The Man with one Red Shoe
The Red Shoes
https://safenetworkprimer.com/
28 pages
A SAFE Network PrimerAn introductory guide to the world’s first fully decentralized autonomous data network
The SAFE Network PrimerThe SAFE Network – a brief introduction
Technological progress is a perpetual process of automation and abstraction. Difficult and complex tasks are made simple by software and machines until they are completely taken for granted. Meanwhile technology moves on, taking down new barriers to progress as it goes. One example of this process is cloud computing. The once specialized task of provisioning a server is now so simple that anyone can do it. The complexity has been abstracted away. Ultimately machines will become far better at provisioning other machines than people are, at which point there may be advantages in automating the task altogether. Indeed this is already starting to happen.What if we were to take this process one step further and automate the entire network, making it autonomous, able to store, protect and deliver data without any human involvement at all? And what if all the data on the network were stored and transmitted under conditions of utmost security, with the most advanced encryption techniques available? And what if users of this platform could be as public or as private as they wanted to be?Among the obvious benefits would be hugely enhanced confidence in the security and integrity of all data. With no third parties to introduce error and huge barriers to hackers wishing to steal, corrupt or compromise data, such a decentralized ‘trustless’ system would be invaluable in IoT applications such as driverless cars where any failure or cyber-kinetic attack would be life-threatening. And it would offer a much needed alternative to the current Internet, dominated as it is by a handful of enormously powerful corporations and used by governments to keep tabs on us all. This is a power dynamic that’s ripe for change.Above all, such a system would be simple, with the complexity of managing data abstracted away. This paradigm shift would be a huge shot in the arm for all sorts of industries. With developers no longer having to worry about low-level storage, routing and compute, whole new sets of applications could be built that are independent of the data they use. It would kickstart the nascent personal information economy in which individuals decide who can see what details about them, for what purpose, and for what possible financial recompense.Such a system is the vision of MaidSafe, a Scottish software company working in the area of decentralized computer networking. The SAFE (Secure Access For Everyone) Network is an autonomous peer-to-peer network created by linking together users’ computers and smartphones. It is designed to solve many of the current technical, managerial and societal problems with centralized networks: a lack of privacy and data security, censorship and the massive consolidation of control by a few powerful actors. This guide outlines how the SAFE Network is constructed in order to achieve these aims. While it is somewhat technical in places, it’s intended very much as a primer. By reading it, even those with very little technical knowledge should be able gain a good working understanding of the SAFE Network. Meanwhile for those requiring more depth there are plenty of pointers as to where they can find the relevant information.