#also the other reason i shied away from this being a 'l/n' event

[eir-parade]

i did the Best Summer Ever event story a few nights ago and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it in terms of my unit shuffle AU

initially i thought i was thinking i could make this the most awkward 3 days of the would-be leo/need girls lives by forcing them into a group together and making them perform a song during which you'd see the bittersweetness of them being together again but after everything is over, they would just as quickly split apart

but then i started thinking about haruka out of nowhere??????? and started thinking like wait you know.... what if instead i just use this event as a stepping stone for haruka to get over her stage fright????

and then everything spiralled horribly from then

i am currently staring at a google doc with ideas and an outline of this event story rewrite and oh this au shit gets SERIOUS

[knybits]

THE HATING GAME — 2

PAIRINGS —

↳ kochou shinobu x reader

SUMMARY —

↳ Geniuses within the same field yet rivals within each other’s eyes, your colleagues wonder when the sexual tension will break so that you two will become the department’s powerhouse couple so that they can enter you two into the couples contest against the other departments. Some things might have to be done by force.

WARNINGS —

↳ cursing, alcohol, smut  

[ Navigation ] 

—

Shinobu Kochou absolutely loathes you. 

And she doesn’t have a reason why. 

So because of this, she keeps her nicely painted lips curved upwards when she sees you. And when you pass her without a single glance, the words “fucking asshole” cross her twisted mind.

Neatly combed hair and glasses perched on your nose during lecture is (F/n) (L/n). The smell of coffee and always being surrounded by a group of friends is (F/n) (L/n). You’re the spare bit of warmth during a dead winter and you act like you work harder and are better than everyone else. 

That attitude is something she can’t stand, but you pull it off so well that your friends believe that you’re some genius and hang off your every word. 

But when Shinobu pulls up in skinny jeans and a frilly white crop top, red heels to pull the outfit together, and she sees you dancing without a care in the world, something inside her snaps. She’s glad that she talked to Mitsuri over call before going, else she would have never decided to go to the club and celebrate (celebrate what she doesn’t know.)

She quickly tips a shot down her throat, relishing in the burning satisfaction, before patting her cheeks and strutting onto the dance floor.  When someone makes a move to grab her wrist she bats them off, a dangerous look in her eyes. 

“What’s wrong sweetcheeks!” They yell over the music, advancing on the petite woman. Shinobu takes a step back before bumping into someone, hearing your slurred voice right in her ear. Shinobu quickly apologizes under her breath before backing up even more and swaying her hips into your lap. 

Surprisingly enough, you’re quick to respond, hands cupping her waist and she allows herself to press her back against your chest. Sure, the stranger is looking at her as if he doesn’t believe her, but she feels safe in your chest (as ironic as that may seem, considering how you’re both grinding up against each other.)

The man makes another step towards Shinobu and she clicks her tongue in distaste. As a final move to tell him to back the fuck off, Shinobu takes your hand to grope her breast. The man looks surprised, and she sticks her tongue out at him before mouthing “I have a partner, you prick.” 

That’s enough to finally steer him away, and he rolls his eyes obnoxiously before walking over to the bar and surveying anyone else that might catch his eye. Shinobu yelps in surprise when fingers loop her waistband, spinning her around to face your flushed face. She can’t help but look at your lips, a fire fighting within her. 

Are you even aware of what you’re doing? A year and a half of ignoring each other, but do you really even hate her? Or was your silence a sign of shyness? 

Does she even hate you? 

“Fuck it,” she thinks the minute you open your pretty mouth to ask for consent, her her arms slide around your neck. 

She can taste the alcohol in your mouth, tongue exploring as she hums with delight. But something in her feels empty as she realizes you’re intoxicated. She pushes on, fingers dancing under your shirt and feeling the warm skin underneath. She can’t help but gasp when you move your hand to grip her ass, and your tongue immediately dominates. 

Shinobu hates how easily she let you have your way. Her hate is weak, but in your arms she’s weaker. 

It’s no secret that your tongue is what gets her screaming the loudest. Shinobu remembers the whole night in vivid detail. She couldn’t help but gasp your name over and over while she was strapped to the chair, big doe eyes blindfolded from the rest of the world. 

You were aggressive when you rammed her up the wall, mouth biting and sucking at her neck and jaw while you mercilessly thrust your fingers into her very wet pussy. She remembers how she whimpered and begged your name to fuck her harder, faster, deeper, and the second she came onto your fingers you called her a “good girl,” and that drove her wild. 

And now Shinobu is sore and confused. Every inch of her body throbs while you snore lightly by her side. You barely have any marks on your body and she’s pissed that she’ll have to wear some heavy makeup for a while. 

To be honest, Shinobu could go for another round with you right now. Morning sex hits differently to her, and now that you’ve most likely slept off the alcohol you’d be sober enough to know what you’re doing. But there’s the chance that now that you know what you’re doing, you’ll run out of her apartment without a second thought. 

She hates how you make her feel. Just yesterday she hated your guts for acting like royalty, for ignoring her “hello” with a roll of your eyes. And now you’re in her bed, the smell of sex so strong it makes her head spin. 

Her perfectly manicure nails skim over your skin, and she finds herself writing the kanji character for ‘hate’ before you stir. Shinobu is quick to draw her hand back, and she’s amused with how slow you are to figure out where you are. 

Finally, you turn your head to face her, but the look on your face screams “regret.” And now Shinobu has her answer. Despite the twisted carnage that rages within her, she smiles. 

“Good morning, (F/n). Did you sleep well?” 

– 

“Hi (F/n)! It’s Araceli. Shinobu said she would take you back to her apartment since you were too shitfaced, so I hope you’re okay! I went home with Michael tonight so you don’t have to worry about me. Send me a text when you can, and I’ll see you in the lab!” The voicemail ends as you enter your apartment, body and mind exhausted. 

The second you crash land onto your bed you grab a nearby pillow before yelling into it. 

Because god damn you fucked up. 

Not only did you have drunk sex with the one person you hate, you also said something completely dickish as you walked out the door. 

“This was a mistake,” were your last words as you shut the door to Shinobu’s apartment. You didn’t get to see her face throughout the whole 10 minutes of shame, adamant about putting your clothes on with your back facing her, and she didn’t say anything the whole time. She just let you leave. 

The clock ticks away as you grovel on your bed, head pounding while flashes of last night whiz through your head. You should've known it was Shinobu. 

The same purple eyes, the same petite figure (she’s 4’11” and the shortest in the department, hell yeah you know her general figure size,) the same high pitched voice that screamed your name- 

You groan in annoyance, hands raking through your hair before you decide to run a hot shower to burn away any trace of the witch from your body. 

When you finally walk into the lab all eyes turn to you. With eyebrows raised you decide to just make your way to your usual station, waving and greeting everyone a good morning. Maybe they’re looking at you because you finally found the time to go home and take a shower? 

The most you do in terms of keeping up appearances is taming your hair to the best of your abilities, so maybe they can tell that you aren’t wearing the same clothes from the last three days.

Once you’re at your station you see the stupid “department couples” poster sitting there again, and everyone shies away from your razor sharp glare as you survey every potential perpetrator. 

You pick the poster up to crumple it and throw it away when you see a picture of Shinobu and you shittily photo shopped together with stupid hearts around you two. That’s when you scream in frustration and everyone jumps. 

Araceli spots you the minute she walks in and she rushes over with some water, seeing as how drained you are. When you’re about to thank her, lo and behold the witch herself waltzes into class. 

You almost spit up your water when you see how she’s walking, stiff and with a small limp, and you almost feel guilty. Araceli gives you an odd look, and you try to wave her off. But Shinobu- that snake- sits herself beside Rama one station away from you and Araceli. 

Rama looks at her quizzically, considering they don’t talk too often, but he shrugs to himself and goes back to texting his physics major boyfriend. 

You’re trying to mind your business (sans Araceli because she’s taking her sweet time wiggling her eyebrows at you and glancing between you and Shinobu. Her words: that sexual tension is thicc. If only she knew.) and conduct your experiments, but once Rama finishes his conversation with his boyfriend, he and Shinobu start some small talk. 

Shinobu gives you a quick look when she asks Rama if he went to the club last night and you pale considerably. 

“Oh, I spent the night in with my boyfriend,” Rama smiles politely before continuing. “Is that why you’re a little stiff today? Too much dancing?” He laughs to himself and Shinobu gives him a close eyed smile. 

“Things were just super hot and heavy last night!” 

Araceli’s eyes widen and she stares at you with her jaw dropped. You snap at her to keep working, but you can’t help but stop working too. In fact, everyone else in the room goes dead silent, and you pray that Shinobu will keep her damn mouth shut. 

“Wha-“ 

“I take this night yoga class, you know!” Que a sigh of relief from you. 

“I’m super flexible,” she boasts before adding in. “I can spread my legs quite wide!” You fumble with your test tubes, mind flashing to a few events from last night. 

Araceli begins to laugh silently at your red face and you nearly throw her out of the window. When you turn to secretly glare at Shinobu you find that despite the fact that she’s facing Rama, her eyes are pinned onto you. A malicious smile makes its way onto her face when she knows that she has your attention. 

“And then right after, I have a pole dancing class to keep me fit.” 

Rama laughs, “Oh really? Sounds fun!” 

“It is! But yesterday I was dumb and I jumped onto the pole and uhh……. rammed my…” She looks down and onlookers flush red. “So I’m quite sore today!” 

There’s the sound of shattering glass from another station (not your own, but you’re damn near close to breaking the Erwin Meyer flask in your hand.) Now, Shinobu’s just trying to rile you up. 

And it’s working. 

Also, you hate to think it but THANK G O D HE’S GAY. 

“Ow, well that sounds rough…”

“If I could, I would take the classes on different days, but there aren’t many classes available so my hands are tied.” 

Everyone in the lab startles when you slam your hands onto the counter, stool screeching against tile as you stand from your seat. 

There’s a look of victory in Shinobu’s eyes and your stomach twists with rage because she’s such a bitch. She relishes in the dark look in your eyes, your tense shoulders and the way you make your way up to her. 

“Can I help you, (F/n)?” She asks innocently, and you feel something in you snap. Everyone holds their breath when you whip a hand out, gripping the lapels of her lab coat and bringing your face down to her’s. 

Shinobu shivers when you leans in close to her ear and murmur under your breath, “How about you stop being such a dirty whore, be a good girl, and meet me behind the building, hm?” 

You smirk when you see how she shifts in her seat and crosses her legs, and you shove your hands into your lab coat pockets, walking out of the lab with a shocked puppy in tow. 

—

[ Next Chapter ]

[imagination-of-a-melted-bitch]

Collaborative Embarrassment || Han Jisung

Prompt: can you please do a Han Jisung scenario with an older reader?

Pairing: Jisung x reader

Word count: 2.442k

Warning: second hand embarrassment (??)

Y/L/N Y/N, the name carried weight. You were easily the most respected artist in the industry, Kpop and western music alike. Everyone knew who you were and if they didn’t it was safe to say they had been living under a rock.

“Is this the room?” You asked your manager, realizing she couldn’t see the number as she was on the phone and not beside you like you were used to her being. “I’m sorry,” you go to tell her the number only to hear a chorus of laughter from inside the room. “Actually never mind,” You softly chuckle, thanking her and hanging up. “This should be fun,” You take a deep breath and push open the door of the practice room, finding the group of guys tussling about, most likely having a friendly competition of seeing who was the strongest. “Hello?” Your voice is too soft and your accent too light to be one of their managers and this instantly catches all of their attention, everyone turning their heads toward you, horror painting their faces.

“Oh my god!” Felix screams, he knew who you were right off the bat. He followed you on every social media website you had ever made and shared with your fan base. “It’s Y/N!” He sounded similar to the fans that came to see him and the others, screaming like a maniac, running around like a chicken with his head cut off. “Do you not know who she is?” He asks once he realizes the others were still frozen in their previous spots, not even bothering to move into decent positions. Felix now realizes he may have over reacted and most likely embarrassed not only himself but the group and shies away, hiding behind the cluster of guys.

“Hi,” you wave, watching as they slowly begin to untangle themselves. “I’m-“ there’s a chorus of them beginning to explain how they knew who you were and how they all loved and cherished every song and music video you had dropped. “Thank you,” You were never usually this shy around people but for some reason it was as if they were staring right through you, reading you with ease and that was kind of unsettling. “I’m going to assume you guys haven’t been told, but we’re going to be collaborating,”

“What? No way!” Jisung is the first to speak on his own since Felix had sat down and tried to fade away from existence. “That’s so cool! Why weren’t we told earlier?” Jisung is truly struggling to keep his cool. First of all, he loved you and not like the others had said they loved you, he was head over heels in love with you. Emphasis on the word in. He had all your posters in a box under his bed, all your albums and photo cards, no one was as big as a fan as he was and he commended himself with how well he was acting in your presence.

“Yeah!” Chan stands up, looking around the room, only to find that the ten of you were alone. “Oh...well, hi, I’m Chan,” he makes his way towards you and takes your hand with a gentle grasp, giving it a nice shake. “I’m stray kid’s leader and as some say, father,” he looks stressed as he says this, as if he were having flashbacks from war.

“Nice to meet you Chan, believe it or not I’m actually a really big fan of you guys as well,” you shrug, your words were simply meant to let them know there was mutual respect but they nearly made them all pass out. “Are you guys okay? You guys need some water?” You pull your water bottle out the side of your dance bag and hold it out to them. “Don’t worry I don’t have cooties,” you mock younger boys and put the water bottle back in your bag when no of them make a move to take it from you. “Hmm, you guys a little shy?” You drop your bag and decide against taking off your windbreaker not needing them to tense up again at the sight of you in your dance wear.

“You’re so cool,” Jeongin whispers mindlessly, staring at you in awe. “Much cooler than Chan hyung,” His eyes only shift toward his leader for a second before he turns back to look at you. “No offense or anything of course,” He smiles adorably, rocking himself back and forth, his face lit up like a child who had met their hero.

“No worries Chan,” you giggle, watching his brows raise with an unreadable expression on his face. “I promise I’m not after your position.” You clamp a hand on his shoulder, slightly shaking him a little. “I just wanted to meet you guys before I had to head to the hotel.”

“You could totally stay here!” Jisung blurts out but covers his mouth with his hands, eyes darting around the room, hoping to avoid your intense gaze. “I’m sorry, I really wasn’t thinking before saying that!”

“Oh no it’s totally fine. I wouldn’t want to impose or anything. Also I don’t think us staying under the same roof is a smart idea because most of you haven’t even looked at me for longer than ten seconds since I’ve walked in,” Everyone’s cheeks deepen in color, someone coughing in an attempt to clear the tension in the room. “It’s fine! I’m not upset or anything, I completely understand! If you guys want the honest truth I’m really nervous right now,” you smile softly, scratching the back of your neck at your own confession. “I’ve been a big fan since hellevator, I wasn’t lying or trying to calm you guys down earlier...” you jut out your bottom lip and look back toward the guys, lips slowly tugging into a smile. “All I ask is for you guys to treat me like a close friend, not like a big star or whatever, I just want to be...like one of the guys.” This seems to make them relax but you knew it’d take a few days for them to completely warm up to you but you were patient and willing.

“Do I have to call you noona?” Seungmim asks softly, scared everyone would blow up on him at his question. “I don’t mind!” He quickly recovers, “You know what? I’ll only call you noona! I’m sorry! Forget I even said anything!” He hides his hands in his face and it seems like he’s about to cry. He felt so idiotic and embarrassed. He wished he could fade away much like Felix still did.

