MaidSafe and PARSEC - a new distributed consensus algorithm
I'll write something about my work for a change.
I've been employed at MaidSafe for over a year and a half now. It's a small, Scottish company working on creating a fully distributed Internet. Sounds a bit weird - the Internet is already distributed, isn't it? Well, it isn't completely - every website in the Internet exists on some servers belonging to some single company. All data in the Internet is controlled by the owners of the servers that host it, and not necessarily the actual owners of the data itself. This leads to situations in which our data is sometimes used in ways we don't like (GDPR, which came into force recently, is supposed to improve the state of affairs, but I wouldn't expect too much...).
MaidSafe aims to change all of this. It counters the centralised servers with the SAFE Network - a distributed network, in which everyone controls their data. When we upload a file to this network, we aren't putting it on a specific server. Instead, the file is sliced into multiple pieces, encrypted and distributed in multiple copies among the computers of the network's users. Every user shares a part of their hard drive, but only controls their own data - the rest is unreadable to them thanks to encryption. What's more, in order to prevent spam and incentivise the users to share their space, SAFE Network is going to have its own native cryptocurrency - Safecoin - but it won't be blockchain-based, unlike the other cryptocurrencies.