David Versus Goliath

A transcription of David Irvine, Scottish engineer from MaidSafe, in a radio interview on the 11th of May 2021 on the show "Declare your Indepenence" with Ernest Hancock, talking about the upcoming Safe Network.

Scribe's Note:

Text inside parentheses is me, as is the title. Ellipses are sometimes used to mean text left out or a sentence that trailed away. Text is only ever left out for reasons of readability.

In general, I chopped and changed text only when I considered that no meaning was lost and that it helped make things readable, and this was almost always minor and straightforward.

This is a first transcription for me, but I have taken it seriously and strived for accuracy, and don't think I have missed anything important. After several re-reads and re-listens I don't think you'll catch me out, but if anyone spots anything, please do get in touch with JayBird at https://safenetforum.org/. My submission to public scrutiny is also how you can be assured of the accuacy of this transcript.

I tried to get in touch with Ernie before publishing to check with him that it's ok and didn't hear back, I presume he is busy. I invite Ernie to get in touch if there is any issue and I will be responsive to any request from him! Thanks also to Ernie for doing the interview, I enjoyed it more with each listen.

I'm publishing in good faith, on my own initiative and unrelated to MaidSafe the company. My unabashed hope is that anyone interested can learn more about the Safe Network and the mad Scotsman who started the whole thing.

The 38m25s mp3 file of the interview is available for download from the following page https://www.freedomsphoenix.com/Media/304326-2021-05-11-05-o11-21-ernest-hancock-interviews-david-irvine-maidsafe-on.htm.

Read time is 25-30 minutes.

End note.

1.10: Ernest Hancock -> David Irvine is on from Troon, Scotland. (Story about the FBI banging in the door of one of Ernie's radio colleagues because they had set up a Bitcoin ATM, ramming vehicles, yanking the wires out of the wall and all). Well first off, make sure we got you there David, say hello to the audience, introduce yourself.

2.21: David Irvine -> Hello everyone, this is David Irvine, of MaidSafe in Scotland. We're working on decentralising the internet, or decentralising the power of data. Basically, putting data back in the hands of the people.

It seems to me a critical thing, whether you like governments or don't like governments or whatever; there's no need for anyone else on the planet to have any say over your data, your thoughts, your messages to other people. These all are a fundamental human right.

It's not even that we're seeking privacy, we're just seeking reality. The reality is that when you speak to someone, ever since we were cavemen and cavewomen and were communicating, we didn't have third parties in the middle. That's a barnacle that's grown since... (inaudible, presumably since the advent and rise of servers).

3.18: EH -> (Talks about a Bitcoin conference maybe in 2013 where David, added at the last minute, was very well-received. Mentions how David's work predates Bitcoin. How the MaidSafe ICO sold out in five hours, and how that sent a strong signal to many people about decentralisation being an important space. He sees MaidSafe as the future, and is happily hodling his MAID).

7.15: (Musical break, poetry corner, Pirates Without Borders, no roads, a festival of fun. Ernie keeping excitement sky high.)

9.10: EH -> Alright David, I want you to monologue me, we need to get people caught up. They wanna know what's going on with this MaidSafe thing, so help me out. Why do you call it MaidSafe, when did you start doing it, how long were you working on it, then crypto came and everybody went "oh like that", so go ahead, tell us a story man, go.

9.30: DI -> Well the story started, it was a typical engineering thing. Engineering being: what's the next problem? A bit like physics - what should we solve, what's the problem?

Working in computers and networking through the nineties it was quite clear that one of the problems was complexity. Complexity of setting up servers, getting people to connect to them, companies to talk to each other and whatnot, and it didn't make sense. It just made no sense whatsoever.

So I started looking into, around about 2002, 2003, why do we lose data? Why are passwords being hacked? Why is all this stuff happening? And obviously we all know, from 2002 onwards, that has just got dramatically worse.

Companies have seen that they can set up servers on other people's behalf and steal all their information - take all their data. Track you, analyse what you're doing, change the way that you think.

So this is all obviously incorrect, and it's incorrect not because there are greedy companies about, it's not that. There are greedy companies, there's manipulation at huge corporate level and government level, but that's a byproduct of doing something completely and utterly wrong.

So when we look back, the story started when I was sailing about on a yacht. I took a couple of years out to try and work out why, why has mankind done this, why have we done this silly thing of giving up control of our deepest thoughts and data and communications? Why is this happening?