“No.” You put all his worrying to ease. “I understand elders are an important part of Korean culture so of course I’ll call you guys ‘oppa’ when need be but you guys don’t have to call me noona,” you motion for them all to come in, “I’ll let you guys in on a little secret,” You motion for them to come closer than they were before giggling a little. “I’m not Korean so I’m not really worried about it, plus I won’t tell anyone.” You look around the room, subtly winking at the nine boys.

“Wow! You’re so awesome!” Jeongin continues from earlier making you softly roll your eyes.

“I’m sorry, ignore him. He doesn’t really know how to act around pretty girls,” Hyunjin comes to the younger boy’s rescue and covers his mouth before he can say anything else. Jisung’s jaw tenses as Hyunjin, someone who obviously knew about his love for you, sweet talked you.

“Thank you...” you cough, returning to your previously shy form at the compliment. “Yah!” You jump back, shaking out your arms and legs, slapping your cheeks to regain your composure. “That’s not fair! No compliments, they...they make me feel funny.” You shy away making them all laugh at how cutely you reacted to Hyunjin’s simple compliment, that hadn’t even meant to carry any weight besides saving Jeongin’s hide.

“But how could we not compliment someone so pretty?” It’s Changbin and you’ve been warned about him. Your eyes widen and you playfully hit his shoulder, instantly feeling bad when he makes a noise of hurt and rubs his shoulder.

“I’m so sorry!” You side hug him and he smiles, winking at the others. “Oh you little bug,” you drop your arm to your side and softly push him away from you.

“You said you were here for a collab?” Minho brings up what you had said earlier, something you were sure none of them had remembered with the events that had taken place in the last twenty minutes. “This’ll be fun,” he smiles to himself, doing eight counts in his head.

“I think our voices will blend the best!” Woojin hits a note from nowhere, shocking you. He was truly a vocalist and the thought of singing alongside him made you feel warm inside. He continues with his note and motions for you to join him. You look around the room nervously but decide to shake away your worries and join him, taking a second but eventually harmonizing with him. Everyone gasps in awe at how beautiful the two of you sound.

“Holy crap!” Felix pulls out his phone and records the moment. “I have to have this forever,” Felix sniffles and wipes away a fake tear making you break your note to laugh.

“You guys are even better in person.” You clap your hands, “I’m sorry to disappoint you Woojin but my manager told me I’d only be rapping in the song...and well, dancing of course. Maybe we can do something on the side, just the two of us?” Woojin smiles brightly at this and Jisung sees this as his chance and pushes toward the front of the group and cutely raises his hand.

“I’ll be happy to help,” This was his moment, helping you write a verse for the upcoming song would be a perfect opportunity to spend one on one time with you and he could make his move then.

“Yeah right like she’d be interested in a kid like you,” Changbin growls playfully, snagging Jisung’s head under his arm and rubbing his knuckles against his scalp. Your brows dart up and an awkward silence falls over the room again as Changbin had gotten too comfortable and told you about Jisung’s crush on you. “Ah crap,” Changbin lets go of Jisung and moves to the other side of the group.

Everyone watches you with bated breaths, all of them on the edge of your seat to find out how you’d react to the information. “Hey! I’m only a year older than him, what are you trying to say!” You playfully glare at Changbin and wrap your arm around Jisung’s shoulders, pulling him into your side. “Plus I think we’d make a cute couple,” You rest your head against his not knowing that you were actually killing Jisung with how cute you were and with the thought of you actually being into him.

“You know what they say,” Changbin puts his hands up on mock surrender, “Don’t knock it until you try it,” he’s happy the awkward silence didn’t last too long, he liked you and hoped you stayed around even after the song was finished.

“Yah!” Jisung exclaims, Changbin’s words doing nothing but embarrassing him further. “As warm as you are noo-Y/N, I don’t think this is proper position.” You drop your arm to your side, letting him stand up straight. “Wouldn’t want the others to get jealous or anything,” he tries to play off his own embarrassment by making fun with the others.

“Right, right,” You play along, hoping to have melted away his embarrassment. You knew how bad rejection hurt and wouldn’t wish the feeling on anyone, plus he was cute. “Anyway,” you clap your hands together again, “I’ll be by bright and early...around noon...around two?” Everyone gives you a thumb up, they had been up since four this morning and would very much need the extra rest and time to clean their dorm incase you decided to come by. “Okay I’ll be around tomorrow at two, and we can start making a beat. There’s no need to rush...” you eye the bunch, softly smiling as they clung on to your every word, you were going to like them.

“It’s late so we’ll be heading to bed, it was so nice to meet you,” Chan is the first to grab your hand, giving it a firm shake before rushing out the practice room. They all follow his course of action, exiting the room quickly until you and Jisung were the only ones in the practice room. You suddenly realize what the others had done, leaving the two of you alone.

“Well...” Jisung whistles, looking awkwardly around the room.

“Listen, about all that earlier, I didn’t mean to embarrass you or anything. I was trying to do the exact opposite believe it or not...” you shove your hands in the pockets of your sweats and pretend to kick something on the ground.

“Oh I wasn’t embarrassed just overwhelmed,” Jisung naws on his bottom lip, hands clenching into fists at his sides. “It’s just, I really like you, which probably sounds really weird because I’ve obviously never met you but I really like you and you’re so talented at everything you do and you’re so pretty and it makes me-“ you put your hand over his mouth, cheeks split into the biggest grin.

“I get it! I get it!” You drop your hand to your side. “Don’t worry about it, you’re really pretty too,” you wink at him, and he nearly faints. “Please don’t faint!” You grab his arms in hope to keep him up straight.

“I won’t, I won’t,” he reassures you, his flushed face a dead give away that your words carried more weight than you’d ever know. “It’s just-“

“Don’t you dare,” you let him go, holding up your hands before he breaks off into a ramble again. “Look, I don’t usually write raps for upbeat songs, you’d know better than anyone else...I’m more of a slow and sensual kind of person so I’m going to need a lot of help.” You nudge him, hinting that you’d be more than happy for him to help you.

“I would love to help you! You can come around earlier tomorrow if you want! I’ll be up! I’ll wake up at any time of the day for you!” You giggle and pinch his cheek. He was so cute.

“Ah! I’ll see you tomorrow, at two! You need to sleep!” You bend over and pick up your dance bag. “I mean it Jisung! Sleep or I’ll ask Changbin to help me!”

“No! I’ll sleep! I’ll go to sleep right now!” Jisung exclaimed, watching you walk out of the dance room, the biggest smile on his face.

[senseless-septic-shambles]

Miles To Go Before I Sleep - Chapter Ten.

Summary: Jackieboy Man has been missing for so long even he is losing hope of ever finding his way home. Henrik Schneeplestien is struggling to cope after the events that left Jack in a coma. Chase Brody is trying to piece his life together after it crumbled around him. Marvin is feeling separated from his family. Jameson Jackson is fighting his own demons. And Jack is sleeping through it all. Ev̡ęr͝ythi̸n͏g is go̡i͞ng̢ acc̕ord͏i̶ng ţo̕ ̡p͞la̡n͠.͞ ҉

Links: Under the ‘Miles to Go Before I Sleep’ heading on my page, or search the ‘#Miles to go before I sleep’ tag

Warnings: Nothing really.

A/N: Brief Hiatus is over, but I’m still figuring out how my life looks at University, so updates may be a little spotty until I figure out when a better time to post is and figure out a routine. Love you all, thank you for sticking with me! Betas are @dinadinu @xtracheesy,@a-septic-writer-of-art and  @softgreysweaters . Dina also drew the banner.

An annoying buzz in his ear woke him. Marvin groaned, trying to pull himself out of his dream fogged sleep. He rolled over in an effort to block out the sound, but it persisted.

Pushing himself up on one elbow, hair falling in his eyes, he woke up enough to realise it was his phone. With a groan, he reached out to grab it, answering and dropping his head back onto the pillow.

“Mmm?” he said as a greeting.

“Marvin, right? It’s Jacob from Rickety Stool.” Marvin groaned again, closing his eyes. Rickety Stool was Chase’s favourite bar, and this wasn’t the first time Marvin had received a call from its owner. Chase had a knack for getting into trouble.

“Is it Chase?” he muttered, his voice still thick with sleep.

“I’m afraid so. He’s causing quite a disturbance, and you did say to call you before I called the police.”

“Yeah,” Marvin said. He groaned once more, very tempted to leave Chase be and let him face the consequences. A night in jail might do him good.

But he couldn’t do that - if Chase was out drinking again it meant that things had clearly not gone well with Stacy. And she could use an overnight jail trip to push for full custody of the kids.

So he let out a long sigh and nodded slowly.

“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” he said reluctantly.

“Thank you, sir,” Jacob said, and Marvin grunted, hanging up. He didn’t move for a long moment, wishing he could drift back into sleep. He was exhausted - using that much magic at once had sucked all his energy.

With effort, he pushed himself up, adjusting his mask into a more comfortable position. He hadn’t even bothered taking it off earlier, he had been too tired. Running a hand through his hair, he managed to escape from the call of his blankets.

A commotion was forming in the corner of the bar when Marvin stepped through the door. He could make out Jacob - a tall, dominating figure - standing near them, clearly trying to keep the peace, but he could tell it was about to get out of hand.

He quickly crossed the space, joining the edge of the crowd. Peering through the heads, he saw, with slight disappointment, but not surprise, that Chase was standing in the middle, eyes blazing. He looked ready to fight - and he looked very drunk.

“Y’spilt m’drink,” Chase growled, glaring up at another man. The man was much larger than Marvin’s younger brother and was backed by two other equally large figures.

“Yeah, well, maybe you should have thought about that before barging into our business,” one of the growled, stepping forward and shoving Chase in the chest. He stumbled back, swaying wildly.

Marvin held his breath, praying that he wouldn’t do anything stupid. But Chase was Chase, and anger flashed in his eyes and he snatched up the bottle beside him on the bar. He swayed slightly, paused, then flung the bottle in the general direction of the man who had pushed him.

Given his intoxicated state, Marvin wasn’t too surprised when it missed entirely and shattered on the head of one of the bystanders. For a frozen moment, no one reacted. Then, the victim of Chase’s bad aim let out a loud cry and shoved himself forward.

“Alright then! Is this how it’s going to be?” he demanded.

“Okay, okay, settled down!” Jacob tried desperately, raising his hands and trying to push between the angry crowd and Chase.

“This punk needs to be taught a lesson,” one of the men growled, glaring at Chase. Chase glared right back, snatching up an abandoned shot and downing it.

“Well take it outside then,” Jacob said shortly. “I don’t need any more mess in here.”

“M’not goin’ anywhere,” Chase slurred.

“You sure about that?”

Marvin groaned softly, knowing he would have to intervene soon before Chase got hurt. Despite the temptation to let him get a bit of a beating in the hopes that it would teach him a lesson, Marvin knew he couldn’t let that happen to his younger brother. So, he pushed his way to Chase’s side.

“M’rvin!” Chase called as he caught sight of him. “What’re you doin’ ‘ere?”

“I’m taking you home,” Marvin said shortly, grabbing his shoulder.

“In a moment,” the man Chase had hit with the bottle said sharply, one had pressed to a large cut from the glass of the bottle. “We gotta teach him a lesson first.”

“As much as that is tempting to allow, I’m afraid I can’t do that,” Marvin said, his voice dark. He was too tired to use much magic and he hoped that he wouldn’t have to try too hard to get them to let him go with Chase.

“I don’t think so. If you wanna join him in his beating, I won’t stop you though.”

Marvin sighed softly, letting his eyes glow slightly. He held himself up to his full height, trying to seem as intimidating as possible, eyes glowing, magic making his cloak flow softly. The men stepped back slowly, muttering uncertainly to each other.

“I suggest you let us go,” Marvin growled.

For a moment, he was afraid they would keep persisting. He wasn’t sure what he would do then - he certainly didn’t have the energy to take on four fully grown men and look after Chase.

But too his immense relief, they backed down, the crowd - sensing a fight wouldn’t actually break out - stepping back as well.

Marvin wasted no time, keeping a firm hold on Chase’s arm and all but dragging him out of the building.

“I don’ wanna go, Marv,” Chase complained, trying to pull away.

“You need to come home and sober up,” Marvin snapped. He was tired, he was frustrated and he was angry at Chase. Even as drunk as he was, Chase seemed to sense that and didn’t fight as they made their way to the car.

They were quiet for a long while, Marvin focusing on not crashing in his anger, Chase thankfully noticing the atmosphere of the vehicle. But about five minutes away from the bar, a low whining filled the silence, and Mavin glanced at Chase to see his shoulder shaking.

He sighed softly, knowing what that meant. It meant Chase was in a clingy, needy drunk mood now. He wasn’t sure that was any better than angry drunk Chase.

“I take it things didn’t go well with Stacy?” he asked - anything better than that horrible noise. But it was clearly the wrong thing to say - Chase’s sobs got louder and more pitiful.

“Damnit Chase - I swear I will drop you off on the side of the road if you don’t shut up!”

“Sh - she’s not l-letting me s-see the ki-ids anymore,” he whined, wiping his eyes and looking up. He suddenly gagged and Marvin cursed, slamming the window down.

“Outside!” he snapped, and to his relief, Chase turned and hurled the contents of his stomach out the window - not into his car. He knew from experience that was not a smell that left quickly.

They fell into an uneasy silence for the rest of the drive, Chase occasionally sobbing or hiccuping. Marvin drove perhaps a little too violently, but he was angry and wanted to go back to bed.

Chase leaned on him heavily as Marvin unlocked the door and stepped inside, muttering occasionally. Once inside, Marvin made a beeline for Chase’s room.

“Straight to bed and you can sleep it off,” he said sharply, lowering Chase onto the bed.

“I wanna see Jackie,” Chase muttered.

“Well Jackie doesn’t want to see you like this.”

“You’re being meeaaan he’s my brooother.”

“Jackie needs his rest, alright? If Henrik says it’s okay you can see him tomorrow.” Marvin sighed, pressing clutching the bridge of his nose through his mask. “Damnit Chase, you have to stop drinking like this.”

“Stacy’s fault. She’s being meeaaan.”

“Stacy saying you can’t see the kids is no reason to get wasted at…” he glanced at the clock, muttering a curse. “Chase it’s 4pm.”

“An ‘m not tired! You’re a meany!”

“You need to stop! Alright Chase!” Marvin snapped. He was sick of it. He was sick of picking his brother up, he was sick of seeing him in such a state.

“Stacy’s being mean!” Chase snapped back.

“Stacy’s not in control of your actions!” Marvin shot back. “You are an adult Chase - start acting like it.”

“Why should I listen to you?”

“Because I’m your brother and I hate seeing you like this. Listen to me, Chase -”

“No one likes you though!” Chase shouted.

Marvin flinched. He couldn’t help it - Chase’s words cut too deep. He tried not to let it show, but Chase clearly picked up on the impact that had on him. He stumbled to his feet, swaying, and glared at his older brother.

“No one likes you cause you’re not a favourite. An - an the community never cared about you and Jack didn’t even give you a name so you’re just a big meany!” He shoved at Marvin’s chest, stumbling slightly. 

Marvin spun around abruptly, not meeting Chase’s eyes.

“I’m leaving,” he said shortly, storming out of the room. He didn’t hear Chase’s response as he slammed the door behind him.

He almost made it to his room before Henrik cut him off.

“Marvin - there you are. We must have a talk about Jac-”

“Piss off, Schneeplestein!” Marvin snarled, not in the mood to talk. He tried to ignore the way Schneep recoiled away from him, the bright flash of fear that shone in his eyes as he shied away from Marvin. He didn’t care and slammed the door behind him, leaning against it.

He let out a shaky breath, ripping his mask off his face and flinging it across the room, suddenly not wanting the prison across his face. Sinking down the door, he angrily wiped tears away from his eyes. Crying was foolish - he knew that what Chase said was true. And he knew that Chase didn’t mean it - he wasn’t in his right mind.

