Internet 2.0 Cometh, with WEB3
Autonomi Network is real, about to be unleashed as a DAO for the world, WEB3 included.
The Token Genesis Event TGE for Autonomi Network is happening,
January 25th, 2025.
That said,
around this time last year, the rumour chatter mill started on the Maidsafe Forum about a new incoming “Queen ANT” to lead the Maidsafe team to a new ‘Genesis Event’ Nirvana.
At first I was a bit skeptical, but at the same time hopeful. The Maidsafe team original inventor was still at it, David Irvine, ‘nose to the grindstone’ if you like. After what he had been through, no one in the crypto world would have blamed him for ‘packing it in’, perhaps defeated by the challenge of building a private internet layer for the people on top of the existing Internet, essentially giving back the Internet to the people.
I discovered the incoming ANT Queen (A meme had been posted on the forum generated with AI depicting her as such), was one Sarah Buxton, of Gala Music CEO fame, and early COO at Gala Games, was arriving to take over the reigns, not really introduces to the community at large, as I was a fringe observer, part time blogger in the Maidsafe Forum, until March of 2024, I came to know her by her handle “Bux” via a short video intro posted on the Maidsafe Forum. A London School of Economics grad et al, Bux on on a few calls, stated she had been a consultant for several big companies at some point early in her career.
I had been causally following Maidsafe and Irvine since late 2017.
I saw Irvine and his first team ‘turn into’ distributed Proof of Stake “dPoS” Consensus land, only to get muddled down in the early machinations of trying to figure out how to adapt/fuse their vision for Internet 2.0 with dPoS.
Then after Irvine shedding a few early team members along the way (likely I found out later not quite buying into Irvine’s dream of a Free and safe Internet for the people), I noticed Irvine and what was left of Maidsafe, after a few false starts trying to launch, had pivoted hard in my opinion, some time in 2021, back to their original white paper design.
That pivot back to the original White Paper regained the attention I had given Maidsafe in the first place.
AS such, I re-engaged trying to catch up with where Irvine and Maidsafe were now going on Github, and also started reading some more recent Maidsafe forum posts recent and also in the past.
I soon discovered based on some of their technical choices, Rust language being one of them, that Irvine had re-found the Maidsafe Mojo. That and I was actually quite impressed with their stamina and frugalness (Given US $15M does not go that far for that long, Seven years since 2014, easily), to some how manage not to flatline the project and just plain give up.
In the Beginning
How did I become aware of Maidsafe?
Well really around 2013 was the first time I had hear the ‘Massive Array of Internet Disk’ MAID story from a colleague in the Toronto area, one with whom I still work.
Around 2015, a bit later, I caught Irvine on a August 2014 Youtube video recording with Max Keiser Report when he was still running his show in London, in 2015 ‘sans Stacy’. The Maidsafe pitch done with Irvine and his then COO was a modest one which I found really intriguing, where at one point Irvine was describing a huge Andreesen and Cerf nod he received when they said (to paraphrase) “Yes this is how the Internet should have been built in the first place”.
That nod, plus the huge ‘Internet 2.0 Build’ challenge of the Maidsafe vision and based on my on experience and expertise, told me the Maidsafe “Safe Network’ was doable, given I was then and still am a hard core networking and distributed application development guy.
Later though, I put ‘2+2’ together doing a search on Irvine’s tech background, finding a claim somewhere in an Irvine bio or intweview posted on the ‘Net’ of his claim ‘he had built the biggest network in Saudi Arabia’, which meant to me then, that was Saudi Aramaco.
Biggest Network in the Middle East where Irvine cut his teeth
Why Aramaco? Because I was working at the time with Cisco Systems in Europe in 1993–94 when that was going on and was helping the local Sales Manager in the Middle East Khalid Ashraq (with his local distributor at the time Gulfstar), so I had heard a thing or two about the giant ‘biggest of its kind in the area’ network being built by ‘Aramco’, since Mr. Ashraq was expert in getting everyone else to do his work for him, using anyone at Cisco to help him move things along, with Aramco and his local distributor (Given Mr. Ashraq like most Sales people, are indeed ‘coin operated’).
So it was then around 2016, I assumed Irvine was indeed either the prime System Integrator Network Engineer working for a contractor of Armaco, or possibly working for another Solution Integrator contractor in the field of big software systems that ran on that giant Aramco network, or doing both as was the case in a lot of circumstances back then given TCP/IP talent was quite thin in those days, because the Internet Protocol “IP” had become central fast to any sort of software solution that big, in the day likely around 1992–93, and still is today.