For many years I was trying to tell people that this is a serious problem that we're sleepwalking into and now, in 2021, we're almost looking back and saying, this is a huge problem, and the reason we think it can't be solved is...

Ultimately, go back to the fundamentals. The internet started. People had computers, they connected to the internet, and rather than connecting those computers to each other, corporates came in, very silly engineering, and created servers. Which were computers that everybody connected to to connect back to someone else.

So, a central point of control. A man in the middle of every bit of communication that you have with every other person on the planet; it doesn't make sense.

MaidSafe came along, and the idea was very simple. It was - we don't need servers, we don't need government control, we don't need data centers, if we take the unused resources on everybody's computer.

Way back in those days it was before even mobile phones which have become a big thing now, which changes things slightly. Everybody had a computer - the spare capacity on all of the computers on everyone's desk was 30 to 300 times larger than the likes of your google, and your amazon, and these types of companies.

We as a species already had all the spare capacity to store everybody else's data. And to do it in such a way where all that you have to do is really come up with a network that says: all of these computers will connect to all these other computers in a secure way and they'll all store little bits of data on every other computer in a way that the computer network knows where the data is, but humans don't.

When you log into your computer and you want to look at your photos those all come back to your computer that you've logged into - whichever computer that is. The photos all come back to your computer, just like lots of little bittorrent things. It makes a lot more sense.

Then you actually don't need to store your own data on your own computer. Now it starts to make even more sense.

My firm belief is, if you get a child, and you show them a picture on a computer of their favourite dog, for instance, and they crawl along the floor to another computer, they want to know, why is that dog not on the other computer? Why is this thing different? Why are these different keyboards showing me different information?

Or an alien species looking from outer space saying, "That's fantastic, look, all these people have got this internet thing, all the computers are connected together, they must be able to communicate very freely and openly and be able to innovate and invent and come up with new things. They're almost acting like a single organism. The power that they will be able to progress their society at must be insane..."

And then when we look a little bit deeper down and say hang on a second, what's google, what's amazon, what's the government, what's firewalls, what's all these things, what have they done! What have they done?!

They're all connected to the one network, and specifically not connected to each other. They have asked other people to allow them to connect to each other. They're asking other people, "Can I please have access to my data - it is mine after all!?"

These other people - the corporates and governments - might say no. Information is power, and I think we all know that. Data is much more valuable than any money, or any gold.

Data is the thing that you need as a species. I mean, give a caveman a hundred dollar bill, or a big block of gold, or give him the knowledge to light a fire. What makes us go forward isn't the block of gold, it's not the money, it's knowledge. So knowledge is extremely important.

The whole MaidSafe philosophy is not really to - and you see some other projects saying we're going to compete with Amazon AWS, or we're going to compete with... - and the MaidSafe philosophy is: we shouldn't compete with any other third party that's in between people's data. We should make them immediately irrelevant.

16.30: EH -> (break is announced by Ernie, music, fresh cup of tea for everyone)

18.00: EH -> ... What was your history in I.T.?

18.18: DI -> I started off in computers almost at the beginning with Thorn. I started as a graduate engineer. Prior to being in computers, I actually was a mechanical engineer, a time-served apprentice.

So I'm quite happy with a hammer, a vernier gauge, a welder, plumbing, all that sort of stuff. Then did electrical and electronic engineering, then moved on with Thorn as a graduate engineer working for them and quickly became their networking and communications go-to person and went through the whole graduate thing, worked for a lot of very large companies.

I eventually went out to Saudia Arabia. They were building at the time what was the world's largest network. There were seven different campuses, two thousand kilometers of single-mode fiber cabling. They had to get this network designed, and that was my job, it was designing the world's - I think it still is - the world's largest private network.

Did that and then came home to Scotland after a few years and thought - why is it only large companies that are able to get this kind of skill, why not small companies? These smaller companies, they need to be able to communicate, get on the internet and whatnot.

I ended up working for quite a few small companies and fell into almost a corporate thing again, until realising that the problem wasn't the (inaudible) of designing a network. It shouldn't be that difficult, it should be - you plug the thing in, you're connected to the internet, speak.

At that point I ended up designing an all-in-one server called 'eBoxit', that you just plugged in, and it worked. It had things like Google Docs on it. That was around the mid nineties. Couldn't really get funding to take that any further, but that was a simple - every company can just plug this box in and they're connected to the internet, they have their website, have their internet, have all their docs online.

