C'mon Maidsafe, when are you going to launch? This is getting ridiculous, are we still going to be waiting this time next year.. WTF is going on Maidsafe
When I got interested in crypto, this seemed like one of the most interesting projects out there,
but really, if regular Internet developed at this pace, we would still use Gopher, Veronica and Archie
Okay, do you want to talk about the "regular internet"? Fine, lets do that, lets talk a bit about history:
David Irvine is the equivalent to J.C.R. Licklider.
Do you know how long it took from his concept of the "Intergalactic Computer Network" to even start making the first baby steps as the ArpaNet?
It took 9 years to develop the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). It took another 6 years to implement the Internet Protocol (IP).
Do you know how many years it took from the Arpanet to become the actual Internet? Another 7 years, until the ARPANet was decomissioned, became commercial and Tim Berners-Lee created the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP).
From concept "Intergalactic Computer Network" to the release of the WorldWideWeb it took 28 years in total, to then begin their first baby steps to gather public adoption.
Everything up to that point was essentially basic research, and testing out new untested revolutionary ideas to implementing them is a very sinuous route, which NONE of you bunch of cry babies can even fathom.
If your concept of "regular internet" is developing webapps on existing frameworks, using rapid prototyping scripting languages, using existing libraries and building on existing paradigms, then you have no idea of what actually MaidSafe is attempting to achieve.
MaidSafe attempted to rewrite the internet almost from zero, no blueprints exist, there are no models to base it on, and no other crypto project is even dreaming what MaidSafe is about to achieve with their Safe Network. And do you know how freaking hard is to avoid sunk cost fallacies and technical debt?
They decided to refactor the whole project from C++ to Rust, being one of the first large projects to adopt it, and definitely the first one in the crypto space that foresaw the need for a memory safe programming language that performs as well as C. It was extremely bold and even crazy at the time, but now looking backwards it was the wisest decision ever made.
It isn't even based on blockchains (as this project was born before the release of Satoshi's whitepaper), and it was the first and still the only one that will bring a whole new original consensus mechanism that is truly robust, distributed and decentralized. Without compromising hacks like supernodes and other patchworks. Tell me one project that can guarantee being fully equitative and democratic, without inheriting cumbersome governance drama.
A
fully trustless autonomous private network
without bottlenecks, it doesn't even use tcp/ip for routing packages within the network.
If that's the promise, building something like that properly will take its sweet time.
Btw, Tim Berners-Lee has been developing the next version of linked-data internet called Solid, guess how long it took to develop it? About 9 years.
And guess who is in close talks with Tim Berners-Lee and which project has been experimenting with it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTNVv0WV4osIf you understand the design of the Safe Network and what Solid is capable of, you will understand that this is the most naturally perfect match, which if successful it will become a major tour de force. It may change the face of the Internet forever.
I am not here to defend the commercial viability of the project, but to point out that it is ridiculous to compare a project this ambitious to any other internet webapp type of development.