Now, looking back to 2006, Maidsafe’s story is a REALLY interesting one, always centred around David Irvine.
Maidsafe was the ‘2ND Ever’ Initial Coin Offering (after MasterCoin) back in September of 2014 or so, a ‘raise’ if I recall, of about US $15M to get going.
Maidsafe’s ICO intake , selling what was an OMNICOIN Token called Maidsafe was a record at the time that held that record for a little bit until the whole ICO raise craze thing got super crazy, peaking in Late 2017 and into early 2018 with what seemed ridiculous Market Capital Valuations as the time. most all of the craze was fueled by VC frontmen piling vast quantities of ‘spare’ speculator money into almost any ICO no matter how ridiculous it seems, powered largely by FOMO.
Before that though Irvine was working on Maidsafe as early as 2006, a couple of years before Bitcoin was released to the world in late 2008.
Fast forward to now, December 19th, 25 minutes before Midnight in EDT terms, and her I am writing about the coming of Internet 2.0, “ Autonomi Network” style with WEB3 support included, the new Maidsafe brand for what until recently very early this year, was called “The Safe Network”.
I will continue, in the morning, as I am ‘beat’ by the drudgery of the day now past. Besides we have been told we will be introduced to “DAVE” tomorrow, so read on to find out more. ;)
Well after a reset of my node at 4:30pm yesterday, after earning two test attos, the reset was to add a second node then, this morning I woke up to see I had earned yet another atto. Attos during this test phase are converted likely 2 to 1 real ANT token which gets credited to my Wallet address via an Airdrop sometime after the TGE event, Jan. 25th/24.
The backside of the control panel accessed with ‘Ctrl + O’ reveal how the setup works for the wallet, it’s really quite easy.
During test mode, this rudimentary control panel is accessed using a program downloaded from the www.autonomi.com site for your OS type (MAC, Windows and Linux is supported. mobile support is for a future release, likely much later in 2025)
‘DAVE’ is the first edition of the much anticipated software Upload client (Mac, Linux and MS Wind10/11) for the Autonomi network, which does not require you to be a “Noderunner”. Just pay one time, upload your files for a small fee, and your private data or file is permanently protected, for ever.
Your keys, your data, accessible from any machine at anytime, downloaded for free forever.
Well today is supposedly the day we get to see DAVE as an OG ‘Original Gangster’ of the community, which is really those folk super active following Autonomi and contributing ideas and even useful tools to check state of the Autonomi Network during the last six months of Test network operation.
And Surprise, I am greeted after waiting the most of the day to 4:20pm, to check Discord and see that at 12.22 my time today I receive the post from BUX on Autonomi News Channel in Discord:
“Lastly, I mentioned on the Stage last night that ‘Dave’ would be with us today, but in typical Dave style he’s going to be later than hoped … the plans we have to use him kick off in the New year, (he will be a big part of testing for some of the application reward aspects we’re developing, which also attach to the DAO for token holders)”
Not surprising, so it’s software development after all, what ever the devs tell you is the ETA measured in developer days, double it and add 50%, and that is when it will be showing up.. :)
So we wait until the New Year to see DAVE.
Really the last month or so has seen the Autonomi Early release ‘beta’ network for ‘testing/debugging’ payment purposes morph to use the arbETH Layer 2 sidechain to record Wallet atto earnings.
The Autonomi Wallet (I use MetaMask) will at some point require the addition of another ‘ANT’ Token being added to the Wallet, where the post TGE earnings of the Autonomi Network will also be living on that ERC-20 compliant arbETH (Arbitrum rollup Blockchain to keep Ethereum Gas fees low and transaction postings per Epoch really fast) sidechain.
The Autonomi Foundation (Based in Geneva, Switzerland) is operating the governance of the Autonomi Network and is expecting to call the token the ‘ANT’ Token. (Presumably standing for Autonomi Network Token).
As for the WEB3 capabilities, much of that depends on Maidsafe development team delivering the SDK ‘Software Development Kit” and necessary APIs “Application Programmer Interfaces’ for each of the Autonomi Network Components which can be viewed here
I just checked my antnode earnings on MS Windows 11 2H2024 edition and no additional test attos earned:
Converting your PC into a Passive Income ANT EARNING MACHINE
At the moment Memory Use is 220MB of RM per antnode, with 32GBs of storage plus 3GB for ‘very verbose easy to read in English’ log storage used to debug the network by the Maidsafe team.