Then I looked and thought, why are these things... Why do we need to put back-ups on them? Why don't they just back up each other?

That sent me down a road thinking - there's a real problem here. The real problem, basically: computers don't connect to each other.

I looked at it, I ended up writing a whole bunch of patents, I think about 38 of them (hearty chuckle). To try and get investment at the time in the U.K. you had to do that - you'd to write patents to give some king of proof that you're not a crazy person and you could build what you're speaking about.

I then ended up, round about 2004, 2005, developing the whole MaidSafe concept. MaidSafe, really, it's a play on a technical term, RAID, and MaidSafe means 'Massive Array of Internet Disks, Secure Access For Everyone'.

The 'Secure Access For Everyone' is quite interesting because at the time I also wrote a security portal for the European Union Medical Association. Thirteen member countries of the European Union in the early 2000s, they had to securely transmit documents so that no-one had read them. I designed and wrote that system for them.

MaidSafe basically is 'Massive Array of Internet Disks, Secure Access For Everyone'. And I think... I would describe myself not as a computer scientist, but as an engineer.

A typical day for me could be welding something in the morning, tending to some sheep, working on a robot thing, looking at actual intelligence: how do you transition A.I. to actual real intelligence.

99% of my time is currently: let's get this MaidSafe Network out into the wild. That's what we're doing at the moment, and one of the reasons I wanted a network like this is obviously to free people, to free data.

But as A.I. comes along, and actual intelligence comes along like continuous learning devices, not what we've got just now - can you drive a car, can you recognise a cat's picture, those are not intelligence. Those are just advanced machines, they're not intelligent machines.

When we get to intelligence, the ability for then those kinds of things to communicate and cooperate over a secure network is going to be vital. And the ability for everyone to access that intelligence is going to be vital.

I come from very much an engineering background. I got involved in computers, got involved in networking at a very low-level, where Cisco and Wellfleet and all these companies were after me for a while.

Came back to Scotland and worked on MaidSafe. I thought no, the whole thing's wrong, the whole thing stinks. It's all slewed towards the corporates. The ordinary small company, and the ordinary people are excluded from this whole thing.

That's really what was the drive to get MaidSafe up and running; there's a bit of maths, a bit of cryptography, a bit of networking, but primarily engineering. The whole concept of real engineering, I think is lost at times - it's not about complexity, it's actually about the opposite. It's about simplicity.

Similar to - I mean I spoke to you years ago about this - what drives the design of these things. Nature does drive the design. Looking at - I've spoke about it many times - an ant colony, each ant follows very simple rules, and they make sophistication out of this complexity. They have done for 150 million years.

You see projects and they're talking about polynomial expansion of some calculus-type thing; nature doesn't work with all that nonsense. If you really want to do this, and you want to do it right, you've got to make it simple, and it's got to be so simple, that it works.

The other thing that is also critical when you're designing something like a decentralised network, a network for the people, is that you cannot - and this is where computer scientists and some engineers I think get it very wrong - you cannot control the world. All that you can do is react to the world.

You cannot say - you can only update this document, and then this next document, and then this next document... You've got to be able to say - well lots of people try and update lots of things at the same time, some computers will be fast, some will be slow, some might not have data for a second then get it later.

Really, it's a bit like neuroscience and where we're going with intelligence at the moment, and what people are starting to discover is: the brain is not a very complex machine. It does amazingly complex things, but when you break it down into the cortical columns for instance, each neuron is doing a very simple algorithm. We don't know what that algorithm is but...

26.40: (Ernie jumps in and announces the break, the music has kicked in. Donna Hancock will help you sell your home in Phoenix, Arizona. With twenty years of experience, you'll be in safe hands, etc).

28.20: EH -> David Irvine was the genesis of my hope for the planet... Boom! What makes Safe different from IPFS...?

29.30: DI -> Where we're coming from is, we're not just a storage thing. If you look and say, we're going to create a storage network, you can do it very easily. Bittorrent did it years ago. It's very easy to create a storage network.

What we're doing is saying: it's not good enough. You have to replace the whole thing. The whole internet.

That means that you've got to have the ability to not only store data, but the ability to - in real time - manipulate data. So you have your facebooks, you have your twitters, and all the rest of it, running on that same network.

To do that, we're using spare capacity from people's computers. When people give up that capacity and other people's stuff is being stored all over the place, they get a reward of some kind. A token. That was always the design. And with that token you can pay to store more data yourself, or access the network yourself.