But Chase’s words had echoed what he had been thinking for the past few weeks.  Chase’s words spoke too clearly that his secret thoughts were true. He wasn’t liked. The others didn’t care for him.

A flicker of light caught his attention and he looked up to see his computer flash to life. Frowning, he stepped forward slowly, unsure why it had turned on. A message flashed across the screen, a familiar note.

“Fe͟ȩl̵ìng d͜ow̛n, ̨ki͢t̸ k͡a̴t̛?̷”

For a long moment, he just stared at the screen, hesitating. Then, slowly, he sank into the seat. He knew he shouldn’t - he knew who was sending the messages, he knew this was dangerous. But somehow, he couldn’t stop himself. 

Who else was there to talk to? 

Tag list: 

@watermelonsinmyattic  @cute-anxious-kitten @asunachinadoll @aesthetic-ego @iris-the-asparagus @plutoandpolaris @vity-dream @fangirlintrovert @viostormcaller @squishygamermama @theblackphoebe @anqshusxx

[feyria]

Loose cannon

It was the middle of­ the night and he cou­ld barely walk straig­ht- granted he had ju­st downed a whole bot­tle of vodka. He blam­ed it on Mako for thr­owing the celebration­ party in the first p­lace, they had succee­ded in locking Black ­Magic up for good and­ the harpy goddess in­sisted it was the per­fect reason to party ­deep into the night. ­Leon knew he should h­ave declined the invi­tation when he had th­e chance but he just ­figured hey, it'll on­ly be for a little wh­ile right? He would o­nly have maybe one or­ two drinks right? Ab­solutely not; Lycan h­ad challenged him to ­a drink off at Raigek­i's request and he co­uldn't exactly back d­own with everyone wat­ching. Needless to sa­y, he was victorious ­and there was a very ­"sleepy" wolf hanging­ by Rai's side for th­e rest of the party. ­He had left the party­ immediately after th­at before Rai could c­onvince him to do any­thing else crazy. Leo­n stumbles again and ­he places his hand on­ the wall to steady h­imself, it wouldn't d­o him any good if he ­fell over before he c­ould reach his target­. He was more than su­re that he would be a­wake at this hour- th­e man rarely if ever ­slept and it wouldn't­ be the first time he­'s popped in to see h­im. Although, this wo­uld be the first time­ he shows up complete­ly intoxicated with s­omething more than ju­st reprimands on his ­mind. He reaches the ­room and enters witho­ut bothering to knock­; Rodrick was seated ­on the bed watching t­v and Leon steps in f­ront of it to block h­is view. Rodrick look­s up at him, "can I h­elp you?" Leon stares­ at him for a few sec­onds, dully noting th­at he's missing a shi­rt at the moment, "yo­u...need sex to live ­right? Just like all ­the other inccubi." R­odrick raises an eyeb­row, "uhh yeah I do- ­what, are you doing s­ome kind of project o­n my kind or somethin­g?" Leon didn't feel ­like deeming that wit­h a verbal answer, in­stead he moves in clo­ser to Rodrick; one h­and on his bare shoul­der while he connects­ their lips in a soft­ kiss. He can feel th­e incubus stiffen bef­ore he relaxes into t­he kiss, but then he'­s pushing Leon away a­nd looking at him str­angely, "are you feel­ing okay man? Normall­y you're always on yo­ur high horse about n­ot being gay or wanti­ng to do anything lik­e this with other gu-­" Leon places to fing­ers on Rodrick's lips­ to silence him, "you­r talking is annoying­. Right now all I wan­t is for you to do me­, okay?" Rodrick gape­s at him like a fish ­before something chan­ges in him and a wick­ed grin appears on hi­s face, "really?~ Wel­l I would love to do ­you but....why don't ­we do this my way?" F­eeling intrigued but ­slightly impatient fo­r reasons he doesn't ­understand, Leon cros­ses his arms, "what e­xactly IS your way?" ­Rodrick chuckles, "we­ start with you using­ that normally snippy­ mouth of yours to pl­easure my dick~ then ­from there we'll get ­to the actual doing."­ Leon nods before spr­eading Rodrick's legs­ apart, his hands qui­ckly unzipping his pa­nts to grasp at the l­imp member inside. Hi­s eyes flick over to ­meet Rodrick's for ha­lf a second and then ­he's dropping to his ­knees, sliding his me­mber into his mouth a­s he begins to suck a­nd lick at it. He clo­ses his eyes in faint­ pleasure, it wasn't ­what he wanted right ­now but it would suff­ice for now. The thic­kness was just right ­and he could feel it ­twitch as it slowly l­engthens and hardens;­ his own body respond­ing as he feels an er­ection beginning to r­ise. He jolts a bit w­hen Rodrick's hand sl­ides through his hair­, fingers toying with­ his ear and Leon ope­ns his eyes to watch ­Rodrick's face. He no­tes the parted lips a­nd half lidded eyes; ­the way the incubus g­od seems to be enjoyi­ng this already and i­t motivates him to do­ more. He begins stro­king the erection par­tly to spread his sal­iva and partly to giv­e Rodrick more pleasu­re. Leon flicks his t­ongue along the sensi­tive slit of Rodricks­ penis and delights i­n the throaty moan he­ releases. Wanting to­ hear more of those m­oans, Leon indulges i­n running his tongue ­up and down the full ­length, swirling his ­tongue around the sen­sitive head before su­cking on it hard. He ­can hear Rodrick begi­nning to pant and fee­l the hand in his hai­r tightening it's gri­p. Another hand finds­ it's way into his ha­ir, toying with the s­trands before it slid­es down to caress his­ cheek and he raises ­his eyes to meet Rodr­ick's gaze. "You're d­oing great Leon but I­ think it's time we m­oved onto the next st­ep, no?" Leon detache­s himself from Rodric­k's nether region and­ allows him to direct­ his body towards the­ bed until he's seate­d on it, Rodrick lean­ing over his body to ­deliver a short kiss.­ He trails more kisse­s down Leon's cheek, ­his neck; then his ha­nds are slipping unde­rneath the fabric of ­his shirt and he shiv­ers at the feel of Ro­drick's slim fingers ­ghosting over his ski­n. He moves to connec­t their lips again bu­t Rodrick's hands are­ gently pushing him b­ack before they pull ­his shirt over his he­ad and then the incub­us allows him to brin­g their lips together­ again. This time Rod­rick leads the kiss a­nd his tongue is soon­ slipping into Leon's­ mouth, his hands ret­urning to trace light­ patterns over his sk­in and Leon sighs. Pe­rhaps it was the alco­hol but the kiss felt­ particularly nice, R­odrick's tongue was w­arm and slick but it ­also faintly tasted o­f mint. All too soon,­ Rodrick is ending th­e kiss but his lips d­on't exactly leave Le­on, instead they move­ down to his nipples.­ Leon flinches slight­ly at the feeling of ­Rodrick's mouth sucki­ng on him in such a s­trange spot, he didn'­t think his chest wou­ld actually be sensit­ive enough to give hi­m pleasure and he's r­eally not sure how to­ feel when Rodrick be­gins swirling his ton­gue around the harden­ed nub. He settles fo­r a mix of light moan­ing and panting just ­because it feels righ­t. Rodrick looks up a­t him with a smug smi­rk on his face, "you ­like that huh?" At Le­on's nod, he returns ­to swirling his tongu­e around the nub and ­toys with the other, ­gently twisting and p­inching it. His smug ­expression only incre­ases when Leon's back­ arches as a louder m­oan passes between hi­s lips. The strange p­leasure was quickly b­ringing him to full a­rousal and he runs hi­s fingers through Rod­rick's hair to get hi­s attention, "it feel­s nice but I want mor­e- I want you inside ­me." Rodrick jerks aw­ay from Leon and snor­ts, "wait really? If ­this is how you're go­ing to be then maybe ­you should drink more­ often~" He doesnt wa­ste any time removing­ the rest of Leon's c­lothing and then he's­ holding two fingers ­near his lips, "go on­ and get them nice an­d slick so I can prep­ you up. It'll feel m­uch better if you're ­loose." The intoxicat­ed lion obeys, partin­g his lips to take th­e two digits into his­ mouth where he then ­sucks and licks at th­em, down their length­ and in between them ­in a way that makes R­odrick shiver in arou­sal. The lion always ­went on and on about not liking men yet he­ sure knew how to get­ them hot and bothere­d. Rodrick pulls his ­fingers out of Leon's­ mouth before the nau­ghty lion's actions c­ause him to moan, "o-­okay that's enough of­ that...lay on your b­ack for me," Leon com­plies, spreading his ­legs as if he's tryin­g to give Rodrick a b­etter view of his alr­eady throbbing erecti­on which he tries har­d not to openly stare­ at. He distracts him­self with slipping on­e finger in Leon's en­trance, the smug expr­ession returning when­ he sighs in pleasure­. Rodrick begins thru­sting the single digi­t in and out until he­ feels Leon is ready ­for the second digit ­and then he's thrusti­ng them both in and o­ut of the lion, sciss­oring them for added ­pleasure and to stret­ch his entrance more.­ Leon continues to si­gh and moan in pleasu­re, he was enjoying t­he feel of Rodrick's ­fingers roaming aroun­d inside him; stretch­ing him in ways that ­hurt but also felt in­credibly nice. He wan­ted more of that stra­nge pleasure, "Rodric­k...can you use more ­fingers or maybe..." ­His gaze drifts down ­to the incubus's prou­d erection and he lic­ks his lips, already ­imagining what it wou­ld feel like to have ­it inside him. Rodric­k chuckles, "you're p­retty impatient over ­there. Give me a seco­nd and we can get to ­the main event." He w­ithdraws his fingers ­from Leon's body befo­re walking to a small­ dresser and he opens­ one of the drawers t­o pull out a small bo­ttle of lube. Leon's ­ear twitches, "you ha­d lube...why make me ­suck on your fingers ­if you could have use­d that?" Rodrick shru­gs, "wanted to see if­ you would actually d­o it. But anyway, can­ you pull your legs u­p a bit? It'll make i­t easier for me to fi­nish prepping you." L­eon rolls his eyes bu­t does as he's told, ­watching Rodrick squi­rt a little lube onto­ his hand which he th­en rubs over his erec­tion, stroking it to ­spread it around whil­e creating an erotic ­wet sound that makes ­him lick his lips aga­in. Rodrick slips two­ fingers into his ent­rance again to check ­that he's still prope­rly stretched and the­n he's replacing them­ with the tip of his ­penis; that strange p­leasure pain returnin­g strong enough to ma­ke Leon moan. Rodrick­ strokes his cheek as­ he continues to slid­e into him, "naturall­y it's going to hurt ­but I promise it'll g­et better~." He wasn'­t quite sure if he wa­nted to tell Rodrick ­that it wasn't hurtin­g him at all, he like­d the soft caresses o­n his cheek and didn'­t want to give him an­ excuse to pull his h­and away. Instead Leo­n simply nods and clo­ses his eyes to bette­r focus on the feel o­f Rodrick's penis del­ving deeper into his ­body, the hard thickn­ess stretching his in­ner walls to deliver ­that delicious pleasu­re pain he was quickl­y becoming addicted t­oo. By the time Rodri­ck is fully sheathed ­inside of him, Leon i­s already panting fai­rly hard and he opens­ his eyes to meet the­ incubus's gaze, "thi­s feels so odd but I ­want more...move your­ body for me." Rodric­k looks surprised for­ a moment before he s­norts again, "you wan­t more? Oh I'm totall­y never going to forg­et this- I'll give yo­u whatever you want m­y horny little lion c­ub~" He starts moving­ his hips and Leon's ­words are lost to a l­ong moan of sheer ple­asure. He had thought­ Rodrick's fingers fe­lt wonderful in his b­ody; this new pleasur­e had no words for ho­w good it felt. The p­ace was slow but the ­feel of something so ­much thicker moving b­ack and forth inside ­of him...all Leon cou­ld do was lay his hea­d back and moan, his ­mouth hanging open. R­odrick's hand is on h­is cheek again, cares­sing it sweetly, "wan­t me to move even fas­ter my dear?~" at Leo­n's jerky nod, Rodric­k picks up his pace a­nd the lion's mind go­es numb for a few sec­onds. All he can focu­s on is the sheer amo­unt of pleasure cours­ing through his body,­ making his skin ting­le, his body shiver a­nd his arms flail aro­und weakly as if look­ing for something to.­.he doesn't even know­ what but he can't ke­ep himself still. His­ hands finally find a­ place around Rodrick­'s shoulders and he p­ulls the incubus down­ to connect their lip­s in what has to be t­he most sloppy kiss i­n history, lips slipp­ing and sliding again­st each other before ­their tongues are tan­gling together. Saliv­a being exchanged lik­e fanmail as they bre­athe each other in. L­eon can vaguely hear ­the bed creaking but ­still he wants more; ­his legs wrap around ­Rodrick's hips in an ­attempt to draw him c­loser and he breaks t­he kiss to speak. His­ voice sounds more li­ke a series of pants when he moves to spea­k, "Roddy...m-more..I­ want..h-harder...ple­ase." Rodrick's voice­ is smooth in his ear­s, "harder it is then­, I won't disappoint ­you~," he detaches Le­on's legs from his bo­dy, shifting the lion­ around so that he's ­lying on his side wit­h one leg pulled up t­o rest on his shoulde­r instead of wrapped ­around his hips. The ­change in position fe­els slightly uncomfor­table but then Leon's­ mind is lost to plea­sure again when Rodri­ck resumes his hard- ­near pounding thrusts­, the feeling of Rodr­ick's head pushing ag­ainst a little bundle­ of something strange­ in him that makes hi­m nearly scream in pl­easure. Leon claws at­ the bed sheets, his ­tongue lolling out of­ his open mouth; he c­an feel drool trickli­ng down his chin but ­he doesn't care; all ­that mattered now was­ Rodrick and the plea­sure he was giving hi­m. Rodrick was slammi­ng a part of him that­ made his whole body ­tremble and his own h­ardened penis was gri­nding against the she­ets deliciously, pre ­cum just beginning to­ trickle out. He trie­s to speak but his wo­rds are hard to make ­out, what with them s­ounding more like int­ense moans of pleasur­e but luckily Rodrick­ has a faint idea of ­what he's trying to s­ay. The incubus trade­s his fast pace for a­ slow hard one; pulli­ng himself out until ­the tip remains and t­hen thrusting back in­ to ram himself again­st that same bundle o­f nerves. He could se­e how it was turning ­the normally aloof li­on into a drooling, m­oaning mess and he lo­ved it. The pain part­ of that strange plea­sure was completely l­ost to Leon but he wa­s slowly becoming awa­re of a new feeling. ­Something that was ak­in to a tsunami neari­ng over the horizon a­nd he wasn't quite su­re he wanted it to hi­t yet. Suddenly, Rodr­ick is shifting their­ bodies again and Leo­n finds himself seate­d on top of the incub­us, his hands splayed­ out on his chest; th­ose hips still moving­ to bring him pleasur­e and he doesn't ques­tion the change. Inst­ead, he shifts his ow­n legs around and rea­lizes that with the n­ew position, he can m­ove his own body to m­eet those sinful thru­sts. And that's exact­ly what he does; thru­sts his hips down the­ second Rodrick bring­s his own up and it h­its him like magic. T­he pleasure multiplie­s tenfold and an erot­ic sound of skin slap­ping against skin rea­ches his ears. His fi­ngers curl against Ro­drick's chest, his na­ils digging into the ­skin making the other­ man groan in the sam­e pleasure pain that ­affected him earlier.­ Leon's own moans are­ loud against his ear­s and it makes his ow­n penis twitch, a tin­y part of him felt he­ was enjoying this to­o much but he ignores­ that part- there was­ no such thing as too­ much pleasure. He le­ans down to connect h­is lips with Rodrick'­s in another sloppy k­iss, their tongues so­on joining as well as­ Rodrick's hands slid­ing up and down his b­ody; cupping his butt­ cheeks, pinching the­m and spreading them ­as he thrusts harder.­ That delicious sound­ of skin slapping aga­inst skin causing the­m both to moan in ecs­tasy and Leon can fee­l that tidal wave get­ting stronger. He bre­aks the kiss to tell ­Rodrick as much but t­he incubus silences h­im with a firm hand g­ripping his twitching­ cock, jerking it in ­time with those thrus­ts and Leon throws hi­s head back to moan l­ong and loud. His who­le body shudders as t­hat wave finally brea­ks free with his orga­sm, cum spurting from­ his cock to splatter­ across Rodrick's che­st. Leon's inner wall­s clamp down hard on ­Rodrick's member and ­it doesn't take long ­for him to reach his ­own orgasm, moaning l­ow as he releases his­ seed into the lion's­ body; the one hand s­till on his butt chee­k gives it a good sla­p that makes Leon jol­t. Leon isn't sure if­ it was the slap or t­he alcohol finally hi­tting him but all of ­a sudden he's exhaust­ed, his body slumps a­gainst Rodrick's weak­ly and he can hardly ­lift his head to give­ the incubus one last­ peck on the lips. Hi­s eyes are already sl­iding shut when he he­ars his own faint voi­ce whisper, "I love y­ou." The next morning­, Leon wakes to find ­himself nude and alon­e in what is clearly ­not his own bed. He n­early jumps out of th­e bed but notices a n­eatly folded pile of ­his clothing with a n­ote on top of it. As ­he dresses himself he­ reads the note silen­tly,  "Leon before you eve­n get the wrong idea ­I'd like to let you k­now that you came int­o my room clearly dru­nk off your ass. I tr­ied to convince you t­o go to sleep but you­ were having none of ­it...until you vomite­d all over yourself a­nd passed out. I had ­the misfortune of str­ipping you naked so I­ could clean you and your clothes up. I di­dn't put them back on­ you because I was af­raid you would wake u­p in the middle and t­ry to kill me thinkin­g I was doing the opp­osite. Anyway next ti­me stay away from the­ booze, you're really­ weird when you're dr­unk." Leon crumples u­p the note angrily, k­nowing full well that­ never happened but h­e was too embarrassed­ to admit what really­ happened. He gratefu­lly accepts the scape­ goat Rodrick was lea­ving him; if they wer­e both going to prete­nd they never had sex­...who was he to say ­any different? After ­all, he WAS extremely­ intoxicated last nig­ht. 

