INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Given all the hype and noise swirling around crypto and decentralized network projects, which runs the full gamut from scams and stupidity,
to very clever and inspired ideas, the release of yet another whitepaper does not immediately set off an attention klaxon.
But this
whitepaper— which details a new protocol for achieving consensus within a decentralized network — is worth paying more attention to than
most.
MaidSafe, the team behind it, are also the literal opposite of fly-by-night crypto opportunists
They&ve been working on decentralized networking since long before the space became the hot, hyped thing it is now.
Their overarching
mission is to engineer an entirely decentralized Internet which bakes in privacy, security and freedom of expression by design — the
‘Safe& in their planned ‘Safe Network& stands for ‘Secure access for everyone& — meaning it encrypted, autonomous, self-organizing,
And the new consensus protocol is just another piece towards fulfilling that grand vision.
What consensus in decentralized networking terms
&Within decentralized networks you must have a way of the network agreeing on a state — such as can somebody access a file or confirming a
coin transaction, for example — and the reason you need this is because you don''t have a central server to confirm all this to you,&
explains MaidSafe COO Nick Lambert, discussing what the protocol is intended to achieve.
So you need all these decentralized nodes all
reaching agreement somehow on a state within the network
Consensus occurs by each of these nodes on the network voting and letting the network as a whole know what it thinks of a transaction.
It
almost like consensus could be considered the heart of the networks
It required for almost every event in the network.
We wrote about MaidSafe alternative, server-less Internet in 2014
But they actually began work on the project in stealth all the way back in 2006
So they&re over a decade into the RD at this point.
The network is p2p because it being designed so that data is locally encrypted, broken
up into pieces and then stored distributed and replicated across the network, relying on the users& own compute resources to stand in and
No servers necessary.
The prototype Safe Network is currently in an alpha testing stage (they opened for alpha in 2016)
Several more alpha test stages are planned, with a beta release still a distant, undated prospect at this stage
But rearchitecting the entire Internet was clearly never going to be a day work.
MaidSafe also ran a multimillion dollar crowdsale in 2014
— for a proxy token of the coin that will eventually be baked into the network — and did so long before ICOs became a crypto-related
bandwagon that all sorts of entities were jumping onto
The SafeCoin cryptocurrency is intended to operate as the inventive mechanism for developers to build apps for the Safe Network and users to
contribute compute resource and thus bring MaidSafe distributed dream alive.
Their timing on the token sale front, coupled with prudent
hodling of some of the Bitcoins they&ve raised, means they&re essentially in a position of not having to worry about raising more funds to
build the network, according to Lambert.
A rough, back-of-an-envelope calculation on MaidSafe original crowdsale suggests, given they raised
$2M in Bitcoin in April 2014 when the price for 1BTC was up to around $500, the Bitcoins they obtained then could be worth between
~$30M-$40M by today Bitcoin prices — though that would be assuming they held on to most of them
Bitcoin price also peaked far higher last year too.
As well as the token sale they also did an equity raise in 2016,via the fintech
investment platform bnktothefuture, pulling in around $1.7M from that — in a mixture of cash and &some Bitcoin&.
It gone both ways,& says
Lambert, discussing the team luck with Bitcoin
&The crowdsale we were on the losing end of Bitcoin price decreasing
We did a raise from bnktothefuture in autumn of 2016… and fortunately we held on to quite a lot of the Bitcoin
So we rode the Bitcoin price up
So I feel like the universe paid us back a little bit for that
So it feels like we&re level now.
Fundraising is exceedingly time consuming right through the organization, and it does take a lot of time
away from what you wants to be focusing on, and so to be in a position where you&re not desperate for funding is a really nice one to be
&It allows us to focus on the technology and releasing the network.
The team headcount is now up to around 33, with founding members based
at the HQ in Ayr, Scotland, and other engineers working remotely or distributed (including in a new dev office they opened in India at the
start of this year), even though MaidSafe is still not taking in any revenue.
This April they also made the decision to switch from a dual
licensing approach for their software — previously offering both an open source license and a commercial license (which let people close
source their code for a fee) — to going only open source, to encourage more developer engagement and contributions to the project, as
Lambert tells it.
We always see the SafeNetwork a bit like a public utility,& he says
&In terms of once we&ve got this thing up and launched we don''t want to control it or own it because if we do nobody will want to use it
— it needs to be seen as everyone contributing
So we felt it a much more encouraging sign for developers who want to contribute if they see everything is fully open sourced and cannot be
closed source.
MaidSafe story so far is reason enough to take note of their whitepaper.
But the consensus issue the paper addresses is also
a key challenge for decentralized networks so any proposed solution is potentially a big deal — if indeed it pans out as
promised.
Protocol for Asynchronous, Reliable, Secure and Efficient Consensus
MaidSafe reckons they&ve come up with a way of achieving
consensus on decentralized networks that scalable, robust and efficient
Hence the name of the protocol — ‘Parsec& — being short for: ‘Protocol for Asynchronous, Reliable, Secure and Efficient
Consensus&.
They will be open sourcing the protocol under a GPL v3 license — with a rough timeframe of &months& for that release,
according to Lambert.
He says they&ve been working on Parsec for the last 18 months to two years — but also drawing on earlier research
the team carried out into areas such as conflict-free replicated data types, synchronous and asynchronous consensus, and topics such as
threshold signatures and common coin.
More specifically, the research underpinningParsec is based on the following five papers: 1
The Swirlds Hashgraph Consensus Algorithm: Fair, Fast, Byzantine Fault Tolerance, Swirlds Tech Report SWIRLDS-TR-2016-01 (2016); 2
Mostefaoui A., Hamouna M., Raynal M
Signature-Free Asynchronous Byzantine Consensus with't
