understand what problem this is solving The problem of centralisation and data hoarding. Facebook. Google. Being de-facto forced into giving up your data as a user. It aims to decentralise this, and (hopefully) will make it easier for users to remain in control of their data, without the need for massive server farms etc. By using spare space on user's devices. The crypto currency is an incentivisation layer. (you are rewarded for participation in storage / serving data etc). I'd recommend reading the primer (https://primer.safenetwork.org/ https://primer.safenetwork.org/) to get into the details of how this will work.
  - almost_usual 7y ago
    This is pretty cool and would be interesting to use for personal projects and smaller apps. What is the vision for the future and enterprise though? There will still be a big performance hit right? Suppose most of my site is cached on a CDN with hundreds of DCs across earth. That is going to serve my site content quite a bit faster than ~8 replicas?
    - happybeing 7y ago
      There will be pros and cons in access speed. I expect some latency compared to a CDN that is caching close to the client, but not necessarily significant. And some things may even be faster because chunks are served from random locations meaning a server is not a bottleneck. So it's a bit like having a CDN for free. This should work particularly well for large files because chunks will be delivered in parallel by lots of different vaults in different locations, along different routes. Also, there will be opportunistic caching of popular chunks along the route to the client. So data that is suddenly in demand will be cached rather than overloading the vaults holding the chunks - so u have automatic DDoS protection. Because of that any site will scale automatically to meet demand without cost or extra server side infrastructure. Some really attractive bonuses there for anyone from a lone developer to a large scale commercial operation. The actual performance will I think be better for some use cases, worse for others but we won't know the details for a bit yet. I'm a developer interested in putting decentralised apps on the SAFE Network so have done some testing of the early APIs and tried deploying simple websites on the test networks, porting apps from the Solid project, RemoteStorage etc. I tried different frameworks to see how easily they could be used, how they would perform, and help others get started. For example I had excellent results with my first use of ReactStatic (see https://dweb.happybeing.com https://dweb.happybeing.com) but I was very impressed when I tried Svelte for the first time because it's a really nice framework and very fast. But any web framework should work well for many kinds of app, but I'm smitten by Svelte so will build using that for the time being. You will be able to use pretty much any language or platform though because language bindings are being made available for the SAFE API and are I understand fairly easy to create yourself if the one you want hasn't been created yet.