[endenogatai]

Not just another decentralized web whitepaper?

Given all the hype and noise swirling around crypto and decentralized network projects, which runs the full gamut from scams and stupidity, to very clever and inspired ideas, the release of yet another whitepaper does not immediately set off an attention klaxon.

But this whitepaper — which details a new protocol for achieving consensus within a decentralized network — is worth paying more attention to than most.

MaidSafe, the team behind it, are also the literal opposite of fly-by-night crypto opportunists. They’ve been working on decentralized networking since long before the space became the hot, hyped thing it is now.

Their overarching mission is to engineer an entirely decentralized Internet which bakes in privacy, security and freedom of expression by design — the ‘Safe’ in their planned ‘Safe Network’ stands for ‘Secure access for everyone’ — meaning it’s encrypted, autonomous, self-organizing, self-healing. And the new consensus protocol is just another piece towards fulfilling that grand vision.

What’s consensus in decentralized networking terms? “Within decentralized networks you must have a way of the network agreeing on a state — such as can somebody access a file or confirming a coin transaction, for example — and the reason you need this is because you don’t have a central server to confirm all this to you,” explains MaidSafe’s COO Nick Lambert, discussing what the protocol is intended to achieve.

“So you need all these decentralized nodes all reaching agreement somehow on a state within the network. Consensus occurs by each of these nodes on the network voting and letting the network as a whole know what it thinks of a transaction.

“It’s almost like consensus could be considered the heart of the networks. It’s required for almost every event in the network.”

We wrote about MaidSafe’s alternative, server-less Internet in 2014. But they actually began work on the project in stealth all the way back in 2006. So they’re over a decade into the R&D at this point.

The network is p2p because it’s being designed so that data is locally encrypted, broken up into pieces and then stored distributed and replicated across the network, relying on the users’ own compute resources to stand in and take the strain. No servers necessary.

The prototype Safe Network is currently in an alpha testing stage (they opened for alpha in 2016). Several more alpha test stages are planned, with a beta release still a distant, undated prospect at this stage. But rearchitecting the entire Internet was clearly never going to be a day’s work.

MaidSafe also ran a multimillion dollar crowdsale in 2014 — for a proxy token of the coin that will eventually be baked into the network — and did so long before ICOs became a crypto-related bandwagon that all sorts of entities were jumping onto. The SafeCoin cryptocurrency is intended to operate as the inventive mechanism for developers to build apps for the Safe Network and users to contribute compute resource and thus bring MaidSafe’s distributed dream alive.

Their timing on the token sale front, coupled with prudent hodling of some of the Bitcoins they’ve raised, means they’re essentially in a position of not having to worry about raising more funds to build the network, according to Lambert.

A rough, back-of-an-envelope calculation on MaidSafe’s original crowdsale suggests, given they raised $2M in Bitcoin in April 2014 when the price for 1BTC was up to around $500, the Bitcoins they obtained then could be worth between ~$30M-$40M by today’s Bitcoin prices — though that would be assuming they held on to most of them. Bitcoin’s price also peaked far higher last year too.

As well as the token sale they also did an equity raise in 2016, via the fintech investment platform bnktothefuture, pulling in around $1.7M from that — in a mixture of cash and “some Bitcoin”.

“It’s gone both ways,” says Lambert, discussing the team’s luck with Bitcoin. “The crowdsale we were on the losing end of Bitcoin price decreasing. We did a raise from bnktothefuture in autumn of 2016… and fortunately we held on to quite a lot of the Bitcoin. So we rode the Bitcoin price up. So I feel like the universe paid us back a little bit for that. So it feels like we’re level now.”

“Fundraising is exceedingly time consuming right through the organization, and it does take a lot of time away from what you wants to be focusing on, and so to be in a position where you’re not desperate for funding is a really nice one to be in,” he adds. “It allows us to focus on the technology and releasing the network.”

The team’s headcount is now up to around 33, with founding members based at the HQ in Ayr, Scotland, and other engineers working remotely or distributed (including in a new dev office they opened in India at the start of this year), even though MaidSafe is still not taking in any revenue.

This April they also made the decision to switch from a dual licensing approach for their software — previously offering both an open source license and a commercial license (which let people close source their code for a fee) — to going only open source, to encourage more developer engagement and contributions to the project, as Lambert tells it.

“We always see the SafeNetwork a bit like a public utility,” he says. “In terms of once we’ve got this thing up and launched we don’t want to control it or own it because if we do nobody will want to use it — it needs to be seen as everyone contributing. So we felt it’s a much more encouraging sign for developers who want to contribute if they see everything is fully open sourced and cannot be closed source.”

MaidSafe’s story so far is reason enough to take note of their whitepaper.

But the consensus issue the paper addresses is also a key challenge for decentralized networks so any proposed solution is potentially a big deal — if indeed it pans out as promised.

  Protocol for Asynchronous, Reliable, Secure and Efficient Consensus

MaidSafe reckons they’ve come up with a way of achieving consensus on decentralized networks that’s scalable, robust and efficient. Hence the name of the protocol — ‘Parsec’ — being short for: ‘Protocol for Asynchronous, Reliable, Secure and Efficient Consensus’.

They will be open sourcing the protocol under a GPL v3 license — with a rough timeframe of “months” for that release, according to Lambert.

He says they’ve been working on Parsec for the last 18 months to two years — but also drawing on earlier research the team carried out into areas such as conflict-free replicated data types, synchronous and asynchronous consensus, and topics such as threshold signatures and common coin.

More specifically, the research underpinning Parsec is based on the following five papers: 1. Baird L. The Swirlds Hashgraph Consensus Algorithm: Fair, Fast, Byzantine Fault Tolerance, Swirlds Tech Report SWIRLDS-TR-2016-01 (2016); 2. Mostefaoui A., Hamouna M., Raynal M. Signature-Free Asynchronous Byzantine Consensus with t <n/3 and O(n 2 ) Messages, ACM PODC (2014); 3. Micali S. Byzantine Agreement, Made Trivial, (2018); 4. Miller A., Xia Y., Croman K., Shi E., Song D. The Honey Badger of BFT Protocols, CCS (2016); 5. Team Rocket Snowflake to Avalanche: A Novel Metastable Consensus Protocol Family for Cryptocurrencies, (2018).

One tweet responding to the protocol’s unveiling just over a week ago wonders whether it’s too good to be true. Time will tell — but the potential is certainly enticing.

Bitcoin’s use of a drastically energy-inefficient ‘proof of work’ method to achieve consensus and write each transaction to its blockchain very clearly doesn’t scale. It’s slow, cumbersome and wasteful. And how to get blockchain-based networks to support the billions of transactions per second that might be needed to sustain the various envisaged applications remains an essential work in progress — with projects investigating various ideas and approaches to try to overcome the limitation.

MaidSafe’s network is not blockchain-based. It’s engineered to function with asynchronous voting of nodes, rather than synchronous voting, which should avoid the bottleneck problems associated with blockchain. But it’s still decentralized. So it needs a consensus mechanism to enable operations and transactions to be carried out autonomously and robustly. That’s where Parsec is intended to slot in.

The protocol does not use proof of work. And is able, so the whitepaper claims, to achieve consensus even if a third of the network is comprised of malicious nodes — i.e. nodes which are attempting to disrupt network operations or otherwise attack the network.

Another claimed advantage is that decisions made via the protocol are both mathematically guaranteed and irreversible.

“What Parsec does is it can reach consensus even with malicious nodes. And up to a third of the nodes being malicious is what the maths proofs suggest,” says Lambert. “This ability to provide mathematical guarantees that all parts of the network will come to the same agreement at a point in time, even with some fault in the network or bad actors — that’s what Byzantine Fault Tolerance is.”

In theory a blockchain using proof of work could be hacked if any one entity controlled 51% of the nodes on the network (although in reality it’s likely that such a large amount of energy would be required it’s pretty much impractical).

So on the surface MaidSafe’s decentralized network — which ‘only’ needs 33% of its nodes to be compromised for its consensus decisions to be attacked — sounds rather less robust. But Lambert says it’s more nuanced than the numbers suggest. And in fact the malicious third would also need to be nodes that have the authority to vote. “So it is a third but it’s a third of well reputed nodes,” as he puts it.

So there’s an element of proof of stake involved too, bound up with additional planned characteristics of the Safe Network — related to dynamic membership and sharding (Lambert says MaidSafe has additional whitepapers on both those elements coming soon).

“Those two papers, particularly the one around dynamic membership, will explain why having a third of malicious nodes is actually harder than just having 33% of malicious nodes. Because the nodes that can vote have to have a reputation as well. So it’s not just purely you can flood the Safe Network with lots and lots of malicious nodes and override it only using a third of the nodes. What we’re saying is the nodes that can vote and actually have a say must have a good reputation in the network,” he says.

“The other thing is proof of stake… Everyone is desperate to move away from proof of work because of its environmental impact. So proof of stake — I liken it to the Scottish landowners, where people with a lot of power have more say. In the cryptocurrency field, proof of stake might be if you have, let’s say, 10 coins and I have one coin your vote might be worth 10x as much authority as what my one coin would be. So any of these mechanisms that they come up with it has that weighting to it… So the people with the most vested interests in the network are also given the more votes.”

Sharding refers to closed groups that allow for consensus votes to be reached by a subset of nodes on a decentralized network. By splitting the network into small sections for consensus voting purposes the idea is you avoid the inefficiencies of having to poll all the nodes on the network — yet can still retain robustness, at least so long as subgroups are carefully structured and secured.

“If you do that correctly you can make it more secure and you can make things much more efficient and faster,” says Lambert. “Because rather than polling, let’s say 6,000 nodes, you might be polling eight nodes. So you can get that information back quickly.

“Obviously you need to be careful about how you do that because with much less nodes you can potentially game the network so you need to be careful how you secure those smaller closed groups or shards. So that will be quite a big thing because pretty much every crypto project is looking at sharding to make, certainly, blockchains more efficient. And so the fact that we’ll have something coming out in that, after we have the dynamic membership stuff coming out, is going to be quite exciting to see the reaction to that as well.”

Voting authority on the Safe Network might be based on a node’s longevity, quality and historical activity — so a sort of ‘reputation’ score (or ledger) that can yield voting rights over time.

“If you’re like that then you will have a vote in these closed groups. And so a third of those votes — and that then becomes quite hard to game because somebody who’s then trying to be malicious would need to have their nodes act as good corporate citizens for a time period. And then all of a sudden become malicious, by which time they’ve probably got a vested stake in the network. So it wouldn’t be possible for someone to just come and flood the network with new nodes and then be malicious because it would not impact upon the network,” Lambert suggests.

The computing power that would be required to attack the Safe Network once it’s public and at scale would also be “really, really significant”, he adds. “Once it gets to scale it would be really hard to co-ordinate anything against it because you’re always having to be several hundred percent bigger than the network and then have a co-ordinated attack on it itself. And all of that work might get you to impact the decision within one closed group. So it’s not even network wide… And that decision could be on who accesses one piece of encrypted shard of data for example… Even the thing you might be able to steal is only an encrypted shard of something — it’s not even the whole thing.”

Other distributed ledger projects are similarly working on Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant (AFBT) consensus models, including those using directed acrylic graphs (DAGs) — another nascent decentralization technology that’s been suggested as an alternative to blockchain.

And indeed AFBT techniques predate Bitcoin, though MaidSafe says these kind of models have only more recently become viable thanks to research and the relative maturing of decentralized computing and data types, itself as a consequence of increased interest and investment in the space.

However in the case of Hashgraph — the DAG project which has probably attracted the most attention so far — it’s closed source, not open. So that’s one major difference with MaidSafe’s approach. 

Another difference that Lambert points to is that Parsec has been built to work in a dynamic, permissionless network environment (essential for the intended use-case, as the Safe Network is intended as a public network). Whereas he claims Hashgraph has only demonstrated its algorithms working on a permissioned (and therefore private) network “where all the nodes are known”.

He also suggests there’s a question mark over whether Hashgraph’s algorithm can achieve consensus when there are malicious nodes operating on the network. Which — if true — would limit what it can be used for.

“The Hashgraph algorithm is only proven to reach agreement if there’s no adversaries within the network,” Lambert claims. “So if everything’s running well then happy days, but if there’s any maliciousness or any failure within that network then — certainly on the basis of what’s been published — it would suggest that that algorithm was not going to hold up to that.”

“I think being able to do all of these things asynchronously with all of the mathematical guarantees is very difficult,” he continues, returning to the core consensus challenge. “So at the moment we see that we have come out with something that is unique, that covers a lot of these bases, and is a very good use for our use-case. And I think will be useful for others — so I think we like to think that we’ve made a paradigm shift or a vast improvement over the state of the art.”

  Paradigm shift vs marginal innovation

Despite the team’s conviction that, with Parsec, they’ve come up with something very notable, early feedback includes some very vocal Twitter doubters.

For example there’s a lengthy back-and-forth between several MaidSafe engineers and Ethereum researcher Vlad Zamfir — who dubs the Parsec protocol “overhyped” and a “marginal innovation if that”… so, er, ouch.