Then when Bitcoin came out, and it was cryptocurrency, it was like look, this stuff works. We said right - we already had a cryptocurrency design in 2007. We did a lot of work with Paul Grignon in Canada on that. He was a fantastic person with us.

Bitcoin was good in some ways, and the whole cryptocurrency thing was bad in other ways for us, because then everything became - oh look, you can do this and get money, oh look you can do that and get money. And we have all the time been saying: it's not about money. It's about data, it's about information.

The money is exactly as money was originally envisaged in the network. It's just a transfer of resource. It's a way to say "you've done something for the network, there's a thing, the network will now do something for you". The whole point of doing that is to make sure the people who are keeping their computers online are rewarded for keeping them online.

That works really well to use a currency there, so that you can be sure - not like bittorrent or some of these networks, where folks switch their computer off and then all of a sudden the file's not there, maybe it'll come back, maybe it won't - our proposition is very much different from that. You're replacing the whole internet.

Data has to not only be stored, it has to be guaranteed to be retrievable. All data has to be retrievable. And it has to be retrievable for a period of infinity.

If we're saying data is valuable, I'm not really interested in - you know, a lot of projects, what they'll do is they'll say, ok, you can store your stuff here for 4 bucks a month for however much data it is.

The MaidSafe approach is: that data is the most valuable thing that humanity has got, so we will store it for you, forever.

32.45: EH -> Now how does that happen? (mentions Pirate Box, a fun sounding project they are running themselves which involves 'pinning' data, seeding and mirorring.) How is MaidSafe making the data, once I load it, it's there forever and always, how does that work?

33.15: DI -> You don't need to pin it. That's the difference. Every single piece of data going on the MaidSafe Network exists for as long as the network exists. And hopefully, any future networks.

What we're saying is: you don't need to do anything else. When your data goes on the network, it's there forever. It can't be hacked, it can't be manipulated, it won't get viruses, that's a kind of cryptographic guarantee we've got. But the whole point is - the data is king.

You shouldn't have to create your own servers to make sure that your own data is there, just store your own data on them if that's what you want. The whole point is every single person on the planet can access this data free of charge - that's secure access for everyone. That's vital to us.

And secondly, when you do store data on the network, it has to be guaranteed to always be there. You don't need to jump through hoops. You don't need to do some kind of strange somersaults.

Thirdly, there can be no human intervention. In a lot of projects what they say is - oh you can run a box here, you can decide how much you're going to charge people to store your data - no way, that is exactly the road that we're not going down. That's exactly the stupidity that got us to people controlling access.

In the Safe Network, it's not possible to control access. It's not possible to refuse to store some stuff. You don't even know where it is.

So the whole point of the MaidSafe Network is: if you're going to democratise data, don't do it halfway. Don't take a half-measure. Don't tell folk you can also store it on a pinned machine, or a tape-drive for later. Do it properly.

To do that properly is a significant thing, but it's a good thing about being Scottish in one way - you're downtrodden by many other people, especially our neighbours - but we have got this ability to take on any challenge. And the challenge of MaidSafe is a considerable one.

Where we are today is, ok, it's great to have dreams but if you don't make them reality they're pretty much useless.

What we've done in the last twelve months has been transformational. 12-18 months ago we had some offices, there were people working in those offices, I wasn't one of them. Not everybody was working on launching this network.

We cut everything back. We cut the team down to a third of the size, we gave them a day off a week, so that they work less days per week, their day off can be any day they want. That increased the productivity per person by 40%.

This last 12-18 months, this team that are here just now, a lot of them from the community, a lot of them are there not because they're the best engineers in the world, or the best whatever in the world, you know, all this stuff that people say about their team... This team are a bunch of folk from the community, a lot of them have reinvested in the company, and they want to make the vision happen.

36.53: EH -> Ok we got like thirty seconds before the music starts, how close are we to seeing a major announcement, or package that we can use from MaidSafe?

37.05: DI -> The increasing velocity that the team have, for instance, is... We did a testnet years ago, and then 18 months later another one happened, and then I think it was about 3 or 4 years before another one happened after that. This team and the way they're working at the moment, we did a testnet about 6 weeks ago and we're onto a 5th one. The time between these tests is tiny now, days rather than months or years.

37.40: EH -> Where do they go to get more information David?... (music has kicked in, wrapping up)

37.52: DI -> The Safe Network Forum is the best place, at https://safenetforum.org.