Quote from: trout on April 26, 2014, 11:03:52 PM

Hi,
may be I just fail at googleing, but I can't find a proper technical description of
how maidsafe is supposed to work. I'm mostly interested in the proof of resource
and whatever is the analogue of "blockchain" for the safecoin (the "token").
I'm not looking for the implementation details or the source code, just a paper to read
so that I can understand how it is supposed to work.

Their whitepaper is pretty vague. It just says that Safecoin .... will be injected into network using the storage space related mining procedure. What is this mining?

Also for Proof of resource it doesn't say how cheating is prevented, how the transactions are ordered, etc.
It just says If any cheating is detected, the used_space will be changed to reflect that.
But doesn't explain who defines cheating, etc.

In short, I'd like to see a proper paper with all the necessary crypto details and proofs wherenever necessary.
Does such a paper exist?

There is some headline info here metaquestions.me/2014/04/12/safecoin-why-its-safe-and-what-it-means-for-us-all/ adn a ton of debate and detail on the developer list. We also have some info on the internal proof of resource token, but not publish state yet. You can see in the github history of the white paper (bad name). safcoin is a mutable data element on the network, if you check the docs here you will see how that works https://github.com/maidsafe/MaidSafe-Vault/wiki/Documentation adn the overview of the stack here maidsafe.net/network-platform-developers . The crypto details are in the common library (cryptopp wrappers).

This all needs pulled into a single implementation detailed design and this will happen pretty soon. If you think mutable signed data elements (xferable, so last and current owner, signed by last owner) then you will see it easily enough I think. The farming and builder algorithms though are a little more complex and several personas (from the vault docs) are chained in consensus groups of up to 6, these all have to agree on several items, these are then hashed and a PUT attempt is made on the network. If the key is empty for that coin then it is considered created. Otherwise teh attempt fails.

So detailed design doc to come. Should not be long and it will appear in the wiki on github and on the dev mailing list.