Well, I don't think asynchronous consensus on an order of events can be described as "never been done before" or "a paradigm shift". And it's not asynchronous, but "very asynchronous" or "randomly synchronous" [sic], and this synchrony assumption isn't very clearly documented

— Vlad ''not giving away ETH'' Zamfir (@VladZamfir) May 31, 2018

Lambert is, if not entirely sanguine, then solidly phlegmatic in the face of a bit of initial Twitter blowback — saying he reckons it will take more time for more detailed responses to come, i.e. allowing for people to properly digest the whitepaper.

“In the world of async BFT algorithms, any advance is huge,” MaidSafe CEO David Irvine also tells us when we ask for a response to Zamfir’s critique. “How huge is subjective, but any advance has to be great for the world. We hope others will advance Parsec like we have built on others (as we clearly state and thank them for their work).  So even if it was a marginal development (which it certainly is not) then I would take that.”

“All in all, though, nothing was said that took away from the fact Parsec moves the industry forward,” he adds. “I felt the comments were a bit juvenile at times and a bit defensive (probably due to us not agreeing with POS in our Medium post) but in terms of the only part commented on (the coin flip) we as a team feel that part could be much more concrete in terms of defining exactly how small such random (finite) delays could be. We know they do not stop the network and a delaying node would be killed, but for completeness, it would be nice to be that detailed.”

A developer source of our own in the crypto/blockchain space — who’s not connected to the MaidSafe or Ethereum projects — also points out that Parsec “getting objective review will take some time given that so many potential reviewers have vested interest in their own project/coin”.

It’s certainly fair to say the space excels at public spats and disagreements. Researchers pouring effort into one project can be less than kind to rivals’ efforts. (And, well, given all the crypto Lambos at stake it’s not hard to see why there can be no love lost — and, ironically, zero trust — between competing champions of trustless tech.)

Another fundamental truth of these projects is they’re all busily experimenting right now, with lots of ideas in play to try and fix core issues like scalability, efficiency and robustness — often having different ideas over implementation even if rival projects are circling and/or converging on similar approaches and techniques.

“Certainly other projects are looking at sharding,” says Lambert. “So I know that Ethereum are looking at sharding. And I think Bitcoin are looking at that as well, but I think everyone probably has quite different ideas about how to implement it. And of course we’re not using a blockchain which makes that another different use-case where Ethereum and Bitcoin obviously are. But everyone has — as with anything — these different approaches and different ideas.”

“Every network will have its own different ways of doing [consensus],” he adds when asked whether he believes Parsec could be adopted by other projects wrestling with the consensus challenge. “So it’s not like some could lift [Parsec] out and just put it in. Ethereum is blockchain-based — I think they’re looking at something around proof of stake, but maybe they could take some ideas or concepts from the work that we’re open sourcing for their specific case.

“If you get other blockchain-less networks like IOTA, Byteball, I think POA is another one as well. These other projects it might be easier for them to implement something like Parsec with them because they’re not using blockchain. So maybe less of that adaption required.”

Whether other projects will deem Parsec worthy of their attention remains to be seen at this point with so much still to play for. Some may prefer to expend effort trying to rubbish a rival approach, whose open source tech could, if it stands up to scrutiny and operational performance, reduce the commercial value of proprietary and patented mechanisms also intended to grease the wheels of decentralized networks — for a fee.

And of course MaidSafe’s developed-in-stealth consensus protocol may also turn out to be a relatively minor development. But finding a non-vested expert to give an impartial assessment of complex network routing algorithms conjoined to such a self-interested and, frankly, anarchical industry is another characteristic challenge of the space.

Irvine’s view is that DAG based projects which are using a centralized component will have to move on or adopt what he dubs “state of art” asynchronous consensus algorithms — as MaidSafe believes Parsec is — aka, algorithms which are “more widely accepted and proven”.

“So these projects should contribute to the research, but more importantly, they will have to adopt better algorithms than they use,” he suggests. “So they can play an important part, upgrades! How to upgrade a running DAG based network? How to had fork a graph? etc. We know how to hard fork blockchains, but upgrading DAG based networks may not be so simple when they are used as ledgers.

“Projects like Hashgraph, Algorand etc will probably use an ABFT algorithm like this as their whole network with a little work for a currency; IOTA, NANO, Bytball etc should. That is entirely possible with advances like Parsec. However adding dynamic membership, sharding, a data layer then a currency is a much larger proposition, which is why Parsec has been in stealth mode while it is being developed.

“We hope that by being open about the algorithm, and making the code open source when complete, we will help all the other projects working on similar problems.”

Of course MaidSafe’s team might be misguided in terms of the breakthrough they think they’ve made with Parsec. But it’s pretty hard to stand up the idea they’re being intentionally misleading.

Because, well, what would be the point of that? While the exact depth of MaidSafe’s funding reserves isn’t clear, Lambert doesn’t sound like a startup guy with money worries. And the team’s staying power cannot be in doubt — over a decade into the R&D needed to underpin their alt network.

It’s true that being around for so long does have some downsides, though. Especially, perhaps, given how hyped the decentralized space has now become. “Because we’ve been working on it for so long, and it’s been such a big project, you can see some negative feedback about that,” as Lambert admits.

And with such intense attention now on the space, injecting energy which in turn accelerates ideas and activity, there’s perhaps extra pressure on a veteran player like MaidSafe to be seen making a meaningful contribution — ergo, it might be tempting for the team to believe the consensus protocol they’ve engineered really is a big deal.

To stand up and be counted amid all the noise, as it were. And to draw attention to their own project — which needs lots of external developers to buy into the vision if it’s to succeed, yet, here in 2018, it’s just one decentralization project among so many. 

  The Safe Network roadmap

Consensus aside, MaidSafe’s biggest challenge is still turning the sizable amount of funding and resources the team’s ideas have attracted to date into a bona fide alternative network that anyone really can use. And there’s a very long road to travel still on that front, clearly.

The Safe Network is in alpha 2 testing incarnation (which has been up and running since September last year) — consisting of around a hundred nodes that MaidSafe is maintaining itself.

The core decentralization proposition of anyone being able to supply storage resource to the network via lending their own spare capacity is not yet live — and won’t come fully until alpha 4.

“People are starting to create different apps against that network. So we’ve seen Jams — a decentralized music player… There are a couple of storage style apps… There is encrypted email running as well, and also that is running on Android,” says Lambert. “And we have a forked version of the Beaker browser — that’s the browser that we use right now. So if you can create websites on the Safe Network, which has its own protocol, and if you want to go and view those sites you need a Safe browser to do that, so we’ve also been working on our own browser from scratch that we’ll be releasing later this year… So there’s a number of apps that are running against that alpha 2 network.

“What alpha 3 will bring is it will run in parallel with alpha 2 but it will effectively be a decentralized routing network. What that means is it will be one for more technical people to run, and it will enable data to be passed around a network where anyone can contribute their resources to it but it will not facilitate data storage. So it’ll be a command line app, which is probably why it’ll suit technical people more because there’ll be no user interface for it, and they will contribute their resources to enable messages to be passed around the network. So secure messaging would be a use-case for that.

“And then alpha 4 is effectively bringing together alpha 2 and alpha 3. So it adds a storage layer on top of the alpha 3 network — and at that point it gives you the fully decentralized network where users are contributing their resources from home and they will be able to store data, send messages and things of that nature. Potentially during alpha 4, or a later alpha, we’ll introduce test SafeCoin. Which is the final piece of the initial puzzle to provide incentives for users to provide resources and for developers to make apps. So that’s probably what the immediate roadmap looks like.”

On the timeline front Lambert won’t be coaxed into fixing any deadlines to all these planned alphas. They’ve long ago learnt not to try and predict the pace of progress, he says with a laugh. Though he does not question that progress is being made.

“These big infrastructure projects are typically only government funded because the payback is too slow for venture capitalists,” he adds. “So in the past you had things like Arpanet, the precursor to the Internet — that was obviously a US government funded project — and so we’ve taken on a project which has, not grown arms and legs, but certainly there’s more to it than what was initially thought about.

“So we are almost privately funding this infrastructure. Which is quite a big scope, and I will say why it’s taking a bit of time. But we definitely do seem to be making lots of progress.”

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Not just another decentralized web whitepaper?

Not just another decentralized web whitepaper?

Given all the hype and noise swirling around crypto and decentralized network projects, which runs the full gamut from scams and stupidity, to very clever and inspired ideas, the release of yet another whitepaper does not immediately set off an attention klaxon.

But this whitepaper — which details a new protocol for achieving consensus within a decentralized network — is worth paying more attention to than most.

MaidSafe, the team behind it, are also the literal opposite of fly-by-night crypto opportunists. They’ve been working on decentralized networking since long before the space became the hot, hyped thing it is now.

Their overarching mission is to engineer an entirely decentralized Internet which bakes in privacy, security and freedom of expression by design — the ‘Safe’ in their planned ‘Safe Network’ stands for ‘Secure access for everyone’ — meaning it’s encrypted, autonomous, self-organizing, self-healing. And the new consensus protocol is just another piece towards fulfilling that grand vision.

What’s consensus in decentralized networking terms? “Within decentralized networks you must have a way of the network agreeing on a state — such as can somebody access a file or confirming a coin transaction, for example — and the reason you need this is because you don’t have a central server to confirm all this to you,” explains MaidSafe’s COO Nick Lambert, discussing what the protocol is intended to achieve.

“So you need all these decentralized nodes all reaching agreement somehow on a state within the network. Consensus occurs by each of these nodes on the network voting and letting the network as a whole know what it thinks of a transaction.

“It’s almost like consensus could be considered the heart of the networks. It’s required for almost every event in the network.”

We wrote about MaidSafe’s alternative, server-less Internet in 2014. But they actually began work on the project in stealth all the way back in 2006. So they’re over a decade into the R&D at this point.

The network is p2p because it’s being designed so that data is locally encrypted, broken up into pieces and then stored distributed and replicated across the network, relying on the users’ own compute resources to stand in and take the strain. No servers necessary.

The prototype Safe Network is currently in an alpha testing stage (they opened for alpha in 2016). Several more alpha test stages are planned, with a beta release still a distant, undated prospect at this stage. But rearchitecting the entire Internet was clearly never going to be a day’s work.

MaidSafe also ran a multimillion dollar crowdsale in 2014 — for a proxy token of the coin that will eventually be baked into the network — and did so long before ICOs became a crypto-related bandwagon that all sorts of entities were jumping onto. The SafeCoin cryptocurrency is intended to operate as the inventive mechanism for developers to build apps for the Safe Network and users to contribute compute resource and thus bring MaidSafe’s distributed dream alive.

Their timing on the token sale front, coupled with prudent hodling of some of the Bitcoins they’ve raised, means they’re essentially in a position of not having to worry about raising more funds to build the network, according to Lambert.

A rough, back-of-an-envelope calculation on MaidSafe’s original crowdsale suggests, given they raised $2M in Bitcoin in April 2014 when the price for 1BTC was up to around $500, the Bitcoins they obtained then could be worth between ~$30M-$40M by today’s Bitcoin prices — though that would be assuming they held on to most of them. Bitcoin’s price also peaked far higher last year too.

As well as the token sale they also did an equity raise in 2016, via the fintech investment platform bnktothefuture, pulling in around $1.7M from that — in a mixture of cash and “some Bitcoin”.

“It’s gone both ways,” says Lambert, discussing the team’s luck with Bitcoin. “The crowdsale we were on the losing end of Bitcoin price decreasing. We did a raise from bnktothefuture in autumn of 2016… and fortunately we held on to quite a lot of the Bitcoin. So we rode the Bitcoin price up. So I feel like the universe paid us back a little bit for that. So it feels like we’re level now.”

“Fundraising is exceedingly time consuming right through the organization, and it does take a lot of time away from what you wants to be focusing on, and so to be in a position where you’re not desperate for funding is a really nice one to be in,” he adds. “It allows us to focus on the technology and releasing the network.”

The team’s headcount is now up to around 33, with founding members based at the HQ in Ayr, Scotland, and other engineers working remotely or distributed (including in a new dev office they opened in India at the start of this year), even though MaidSafe is still not taking in any revenue.

This April they also made the decision to switch from a dual licensing approach for their software — previously offering both an open source license and a commercial license (which let people close source their code for a fee) — to going only open source, to encourage more developer engagement and contributions to the project, as Lambert tells it.

“We always see the SafeNetwork a bit like a public utility,” he says. “In terms of once we’ve got this thing up and launched we don’t want to control it or own it because if we do nobody will want to use it — it needs to be seen as everyone contributing. So we felt it’s a much more encouraging sign for developers who want to contribute if they see everything is fully open sourced and cannot be closed source.”

MaidSafe’s story so far is reason enough to take note of their whitepaper.

But the consensus issue the paper addresses is also a key challenge for decentralized networks so any proposed solution is potentially a big deal — if indeed it pans out as promised.

  Protocol for Asynchronous, Reliable, Secure and Efficient Consensus

MaidSafe reckons they’ve come up with a way of achieving consensus on decentralized networks that’s scalable, robust and efficient. Hence the name of the protocol — ‘Parsec’ — being short for: ‘Protocol for Asynchronous, Reliable, Secure and Efficient Consensus’.

They will be open sourcing the protocol under a GPL v3 license — with a rough timeframe of “months” for that release, according to Lambert.

He says they’ve been working on Parsec for the last 18 months to two years — but also drawing on earlier research the team carried out into areas such as conflict-free replicated data types, synchronous and asynchronous consensus, and topics such as threshold signatures and common coin.

More specifically, the research underpinning Parsec is based on the following five papers: 1. Baird L. The Swirlds Hashgraph Consensus Algorithm: Fair, Fast, Byzantine Fault Tolerance, Swirlds Tech Report SWIRLDS-TR-2016-01 (2016); 2. Mostefaoui A., Hamouna M., Raynal M. Signature-Free Asynchronous Byzantine Consensus with t <n/3 and O(n 2 ) Messages, ACM PODC (2014); 3. Micali S. Byzantine Agreement, Made Trivial, (2018); 4. Miller A., Xia Y., Croman K., Shi E., Song D. The Honey Badger of BFT Protocols, CCS (2016); 5. Team Rocket Snowflake to Avalanche: A Novel Metastable Consensus Protocol Family for Cryptocurrencies, (2018).

One tweet responding to the protocol’s unveiling just over a week ago wonders whether it’s too good to be true. Time will tell — but the potential is certainly enticing.

Bitcoin’s use of a drastically energy-inefficient ‘proof of work’ method to achieve consensus and write each transaction to its blockchain very clearly doesn’t scale. It’s slow, cumbersome and wasteful. And how to get blockchain-based networks to support the billions of transactions per second that might be needed to sustain the various envisaged applications remains an essential work in progress — with projects investigating various ideas and approaches to try to overcome the limitation.

MaidSafe’s network is not blockchain-based. It’s engineered to function with asynchronous voting of nodes, rather than synchronous voting, which should avoid the bottleneck problems associated with blockchain. But it’s still decentralized. So it needs a consensus mechanism to enable operations and transactions to be carried out autonomously and robustly. That’s where Parsec is intended to slot in.

The protocol does not use proof of work. And is able, so the whitepaper claims, to achieve consensus even if a third of the network is comprised of malicious nodes — i.e. nodes which are attempting to disrupt network operations or otherwise attack the network.

Another claimed advantage is that decisions made via the protocol are both mathematically guaranteed and irreversible.

“What Parsec does is it can reach consensus even with malicious nodes. And up to a third of the nodes being malicious is what the maths proofs suggest,” says Lambert. “This ability to provide mathematical guarantees that all parts of the network will come to the same agreement at a point in time, even with some fault in the network or bad actors — that’s what Byzantine Fault Tolerance is.”