Its important to note that optimizing antnode EARNINGS of ANT Tokens will require a bit of thought when setting up yourself as Noderunner.
While its possible for instance to double my memory to 16GB in this older Acer Aspire Notebook running an i5 10thgen 8Core 16 thread processor, and run more antnodes, the big question is how many?
I need to take into consideration how much memory I need for my own applications and the CPU % I expect to use and number of cores and threads these apps need, and also the storage needs given this old notebook has only 246GB of useable capacity.
The post TGE Autonomi Network antnodes will use 64GBs of storage per node, and roughly the same amount of memory 220MM of RAM, but only after the nodes settle.
It’s important to note at node startup a few nodes on this system will consume up to 35MB per Node and almost 50% of my memory at times when first connecting to other antnodes.
I will be able to use post TGE my existing same wallet setup, simply adding ERC-20 protocol conformant ANT tokens to my current MetaMask Wallet (specified by Maidsafe for use during beta) and linking them to the correct Maidsafe published (likely on Discord) arbETH ‘Arbitrum Rollup’ Side chain. Other Wallets are supported, just check the documentation for which ones in the New Year, likely after Jan 6th, 2025 in my opinion.
WHERE WEB3?
Their WEB3, that is Autonomi’s, is enabled as a WEB3 platform for developers to create whatever distributed applications they want via the SDK and the APIs for the various Autonomi components. Given there is a month to go, the documentation on Github is for sure lagging from what we as OGs have been told is happening the Autonomi Forum, so really no surprise as the team takes a bit of a breather during what is the now the upcoming holiday week, pretty well anywhere.
Suffice it to say, the Maidsafe announcement of the Autonomi Network SDK and API build availability are interleaved with the upcoming ‘DAVE’ client capabilities to be released in the New Year. The latter ‘DAVE’ upload client has been built and rebuilt multiple times in the last two months internally at Maidsafe, with the underlying goal of the Autonomi Network and its users staying invisible with deep protection, while still affording the developer distributed solution building capabilities at scale. It’s a tall order for sure delivering DAVE, the API and the SDK all at once, so I eagerly anticipate the release and the early SDK and API, which will have limited but useful functionality I am sure, in it’s first iteration available to the public.
Queen ANT Lead ON!
Outside looking in as a peripherally engaged OG, Bux I think has proven herself to be A VERY competent leader with strong communication skills, morphing the core Maidsafe team out of their previously ‘endless applied research, timelines, what are those?’ moods and into a cohesive small ‘dev , test and DevOps’ team that actually delivers on what they have espoused and promised in the past nine months, hitting most targets on time and just missing targets by a day or two. So kudos to BUX, Irvine and team for delivering on what is the biggest promise out there in techie land, to give the Internet back to the people.
When the community is not happy, Bux is not happy.
The Autonomi community interaction has also been relatively frequent by Bux and informative via Discord Stage and X Spaces, even though some OG purists still have their shorts in a knot’ about embracing the dual ERC-20 Token and Native token design strategy that has unfolded rapidly the past six months. The OGs rightly so are getting impatient, after exhibiting so much of it over the years and can now see its really happening, so are also pushing hard to make sure their voices are heard, and to a large extent they have been heard.
Crypto Media Fair Warning!
As Maidsafe rejoins the main stream of the cryptosphere by launching the Autonomi Network on January 25th 2025, some of the crypto media concerns with sway and the ‘brights’ to look into Autonomi Network are in for a pleasant revolutionary surprise.
For some unbelievably, Irvine and his team, despite the huge odds stacked against them have persevered. Maidsafe led by Irvine have actually delivered on their long standing promise to create a new private Internet For the People, overlayed on top of the existing Internet, having gone places where no crypto software team dared to go.
And the best part? Once released, the Autonomi Network Distributed Autonomous Organization cannot be stopped, as growth is organic, bottom up. Better still, the Autonomi Network antnode to antnode access and upload client access is via QUIC flow controlled HTTP over UDP enabled, so no one in their right mind will be blocking their UDP ports, because shutting off UDP traffic will bring their entire own network down. and put them out of business.
The early signs that Irvine and team, along with some key community members have fixed the Internet to launch Internet 2.0 as Autonomi Network is now emerging on github for all to see.
