when would the team release the Beta version?
One year or two years later?
thanks
The main focus is to get the Vaults (software people run from home that "makes" the SAFE Network) in people's hand again. We had these during several testnets. Now they are being optimized against security attacks and for different bandwidth nodes. This is what they say about it in yesterday's update:
We finally got the routing churn test to pass consistently with disjoint groups: It simulates a network with joining and leaving nodes, and after each change verifies that the new network invariant is satisfied, i.e. every node has made a connection to every node that it needs in its routing table according to RFC 371, And there's more:
We're down to 3 failing tests out of 102, and those all point to a particular problem with groups failing to send a message while they're in the process of merging. We're already working on the fix for that.
After sorting those out, we will move on to testing a routing example application on droplets, while some of us will iron out any remaining test failures in safe_vault. When those tests pass, too, we will test vault binaries on droplets again, and start implementing the Node Ageing RFC1.So what is this all about:
"Node Ageing" is the way new nodes join the network. People could start 1000 nodes and try to take over the network when it's small. "Node Ageing" prevents this. So we need this before we get Vaults.
"Disjoint Groups" is the new logic used for routing. It makes the network more secure and probably faster. The Maidsafe devs not only implemented this, they also implemented several tests for this new logic. It tests splitting and joining groups, the join of new nodes etc. Next to that Maidsafe keeps refactoring modules, which means optimizing code to make it faster, more secure and therefore better.
"Disjoint Groups" is almost done, "node Ageing" will probably take around 5 weeks is my guess. They also work on several other things at the same time as you can read in the update. So my guess: We'll see Alpha 2 with Vaults we can run from home in Q1 of 2017. After that they probably focus on the "Datachain" and the implementation of "Farming" with "Safecoin". A lot of great work is done at the moment, but it's not stuff we can see with installers. We'll have to wait until the features are done and tested.