In theory a blockchain using proof of work could be hacked if any one entity controlled 51% of the nodes on the network (although in reality it’s likely that such a large amount of energy would be required it’s pretty much impractical).

So on the surface MaidSafe’s decentralized network — which ‘only’ needs 33% of its nodes to be compromised for its consensus decisions to be attacked — sounds rather less robust. But Lambert says it’s more nuanced than the numbers suggest. And in fact the malicious third would also need to be nodes that have the authority to vote. “So it is a third but it’s a third of well reputed nodes,” as he puts it.

So there’s an element of proof of stake involved too, bound up with additional planned characteristics of the Safe Network — related to dynamic membership and sharding (Lambert says MaidSafe has additional whitepapers on both those elements coming soon).

“Those two papers, particularly the one around dynamic membership, will explain why having a third of malicious nodes is actually harder than just having 33% of malicious nodes. Because the nodes that can vote have to have a reputation as well. So it’s not just purely you can flood the Safe Network with lots and lots of malicious nodes and override it only using a third of the nodes. What we’re saying is the nodes that can vote and actually have a say must have a good reputation in the network,” he says.

“The other thing is proof of stake… Everyone is desperate to move away from proof of work because of its environmental impact. So proof of stake — I liken it to the Scottish landowners, where people with a lot of power have more say. In the cryptocurrency field, proof of stake might be if you have, let’s say, 10 coins and I have one coin your vote might be worth 10x as much authority as what my one coin would be. So any of these mechanisms that they come up with it has that weighting to it… So the people with the most vested interests in the network are also given the more votes.”

Sharding refers to closed groups that allow for consensus votes to be reached by a subset of nodes on a decentralized network. By splitting the network into small sections for consensus voting purposes the idea is you avoid the inefficiencies of having to poll all the nodes on the network — yet can still retain robustness, at least so long as subgroups are carefully structured and secured.

“If you do that correctly you can make it more secure and you can make things much more efficient and faster,” says Lambert. “Because rather than polling, let’s say 6,000 nodes, you might be polling eight nodes. So you can get that information back quickly.

“Obviously you need to be careful about how you do that because with much less nodes you can potentially game the network so you need to be careful how you secure those smaller closed groups or shards. So that will be quite a big thing because pretty much every crypto project is looking at sharding to make, certainly, blockchains more efficient. And so the fact that we’ll have something coming out in that, after we have the dynamic membership stuff coming out, is going to be quite exciting to see the reaction to that as well.”

Voting authority on the Safe Network might be based on a node’s longevity, quality and historical activity — so a sort of ‘reputation’ score (or ledger) that can yield voting rights over time.

“If you’re like that then you will have a vote in these closed groups. And so a third of those votes — and that then becomes quite hard to game because somebody who’s then trying to be malicious would need to have their nodes act as good corporate citizens for a time period. And then all of a sudden become malicious, by which time they’ve probably got a vested stake in the network. So it wouldn’t be possible for someone to just come and flood the network with new nodes and then be malicious because it would not impact upon the network,” Lambert suggests.

The computing power that would be required to attack the Safe Network once it’s public and at scale would also be “really, really significant”, he adds. “Once it gets to scale it would be really hard to co-ordinate anything against it because you’re always having to be several hundred percent bigger than the network and then have a co-ordinated attack on it itself. And all of that work might get you to impact the decision within one closed group. So it’s not even network wide… And that decision could be on who accesses one piece of encrypted shard of data for example… Even the thing you might be able to steal is only an encrypted shard of something — it’s not even the whole thing.”

Other distributed ledger projects are similarly working on Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant (AFBT) consensus models, including those using directed acrylic graphs (DAGs) — another nascent decentralization technology that’s been suggested as an alternative to blockchain.

And indeed AFBT techniques predate Bitcoin, though MaidSafe says these kind of models have only more recently become viable thanks to research and the relative maturing of decentralized computing and data types, itself as a consequence of increased interest and investment in the space.

However in the case of Hashgraph — the DAG project which has probably attracted the most attention so far — it’s closed source, not open. So that’s one major difference with MaidSafe’s approach. 

Another difference that Lambert points to is that Parsec has been built to work in a dynamic, permissionless network environment (essential for the intended use-case, as the Safe Network is intended as a public network). Whereas he claims Hashgraph has only demonstrated its algorithms working on a permissioned (and therefore private) network “where all the nodes are known”.

He also suggests there’s a question mark over whether Hashgraph’s algorithm can achieve consensus when there are malicious nodes operating on the network. Which — if true — would limit what it can be used for.

“The Hashgraph algorithm is only proven to reach agreement if there’s no adversaries within the network,” Lambert claims. “So if everything’s running well then happy days, but if there’s any maliciousness or any failure within that network then — certainly on the basis of what’s been published — it would suggest that that algorithm was not going to hold up to that.”

“I think being able to do all of these things asynchronously with all of the mathematical guarantees is very difficult,” he continues, returning to the core consensus challenge. “So at the moment we see that we have come out with something that is unique, that covers a lot of these bases, and is a very good use for our use-case. And I think will be useful for others — so I think we like to think that we’ve made a paradigm shift or a vast improvement over the state of the art.”

  Paradigm shift vs marginal innovation

Despite the team’s conviction that, with Parsec, they’ve come up with something very notable, early feedback includes some very vocal Twitter doubters.

For example there’s a lengthy back-and-forth between several MaidSafe engineers and Ethereum researcher Vlad Zamfir — who dubs the Parsec protocol “overhyped” and a “marginal innovation if that”… so, er, ouch.

Well, I don't think asynchronous consensus on an order of events can be described as "never been done before" or "a paradigm shift". And it's not asynchronous, but "very asynchronous" or "randomly synchronous" [sic], and this synchrony assumption isn't very clearly documented

— Vlad ''not giving away ETH'' Zamfir (@VladZamfir) May 31, 2018

Lambert is, if not entirely sanguine, then solidly phlegmatic in the face of a bit of initial Twitter blowback — saying he reckons it will take more time for more detailed responses to come, i.e. allowing for people to properly digest the whitepaper.

“In the world of async BFT algorithms, any advance is huge,” MaidSafe CEO David Irvine also tells us when we ask for a response to Zamfir’s critique. “How huge is subjective, but any advance has to be great for the world. We hope others will advance Parsec like we have built on others (as we clearly state and thank them for their work).  So even if it was a marginal development (which it certainly is not) then I would take that.”

“All in all, though, nothing was said that took away from the fact Parsec moves the industry forward,” he adds. “I felt the comments were a bit juvenile at times and a bit defensive (probably due to us not agreeing with POS in our Medium post) but in terms of the only part commented on (the coin flip) we as a team feel that part could be much more concrete in terms of defining exactly how small such random (finite) delays could be. We know they do not stop the network and a delaying node would be killed, but for completeness, it would be nice to be that detailed.”

A developer source of our own in the crypto/blockchain space — who’s not connected to the MaidSafe or Ethereum projects — also points out that Parsec “getting objective review will take some time given that so many potential reviewers have vested interest in their own project/coin”.

It’s certainly fair to say the space excels at public spats and disagreements. Researchers pouring effort into one project can be less than kind to rivals’ efforts. (And, well, given all the crypto Lambos at stake it’s not hard to see why there can be no love lost — and, ironically, zero trust — between competing champions of trustless tech.)

Another fundamental truth of these projects is they’re all busily experimenting right now, with lots of ideas in play to try and fix core issues like scalability, efficiency and robustness — often having different ideas over implementation even if rival projects are circling and/or converging on similar approaches and techniques.

“Certainly other projects are looking at sharding,” says Lambert. “So I know that Ethereum are looking at sharding. And I think Bitcoin are looking at that as well, but I think everyone probably has quite different ideas about how to implement it. And of course we’re not using a blockchain which makes that another different use-case where Ethereum and Bitcoin obviously are. But everyone has — as with anything — these different approaches and different ideas.”

“Every network will have its own different ways of doing [consensus],” he adds when asked whether he believes Parsec could be adopted by other projects wrestling with the consensus challenge. “So it’s not like some could lift [Parsec] out and just put it in. Ethereum is blockchain-based — I think they’re looking at something around proof of stake, but maybe they could take some ideas or concepts from the work that we’re open sourcing for their specific case.

“If you get other blockchain-less networks like IOTA, Byteball, I think POA is another one as well. These other projects it might be easier for them to implement something like Parsec with them because they’re not using blockchain. So maybe less of that adaption required.”

Whether other projects will deem Parsec worthy of their attention remains to be seen at this point with so much still to play for. Some may prefer to expend effort trying to rubbish a rival approach, whose open source tech could, if it stands up to scrutiny and operational performance, reduce the commercial value of proprietary and patented mechanisms also intended to grease the wheels of decentralized networks — for a fee.

And of course MaidSafe’s developed-in-stealth consensus protocol may also turn out to be a relatively minor development. But finding a non-vested expert to give an impartial assessment of complex network routing algorithms conjoined to such a self-interested and, frankly, anarchical industry is another characteristic challenge of the space.

Irvine’s view is that DAG based projects which are using a centralized component will have to move on or adopt what he dubs “state of art” asynchronous consensus algorithms — as MaidSafe believes Parsec is — aka, algorithms which are “more widely accepted and proven”.

“So these projects should contribute to the research, but more importantly, they will have to adopt better algorithms than they use,” he suggests. “So they can play an important part, upgrades! How to upgrade a running DAG based network? How to had fork a graph? etc. We know how to hard fork blockchains, but upgrading DAG based networks may not be so simple when they are used as ledgers.

“Projects like Hashgraph, Algorand etc will probably use an ABFT algorithm like this as their whole network with a little work for a currency; IOTA, NANO, Bytball etc should. That is entirely possible with advances like Parsec. However adding dynamic membership, sharding, a data layer then a currency is a much larger proposition, which is why Parsec has been in stealth mode while it is being developed.

“We hope that by being open about the algorithm, and making the code open source when complete, we will help all the other projects working on similar problems.”

Of course MaidSafe’s team might be misguided in terms of the breakthrough they think they’ve made with Parsec. But it’s pretty hard to stand up the idea they’re being intentionally misleading.

Because, well, what would be the point of that? While the exact depth of MaidSafe’s funding reserves isn’t clear, Lambert doesn’t sound like a startup guy with money worries. And the team’s staying power cannot be in doubt — over a decade into the R&D needed to underpin their alt network.

It’s true that being around for so long does have some downsides, though. Especially, perhaps, given how hyped the decentralized space has now become. “Because we’ve been working on it for so long, and it’s been such a big project, you can see some negative feedback about that,” as Lambert admits.

And with such intense attention now on the space, injecting energy which in turn accelerates ideas and activity, there’s perhaps extra pressure on a veteran player like MaidSafe to be seen making a meaningful contribution — ergo, it might be tempting for the team to believe the consensus protocol they’ve engineered really is a big deal.

To stand up and be counted amid all the noise, as it were. And to draw attention to their own project — which needs lots of external developers to buy into the vision if it’s to succeed, yet, here in 2018, it’s just one decentralization project among so many. 

  The Safe Network roadmap

Consensus aside, MaidSafe’s biggest challenge is still turning the sizable amount of funding and resources the team’s ideas have attracted to date into a bona fide alternative network that anyone really can use. And there’s a very long road to travel still on that front, clearly.

The Safe Network is in alpha 2 testing incarnation (which has been up and running since September last year) — consisting of around a hundred nodes that MaidSafe is maintaining itself.

The core decentralization proposition of anyone being able to supply storage resource to the network via lending their own spare capacity is not yet live — and won’t come fully until alpha 4.

“People are starting to create different apps against that network. So we’ve seen Jams — a decentralized music player… There are a couple of storage style apps… There is encrypted email running as well, and also that is running on Android,” says Lambert. “And we have a forked version of the Beaker browser — that’s the browser that we use right now. So if you can create websites on the Safe Network, which has its own protocol, and if you want to go and view those sites you need a Safe browser to do that, so we’ve also been working on our own browser from scratch that we’ll be releasing later this year… So there’s a number of apps that are running against that alpha 2 network.

“What alpha 3 will bring is it will run in parallel with alpha 2 but it will effectively be a decentralized routing network. What that means is it will be one for more technical people to run, and it will enable data to be passed around a network where anyone can contribute their resources to it but it will not facilitate data storage. So it’ll be a command line app, which is probably why it’ll suit technical people more because there’ll be no user interface for it, and they will contribute their resources to enable messages to be passed around the network. So secure messaging would be a use-case for that.

“And then alpha 4 is effectively bringing together alpha 2 and alpha 3. So it adds a storage layer on top of the alpha 3 network — and at that point it gives you the fully decentralized network where users are contributing their resources from home and they will be able to store data, send messages and things of that nature. Potentially during alpha 4, or a later alpha, we’ll introduce test SafeCoin. Which is the final piece of the initial puzzle to provide incentives for users to provide resources and for developers to make apps. So that’s probably what the immediate roadmap looks like.”

On the timeline front Lambert won’t be coaxed into fixing any deadlines to all these planned alphas. They’ve long ago learnt not to try and predict the pace of progress, he says with a laugh. Though he does not question that progress is being made.

“These big infrastructure projects are typically only government funded because the payback is too slow for venture capitalists,” he adds. “So in the past you had things like Arpanet, the precursor to the Internet — that was obviously a US government funded project — and so we’ve taken on a project which has, not grown arms and legs, but certainly there’s more to it than what was initially thought about.

“So we are almost privately funding this infrastructure. Which is quite a big scope, and I will say why it’s taking a bit of time. But we definitely do seem to be making lots of progress.”

[theinvinciblenoob]

Given all the hype and noise swirling around crypto and decentralized network projects, which runs the full gamut from scams and stupidity, to very clever and inspired ideas, the release of yet another whitepaper does not immediately set off an attention klaxon.

But this whitepaper — which details a new protocol for achieving consensus within a decentralized network — is worth paying more attention to than most.

MaidSafe, the team behind it, are also the literal opposite of fly-by-night crypto opportunists. They’ve been working on decentralized networking since long before the space became the hot, hyped thing it is now.

Their overarching mission is to engineer an entirely decentralized Internet which bakes in privacy, security and freedom of expression by design — the ‘Safe’ in their planned ‘Safe Network’ stands for ‘Secure access for everyone’ — meaning it’s encrypted, autonomous, self-organizing, self-healing. And the new consensus protocol is just another piece towards fulfilling that grand vision.

What’s consensus in decentralized networking terms? “Within decentralized networks you must have a way of the network agreeing on a state — such as can somebody access a file or confirming a coin transaction, for example — and the reason you need this is because you don’t have a central server to confirm all this to you,” explains MaidSafe’s COO Nick Lambert, discussing what the protocol is intended to achieve.

“So you need all these decentralized nodes all reaching agreement somehow on a state within the network. Consensus occurs by each of these nodes on the network voting and letting the network as a whole know what it thinks of a transaction.

“It’s almost like consensus could be considered the heart of the networks. It’s required for almost every event in the network.”

We wrote about MaidSafe’s alternative, server-less Internet in 2014. But they actually began work on the project in stealth all the way back in 2006. So they’re over a decade into the R&D at this point.

The network is p2p because it’s being designed so that data is locally encrypted, broken up into pieces and then stored distributed and replicated across the network, relying on the users’ own compute resources to stand in and take the strain. No servers necessary.

The prototype Safe Network is currently in an alpha testing stage (they opened for alpha in 2016). Several more alpha test stages are planned, with a beta release still a distant, undated prospect at this stage. But rearchitecting the entire Internet was clearly never going to be a day’s work.