While fixing the Internet and returning it to the people, David Irvine and his Maidsafe dev/QA team, in its creation of Autonomi Network, are in the last stages of finalizing the release of ANT Token, a new monetary form that is not blockchain but DAG Directed Acyclic Graph settled and distributed ledger recorded.
ANT token really represents a new form of money (not currency) which actually turns any physical compute, memory and hard storage value you own , in the form of any old PC, into an ANT Token monetized store of unrealized value, value that is realized the moment your antnode issues a quote and wins the reward for sharing storage capacity and uploading files then copying and distributed the encrypted chunks to other connected nodes to keep one’s permanent data safe and private on the Autonomi Network.
Let the above sink in a bit. You bought your PC hardware with Fiat.
The Hardware is physical asset.
With Autonomi software loaded, one transforms that hard store of value, essentially compute, memory and local bus and storage (your drives SSD and/or HDD) assets and turns them collectively into a new form of tokenized resources when are exchanged for ANT tokens, others also earn ANT doing the same, sharing their resources and also spending ANT to upload their own files.
Noderunner, Autonomi Style
Your revived or even new PC system is now an Autonomi Noderunner, a passive income generating machine that you own, which you get paid ANT Tokens for sharing your data to store others uploaded encrypted data files permanently, making copies stored by other nodes to ensure they are always available as nodes come and go.
In the near future, as more resources join the Autonomi Network and are shared the money supply also grows, backed by shared storage realized, that is paid for by uploaders of files and data (using DAVE) that have either earned the ANT tokens running antnodes, or have converted their fiat to ANT tokens and purchased the shared storage one time with ANT tokens to upload their files, permanently, now stored for ever as long the Autonomi Network exists.
So ANT is a real form of money combined with resource sharing and renting utility that is created bottom up by US the people.
You, simply by sharing resources can convert those PC resources, via into a hard form of money where the inflation of the money supply of ANT is controlled by the algorithm of shared capacity available versus how full the capacity of the entire is at any given time coupled with the automated controlled Emissions of tokens which starts at 10% and over time 15 years declines to less than 2%.
As is the case in any form of new money, it takes time to supplant other currencies backed by political control of that fiat currency’s supply, which itself was artificially created from nothing.
Converting fiat to ANT means spending the fiat on hard computer system assets, some of which may have been converted years ago when one converts an old machine into a Noderunner to earn some ANT tokens, which are real money backed by hard stores of value, namely physical storage and compute and RAM and bus bandwidth, real hard assets.
These hard assets will over time depreciate in utility and value as drives will wear out, chips will stop working, but new hard system resources assets will be purchased, this time with ANT money and be added tpo the Autonomi Network.
THE BRAVE NEW WORLD of ANT MONEY
Autonomi Network is a brave new world of ANT money as much as it is a brave new world of WEB3 commerce, both coming at you really fast in early 2025.
Keep this in mind during the Autonomi Network test phase as many as 110,000 antnodes have been tested in operation, by more than 6,500 separate IP addressed systems. That is a big network, a really big test network, the size of giant Data Centers, but its distributed worldwide running on nodes from everywhere on the planet.
Holder of ANT money will re-shape the world, bottom up.
When you have downloaded Autonomi, started your antnodes to become a Noderunner, you will have earned your first ERC-20 conformant ANT tokens within 24 hours.
ANT in fact is a real form of money backed by hard resources, as you have just turned your extra storage space and compute cycles and ram and the use of your system bus and Internet access link speed into a passive income earning machine.
The above is VERY cool given you can also convert those ERC-20 ANT tokens into Ethereum(Bitpay) or into USDC then Bitcoin (Bitpay et al) to buy other stuff or use it to help pay your bills in January.
This time though when one buys Ethereum or Bitcoin with ANT, you are actually buying these cryptocurrencies with real money backed by real sharing of assets, your ANT tokens, not fiat, some of which where generated the system without the help of Fiat transforming itself into the hard money which is ANT.
Folks, as the details of DAVE the upload client and it’s related WEB3 API and SDK become known in the next week or so, I will be sharing that info on another Medium post.
Until then,
Download Autonomi Network, EARN some ANT tokens, a new form of Money and Utility, while uploading your files and sharing your storage to permanently protect your data and the world’s data !
Live long, ANT Prosper!
TK over and out. ;)