MaidSafe also ran a multimillion dollar crowdsale in 2014 — for a proxy token of the coin that will eventually be baked into the network — and did so long before ICOs became a crypto-related bandwagon that all sorts of entities were jumping onto. The SafeCoin cryptocurrency is intended to operate as the inventive mechanism for developers to build apps for the Safe Network and users to contribute compute resource and thus bring MaidSafe’s distributed dream alive.

Their timing on the token sale front, coupled with prudent hodling of some of the Bitcoins they’ve raised, means they’re essentially in a position of not having to worry about raising more funds to build the network, according to Lambert.

A rough, back-of-an-envelope calculation on MaidSafe’s original crowdsale suggests, given they raised $2M in Bitcoin in April 2014 when the price for 1BTC was up to around $500, the Bitcoins they obtained then could be worth between ~$30M-$40M by today’s Bitcoin prices — though that would be assuming they held on to most of them. Bitcoin’s price also peaked far higher last year too.

As well as the token sale they also did an equity raise in 2016, via the fintech investment platform bnktothefuture, pulling in around $1.7M from that — in a mixture of cash and “some Bitcoin”.

“It’s gone both ways,” says Lambert, discussing the team’s luck with Bitcoin. “The crowdsale we were on the losing end of Bitcoin price decreasing. We did a raise from bnktothefuture in autumn of 2016… and fortunately we held on to quite a lot of the Bitcoin. So we rode the Bitcoin price up. So I feel like the universe paid us back a little bit for that. So it feels like we’re level now.”

“Fundraising is exceedingly time consuming right through the organization, and it does take a lot of time away from what you wants to be focusing on, and so to be in a position where you’re not desperate for funding is a really nice one to be in,” he adds. “It allows us to focus on the technology and releasing the network.”

The team’s headcount is now up to around 33, with founding members based at the HQ in Ayr, Scotland, and other engineers working remotely or distributed (including in a new dev office they opened in India at the start of this year), even though MaidSafe is still not taking in any revenue.

This April they also made the decision to switch from a dual licensing approach for their software — previously offering both an open source license and a commercial license (which let people close source their code for a fee) — to going only open source, to encourage more developer engagement and contributions to the project, as Lambert tells it.

“We always see the SafeNetwork a bit like a public utility,” he says. “In terms of once we’ve got this thing up and launched we don’t want to control it or own it because if we do nobody will want to use it — it needs to be seen as everyone contributing. So we felt it’s a much more encouraging sign for developers who want to contribute if they see everything is fully open sourced and cannot be closed source.”

MaidSafe’s story so far is reason enough to take note of their whitepaper.

But the consensus issue the paper addresses is also a key challenge for decentralized networks so any proposed solution is potentially a big deal — if indeed it pans out as promised.

  Protocol for Asynchronous, Reliable, Secure and Efficient Consensus

MaidSafe reckons they’ve come up with a way of achieving consensus on decentralized networks that’s scalable, robust and efficient. Hence the name of the protocol — ‘Parsec’ — being short for: ‘Protocol for Asynchronous, Reliable, Secure and Efficient Consensus’.

They will be open sourcing the protocol under a GPL v3 license — with a rough timeframe of “months” for that release, according to Lambert.

He says they’ve been working on Parsec for the last 18 months to two years — but also drawing on earlier research the team carried out into areas such as conflict-free replicated data types, synchronous and asynchronous consensus, and topics such as threshold signatures and common coin.

More specifically, the research underpinning Parsec is based on the following five papers: 1. Baird L. The Swirlds Hashgraph Consensus Algorithm: Fair, Fast, Byzantine Fault Tolerance, Swirlds Tech Report SWIRLDS-TR-2016-01 (2016); 2. Mostefaoui A., Hamouna M., Raynal M. Signature-Free Asynchronous Byzantine Consensus with t <n/3 and O(n 2 ) Messages, ACM PODC (2014); 3. Micali S. Byzantine Agreement, Made Trivial, (2018); 4. Miller A., Xia Y., Croman K., Shi E., Song D. The Honey Badger of BFT Protocols, CCS (2016); 5. Team Rocket Snowflake to Avalanche: A Novel Metastable Consensus Protocol Family for Cryptocurrencies, (2018).

One tweet responding to the protocol’s unveiling just over a week ago wonders whether it’s too good to be true. Time will tell — but the potential is certainly enticing.

Bitcoin’s use of a drastically energy-inefficient ‘proof of work’ method to achieve consensus and write each transaction to its blockchain very clearly doesn’t scale. It’s slow, cumbersome and wasteful. And how to get blockchain-based networks to support the billions of transactions per second that might be needed to sustain the various envisaged applications remains an essential work in progress — with projects investigating various ideas and approaches to try to overcome the limitation.

MaidSafe’s network is not blockchain-based. It’s engineered to function with asynchronous voting of nodes, rather than synchronous voting, which should avoid the bottleneck problems associated with blockchain. But it’s still decentralized. So it needs a consensus mechanism to enable operations and transactions to be carried out autonomously and robustly. That’s where Parsec is intended to slot in.

The protocol does not use proof of work. And is able, so the whitepaper claims, to achieve consensus even if a third of the network is comprised of malicious nodes — i.e. nodes which are attempting to disrupt network operations or otherwise attack the network.

Another claimed advantage is that decisions made via the protocol are both mathematically guaranteed and irreversible.

“What Parsec does is it can reach consensus even with malicious nodes. And up to a third of the nodes being malicious is what the maths proofs suggest,” says Lambert. “This ability to provide mathematical guarantees that all parts of the network will come to the same agreement at a point in time, even with some fault in the network or bad actors — that’s what Byzantine Fault Tolerance is.”

In theory a blockchain using proof of work could be hacked if any one entity controlled 51% of the nodes on the network (although in reality it’s likely that such a large amount of energy would be required it’s pretty much impractical).

So on the surface MaidSafe’s decentralized network — which ‘only’ needs 33% of its nodes to be compromised for its consensus decisions to be attacked — sounds rather less robust. But Lambert says it’s more nuanced than the numbers suggest. And in fact the malicious third would also need to be nodes that have the authority to vote. “So it is a third but it’s a third of well reputed nodes,” as he puts it.

So there’s an element of proof of stake involved too, bound up with additional planned characteristics of the Safe Network — related to dynamic membership and sharding (Lambert says MaidSafe has additional whitepapers on both those elements coming soon).

“Those two papers, particularly the one around dynamic membership, will explain why having a third of malicious nodes is actually harder than just having 33% of malicious nodes. Because the nodes that can vote have to have a reputation as well. So it’s not just purely you can flood the Safe Network with lots and lots of malicious nodes and override it only using a third of the nodes. What we’re saying is the nodes that can vote and actually have a say must have a good reputation in the network,” he says.

“The other thing is proof of stake… Everyone is desperate to move away from proof of work because of its environmental impact. So proof of stake — I liken it to the Scottish landowners, where people with a lot of power have more say. In the cryptocurrency field, proof of stake might be if you have, let’s say, 10 coins and I have one coin your vote might be worth 10x as much authority as what my one coin would be. So any of these mechanisms that they come up with it has that weighting to it… So the people with the most vested interests in the network are also given the more votes.”

Sharding refers to closed groups that allow for consensus votes to be reached by a subset of nodes on a decentralized network. By splitting the network into small sections for consensus voting purposes the idea is you avoid the inefficiencies of having to poll all the nodes on the network — yet can still retain robustness, at least so long as subgroups are carefully structured and secured.

“If you do that correctly you can make it more secure and you can make things much more efficient and faster,” says Lambert. “Because rather than polling, let’s say 6,000 nodes, you might be polling eight nodes. So you can get that information back quickly.

“Obviously you need to be careful about how you do that because with much less nodes you can potentially game the network so you need to be careful how you secure those smaller closed groups or shards. So that will be quite a big thing because pretty much every crypto project is looking at sharding to make, certainly, blockchains more efficient. And so the fact that we’ll have something coming out in that, after we have the dynamic membership stuff coming out, is going to be quite exciting to see the reaction to that as well.”

Voting authority on the Safe Network might be based on a node’s longevity, quality and historical activity — so a sort of ‘reputation’ score (or ledger) that can yield voting rights over time.

“If you’re like that then you will have a vote in these closed groups. And so a third of those votes — and that then becomes quite hard to game because somebody who’s then trying to be malicious would need to have their nodes act as good corporate citizens for a time period. And then all of a sudden become malicious, by which time they’ve probably got a vested stake in the network. So it wouldn’t be possible for someone to just come and flood the network with new nodes and then be malicious because it would not impact upon the network,” Lambert suggests.

The computing power that would be required to attack the Safe Network once it’s public and at scale would also be “really, really significant”, he adds. “Once it gets to scale it would be really hard to co-ordinate anything against it because you’re always having to be several hundred percent bigger than the network and then have a co-ordinated attack on it itself. And all of that work might get you to impact the decision within one closed group. So it’s not even network wide… And that decision could be on who accesses one piece of encrypted shard of data for example… Even the thing you might be able to steal is only an encrypted shard of something — it’s not even the whole thing.”

Other distributed ledger projects are similarly working on Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant (AFBT) consensus models, including those using directed acrylic graphs (DAGs) — another nascent decentralization technology that’s been suggested as an alternative to blockchain.

And indeed AFBT techniques predate Bitcoin, though MaidSafe says these kind of models have only more recently become viable thanks to research and the relative maturing of decentralized computing and data types, itself as a consequence of increased interest and investment in the space.

However in the case of Hashgraph — the DAG project which has probably attracted the most attention so far — it’s closed source, not open. So that’s one major difference with MaidSafe’s approach. 

Another difference that Lambert points to is that Parsec has been built to work in a dynamic, permissionless network environment (essential for the intended use-case, as the Safe Network is intended as a public network). Whereas he claims Hashgraph has only demonstrated its algorithms working on a permissioned (and therefore private) network “where all the nodes are known”.

He also suggests there’s a question mark over whether Hashgraph’s algorithm can achieve consensus when there are malicious nodes operating on the network. Which — if true — would limit what it can be used for.

“The Hashgraph algorithm is only proven to reach agreement if there’s no adversaries within the network,” Lambert claims. “So if everything’s running well then happy days, but if there’s any maliciousness or any failure within that network then — certainly on the basis of what’s been published — it would suggest that that algorithm was not going to hold up to that.”

“I think being able to do all of these things asynchronously with all of the mathematical guarantees is very difficult,” he continues, returning to the core consensus challenge. “So at the moment we see that we have come out with something that is unique, that covers a lot of these bases, and is a very good use for our use-case. And I think will be useful for others — so I think we like to think that we’ve made a paradigm shift or a vast improvement over the state of the art.”

  Paradigm shift vs marginal innovation

Despite the team’s conviction that, with Parsec, they’ve come up with something very notable, early feedback includes some very vocal Twitter doubters.

For example there’s a lengthy back-and-forth between several MaidSafe engineers and Ethereum researcher Vlad Zamfir — who dubs the Parsec protocol “overhyped” and a “marginal innovation if that”… so, er, ouch.

Well, I don't think asynchronous consensus on an order of events can be described as "never been done before" or "a paradigm shift". And it's not asynchronous, but "very asynchronous" or "randomly synchronous" [sic], and this synchrony assumption isn't very clearly documented

— Vlad ''not giving away ETH'' Zamfir (@VladZamfir) May 31, 2018

Lambert is, if not entirely sanguine, then solidly phlegmatic in the face of a bit of initial Twitter blowback — saying he reckons it will take more time for more detailed responses to come, i.e. allowing for people to properly digest the whitepaper.

“In the world of async BFT algorithms, any advance is huge,” MaidSafe CEO David Irvine also tells us when we ask for a response to Zamfir’s critique. “How huge is subjective, but any advance has to be great for the world. We hope others will advance Parsec like we have built on others (as we clearly state and thank them for their work).  So even if it was a marginal development (which it certainly is not) then I would take that.”

“All in all, though, nothing was said that took away from the fact Parsec moves the industry forward,” he adds. “I felt the comments were a bit juvenile at times and a bit defensive (probably due to us not agreeing with POS in our Medium post) but in terms of the only part commented on (the coin flip) we as a team feel that part could be much more concrete in terms of defining exactly how small such random (finite) delays could be. We know they do not stop the network and a delaying node would be killed, but for completeness, it would be nice to be that detailed.”

A developer source of our own in the crypto/blockchain space — who’s not connected to the MaidSafe or Ethereum projects — also points out that Parsec “getting objective review will take some time given that so many potential reviewers have vested interest in their own project/coin”.

It’s certainly fair to say the space excels at public spats and disagreements. Researchers pouring effort into one project can be less than kind to rivals’ efforts. (And, well, given all the crypto Lambos at stake it’s not hard to see why there can be no love lost — and, ironically, zero trust — between competing champions of trustless tech.)

Another fundamental truth of these projects is they’re all busily experimenting right now, with lots of ideas in play to try and fix core issues like scalability, efficiency and robustness — often having different ideas over implementation even if rival projects are circling and/or converging on similar approaches and techniques.

“Certainly other projects are looking at sharding,” says Lambert. “So I know that Ethereum are looking at sharding. And I think Bitcoin are looking at that as well, but I think everyone probably has quite different ideas about how to implement it. And of course we’re not using a blockchain which makes that another different use-case where Ethereum and Bitcoin obviously are. But everyone has — as with anything — these different approaches and different ideas.”

“Every network will have its own different ways of doing [consensus],” he adds when asked whether he believes Parsec could be adopted by other projects wrestling with the consensus challenge. “So it’s not like some could lift [Parsec] out and just put it in. Ethereum is blockchain-based — I think they’re looking at something around proof of stake, but maybe they could take some ideas or concepts from the work that we’re open sourcing for their specific case.

“If you get other blockchain-less networks like IOTA, Byteball, I think POA is another one as well. These other projects it might be easier for them to implement something like Parsec with them because they’re not using blockchain. So maybe less of that adaption required.”

Whether other projects will deem Parsec worthy of their attention remains to be seen at this point with so much still to play for. Some may prefer to expend effort trying to rubbish a rival approach, whose open source tech could, if it stands up to scrutiny and operational performance, reduce the commercial value of proprietary and patented mechanisms also intended to grease the wheels of decentralized networks — for a fee.

And of course MaidSafe’s developed-in-stealth consensus protocol may also turn out to be a relatively minor development. But finding a non-vested expert to give an impartial assessment of complex network routing algorithms conjoined to such a self-interested and, frankly, anarchical industry is another characteristic challenge of the space.

Irvine’s view is that DAG based projects which are using a centralized component will have to move on or adopt what he dubs “state of art” asynchronous consensus algorithms — as MaidSafe believes Parsec is — aka, algorithms which are “more widely accepted and proven”.

“So these projects should contribute to the research, but more importantly, they will have to adopt better algorithms than they use,” he suggests. “So they can play an important part, upgrades! How to upgrade a running DAG based network? How to had fork a graph? etc. We know how to hard fork blockchains, but upgrading DAG based networks may not be so simple when they are used as ledgers.

“Projects like Hashgraph, Algorand etc will probably use an ABFT algorithm like this as their whole network with a little work for a currency; IOTA, NANO, Bytball etc should. That is entirely possible with advances like Parsec. However adding dynamic membership, sharding, a data layer then a currency is a much larger proposition, which is why Parsec has been in stealth mode while it is being developed.

“We hope that by being open about the algorithm, and making the code open source when complete, we will help all the other projects working on similar problems.”

Of course MaidSafe’s team might be misguided in terms of the breakthrough they think they’ve made with Parsec. But it’s pretty hard to stand up the idea they’re being intentionally misleading.

Because, well, what would be the point of that? While the exact depth of MaidSafe’s funding reserves isn’t clear, Lambert doesn’t sound like a startup guy with money worries. And the team’s staying power cannot be in doubt — over a decade into the R&D needed to underpin their alt network.

It’s true that being around for so long does have some downsides, though. Especially, perhaps, given how hyped the decentralized space has now become. “Because we’ve been working on it for so long, and it’s been such a big project, you can see some negative feedback about that,” as Lambert admits.

And with such intense attention now on the space, injecting energy which in turn accelerates ideas and activity, there’s perhaps extra pressure on a veteran player like MaidSafe to be seen making a meaningful contribution — ergo, it might be tempting for the team to believe the consensus protocol they’ve engineered really is a big deal.

To stand up and be counted amid all the noise, as it were. And to draw attention to their own project — which needs lots of external developers to buy into the vision if it’s to succeed, yet, here in 2018, it’s just one decentralization project among so many. 

  The Safe Network roadmap

Consensus aside, MaidSafe’s biggest challenge is still turning the sizable amount of funding and resources the team’s ideas have attracted to date into a bona fide alternative network that anyone really can use. And there’s a very long road to travel still on that front, clearly.

The Safe Network is in alpha 2 testing incarnation (which has been up and running since September last year) — consisting of around a hundred nodes that MaidSafe is maintaining itself.

The core decentralization proposition of anyone being able to supply storage resource to the network via lending their own spare capacity is not yet live — and won’t come fully until alpha 4.

“People are starting to create different apps against that network. So we’ve seen Jams — a decentralized music player… There are a couple of storage style apps… There is encrypted email running as well, and also that is running on Android,” says Lambert. “And we have a forked version of the Beaker browser — that’s the browser that we use right now. So if you can create websites on the Safe Network, which has its own protocol, and if you want to go and view those sites you need a Safe browser to do that, so we’ve also been working on our own browser from scratch that we’ll be releasing later this year… So there’s a number of apps that are running against that alpha 2 network.

“What alpha 3 will bring is it will run in parallel with alpha 2 but it will effectively be a decentralized routing network. What that means is it will be one for more technical people to run, and it will enable data to be passed around a network where anyone can contribute their resources to it but it will not facilitate data storage. So it’ll be a command line app, which is probably why it’ll suit technical people more because there’ll be no user interface for it, and they will contribute their resources to enable messages to be passed around the network. So secure messaging would be a use-case for that.

“And then alpha 4 is effectively bringing together alpha 2 and alpha 3. So it adds a storage layer on top of the alpha 3 network — and at that point it gives you the fully decentralized network where users are contributing their resources from home and they will be able to store data, send messages and things of that nature. Potentially during alpha 4, or a later alpha, we’ll introduce test SafeCoin. Which is the final piece of the initial puzzle to provide incentives for users to provide resources and for developers to make apps. So that’s probably what the immediate roadmap looks like.”

On the timeline front Lambert won’t be coaxed into fixing any deadlines to all these planned alphas. They’ve long ago learnt not to try and predict the pace of progress, he says with a laugh. Though he does not question that progress is being made.

“These big infrastructure projects are typically only government funded because the payback is too slow for venture capitalists,” he adds. “So in the past you had things like Arpanet, the precursor to the Internet — that was obviously a US government funded project — and so we’ve taken on a project which has, not grown arms and legs, but certainly there’s more to it than what was initially thought about.

“So we are almost privately funding this infrastructure. Which is quite a big scope, and I will say why it’s taking a bit of time. But we definitely do seem to be making lots of progress.”

via TechCrunch

[abckidstvyara]

Given all the hype and noise swirling around crypto and decentralized network projects, which runs the full gamut from scams and stupidity, to very clever and inspired ideas, the release of yet another whitepaper does not immediately set off an attention klaxon.

But this whitepaper — which details a new protocol for achieving consensus within a decentralized network — is worth paying more attention to than most.

MaidSafe, the team behind it, are also the literal opposite of fly-by-night crypto opportunists. They’ve been working on decentralized networking since long before the space became the hot, hyped thing it is now.

Their overarching mission is to engineer an entirely decentralized Internet which bakes in privacy, security and freedom of expression by design — the ‘Safe’ in their planned ‘Safe Network’ stands for ‘Secure access for everyone’ — meaning it’s encrypted, autonomous, self-organizing, self-healing. And the new consensus protocol is just another piece towards fulfilling that grand vision.

What’s consensus in decentralized networking terms? “Within decentralized networks you must have a way of the network agreeing on a state — such as can somebody access a file or confirming a coin transaction, for example — and the reason you need this is because you don’t have a central server to confirm all this to you,” explains MaidSafe’s COO Nick Lambert, discussing what the protocol is intended to achieve.

“So you need all these decentralized nodes all reaching agreement somehow on a state within the network. Consensus occurs by each of these nodes on the network voting and letting the network as a whole know what it thinks of a transaction.

“It’s almost like consensus could be considered the heart of the networks. It’s required for almost every event in the network.”

We wrote about MaidSafe’s alternative, server-less Internet in 2014. But they actually began work on the project in stealth all the way back in 2006. So they’re over a decade into the R&D at this point.

The network is p2p because it’s being designed so that data is locally encrypted, broken up into pieces and then stored distributed and replicated across the network, relying on the users’ own compute resources to stand in and take the strain. No servers necessary.

The prototype Safe Network is currently in an alpha testing stage (they opened for alpha in 2016). Several more alpha test stages are planned, with a beta release still a distant, undated prospect at this stage. But rearchitecting the entire Internet was clearly never going to be a day’s work.

MaidSafe also ran a multimillion dollar crowdsale in 2014 — for a proxy token of the coin that will eventually be baked into the network — and did so long before ICOs became a crypto-related bandwagon that all sorts of entities were jumping onto. The SafeCoin cryptocurrency is intended to operate as the inventive mechanism for developers to build apps for the Safe Network and users to contribute compute resource and thus bring MaidSafe’s distributed dream alive.

Their timing on the token sale front, coupled with prudent hodling of some of the Bitcoins they’ve raised, means they’re essentially in a position of not having to worry about raising more funds to build the network, according to Lambert.

A rough, back-of-an-envelope calculation on MaidSafe’s original crowdsale suggests, given they raised $2M in Bitcoin in April 2014 when the price for 1BTC was up to around $500, the Bitcoins they obtained then could be worth between ~$30M-$40M by today’s Bitcoin prices — though that would be assuming they held on to most of them. Bitcoin’s price also peaked far higher last year too.

As well as the token sale they also did an equity raise in 2016, via the fintech investment platform bnktothefuture, pulling in around $1.7M from that — in a mixture of cash and “some Bitcoin”.

“It’s gone both ways,” says Lambert, discussing the team’s luck with Bitcoin. “The crowdsale we were on the losing end of Bitcoin price decreasing. We did a raise from bnktothefuture in autumn of 2016… and fortunately we held on to quite a lot of the Bitcoin. So we rode the Bitcoin price up. So I feel like the universe paid us back a little bit for that. So it feels like we’re level now.”

“Fundraising is exceedingly time consuming right through the organization, and it does take a lot of time away from what you wants to be focusing on, and so to be in a position where you’re not desperate for funding is a really nice one to be in,” he adds. “It allows us to focus on the technology and releasing the network.”

The team’s headcount is now up to around 33, with founding members based at the HQ in Ayr, Scotland, and other engineers working remotely or distributed (including in a new dev office they opened in India at the start of this year), even though MaidSafe is still not taking in any revenue.

This April they also made the decision to switch from a dual licensing approach for their software — previously offering both an open source license and a commercial license (which let people close source their code for a fee) — to going only open source, to encourage more developer engagement and contributions to the project, as Lambert tells it.

“We always see the SafeNetwork a bit like a public utility,” he says. “In terms of once we’ve got this thing up and launched we don’t want to control it or own it because if we do nobody will want to use it — it needs to be seen as everyone contributing. So we felt it’s a much more encouraging sign for developers who want to contribute if they see everything is fully open sourced and cannot be closed source.”

MaidSafe’s story so far is reason enough to take note of their whitepaper.

But the consensus issue the paper addresses is also a key challenge for decentralized networks so any proposed solution is potentially a big deal — if indeed it pans out as promised.

  Protocol for Asynchronous, Reliable, Secure and Efficient Consensus

MaidSafe reckons they’ve come up with a way of achieving consensus on decentralized networks that’s scalable, robust and efficient. Hence the name of the protocol — ‘Parsec’ — being short for: ‘Protocol for Asynchronous, Reliable, Secure and Efficient Consensus’.

They will be open sourcing the protocol under a GPL v3 license — with a rough timeframe of “months” for that release, according to Lambert.

He says they’ve been working on Parsec for the last 18 months to two years — but also drawing on earlier research the team carried out into areas such as conflict-free replicated data types, synchronous and asynchronous consensus, and topics such as threshold signatures and common coin.

More specifically, the research underpinning Parsec is based on the following five papers: 1. Baird L. The Swirlds Hashgraph Consensus Algorithm: Fair, Fast, Byzantine Fault Tolerance, Swirlds Tech Report SWIRLDS-TR-2016-01 (2016); 2. Mostefaoui A., Hamouna M., Raynal M. Signature-Free Asynchronous Byzantine Consensus with t <n/3 and O(n 2 ) Messages, ACM PODC (2014); 3. Micali S. Byzantine Agreement, Made Trivial, (2018); 4. Miller A., Xia Y., Croman K., Shi E., Song D. The Honey Badger of BFT Protocols, CCS (2016); 5. Team Rocket Snowflake to Avalanche: A Novel Metastable Consensus Protocol Family for Cryptocurrencies, (2018).

One tweet responding to the protocol’s unveiling just over a week ago wonders whether it’s too good to be true. Time will tell — but the potential is certainly enticing.

Bitcoin’s use of a drastically energy-inefficient ‘proof of work’ method to achieve consensus and write each transaction to its blockchain very clearly doesn’t scale. It’s slow, cumbersome and wasteful. And how to get blockchain-based networks to support the billions of transactions per second that might be needed to sustain the various envisaged applications remains an essential work in progress — with projects investigating various ideas and approaches to try to overcome the limitation.

MaidSafe’s network is not blockchain-based. It’s engineered to function with asynchronous voting of nodes, rather than synchronous voting, which should avoid the bottleneck problems associated with blockchain. But it’s still decentralized. So it needs a consensus mechanism to enable operations and transactions to be carried out autonomously and robustly. That’s where Parsec is intended to slot in.

The protocol does not use proof of work. And is able, so the whitepaper claims, to achieve consensus even if a third of the network is comprised of malicious nodes — i.e. nodes which are attempting to disrupt network operations or otherwise attack the network.

Another claimed advantage is that decisions made via the protocol are both mathematically guaranteed and irreversible.

“What Parsec does is it can reach consensus even with malicious nodes. And up to a third of the nodes being malicious is what the maths proofs suggest,” says Lambert. “This ability to provide mathematical guarantees that all parts of the network will come to the same agreement at a point in time, even with some fault in the network or bad actors — that’s what Byzantine Fault Tolerance is.”

In theory a blockchain using proof of work could be hacked if any one entity controlled 51% of the nodes on the network (although in reality it’s likely that such a large amount of energy would be required it’s pretty much impractical).

So on the surface MaidSafe’s decentralized network — which ‘only’ needs 33% of its nodes to be compromised for its consensus decisions to be attacked — sounds rather less robust. But Lambert says it’s more nuanced than the numbers suggest. And in fact the malicious third would also need to be nodes that have the authority to vote. “So it is a third but it’s a third of well reputed nodes,” as he puts it.

So there’s an element of proof of stake involved too, bound up with additional planned characteristics of the Safe Network — related to dynamic membership and sharding (Lambert says MaidSafe has additional whitepapers on both those elements coming soon).

“Those two papers, particularly the one around dynamic membership, will explain why having a third of malicious nodes is actually harder than just having 33% of malicious nodes. Because the nodes that can vote have to have a reputation as well. So it’s not just purely you can flood the Safe Network with lots and lots of malicious nodes and override it only using a third of the nodes. What we’re saying is the nodes that can vote and actually have a say must have a good reputation in the network,” he says.

“The other thing is proof of stake… Everyone is desperate to move away from proof of work because of its environmental impact. So proof of stake — I liken it to the Scottish landowners, where people with a lot of power have more say. In the cryptocurrency field, proof of stake might be if you have, let’s say, 10 coins and I have one coin your vote might be worth 10x as much authority as what my one coin would be. So any of these mechanisms that they come up with it has that weighting to it… So the people with the most vested interests in the network are also given the more votes.”

Sharding refers to closed groups that allow for consensus votes to be reached by a subset of nodes on a decentralized network. By splitting the network into small sections for consensus voting purposes the idea is you avoid the inefficiencies of having to poll all the nodes on the network — yet can still retain robustness, at least so long as subgroups are carefully structured and secured.

“If you do that correctly you can make it more secure and you can make things much more efficient and faster,” says Lambert. “Because rather than polling, let’s say 6,000 nodes, you might be polling eight nodes. So you can get that information back quickly.

“Obviously you need to be careful about how you do that because with much less nodes you can potentially game the network so you need to be careful how you secure those smaller closed groups or shards. So that will be quite a big thing because pretty much every crypto project is looking at sharding to make, certainly, blockchains more efficient. And so the fact that we’ll have something coming out in that, after we have the dynamic membership stuff coming out, is going to be quite exciting to see the reaction to that as well.”

Voting authority on the Safe Network might be based on a node’s longevity, quality and historical activity — so a sort of ‘reputation’ score (or ledger) that can yield voting rights over time.

“If you’re like that then you will have a vote in these closed groups. And so a third of those votes — and that then becomes quite hard to game because somebody who’s then trying to be malicious would need to have their nodes act as good corporate citizens for a time period. And then all of a sudden become malicious, by which time they’ve probably got a vested stake in the network. So it wouldn’t be possible for someone to just come and flood the network with new nodes and then be malicious because it would not impact upon the network,” Lambert suggests.

The computing power that would be required to attack the Safe Network once it’s public and at scale would also be “really, really significant”, he adds. “Once it gets to scale it would be really hard to co-ordinate anything against it because you’re always having to be several hundred percent bigger than the network and then have a co-ordinated attack on it itself. And all of that work might get you to impact the decision within one closed group. So it’s not even network wide… And that decision could be on who accesses one piece of encrypted shard of data for example… Even the thing you might be able to steal is only an encrypted shard of something — it’s not even the whole thing.”

Other distributed ledger projects are similarly working on Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant (AFBT) consensus models, including those using directed acrylic graphs (DAGs) — another nascent decentralization technology that’s been suggested as an alternative to blockchain.

And indeed AFBT techniques predate Bitcoin, though MaidSafe says these kind of models have only more recently become viable thanks to research and the relative maturing of decentralized computing and data types, itself as a consequence of increased interest and investment in the space.

However in the case of Hashgraph — the DAG project which has probably attracted the most attention so far — it’s closed source, not open. So that’s one major difference with MaidSafe’s approach. 

Another difference that Lambert points to is that Parsec has been built to work in a dynamic, permissionless network environment (essential for the intended use-case, as the Safe Network is intended as a public network). Whereas he claims Hashgraph has only demonstrated its algorithms working on a permissioned (and therefore private) network “where all the nodes are known”.

He also suggests there’s a question mark over whether Hashgraph’s algorithm can achieve consensus when there are malicious nodes operating on the network. Which — if true — would limit what it can be used for.

“The Hashgraph algorithm is only proven to reach agreement if there’s no adversaries within the network,” Lambert claims. “So if everything’s running well then happy days, but if there’s any maliciousness or any failure within that network then — certainly on the basis of what’s been published — it would suggest that that algorithm was not going to hold up to that.”

“I think being able to do all of these things asynchronously with all of the mathematical guarantees is very difficult,” he continues, returning to the core consensus challenge. “So at the moment we see that we have come out with something that is unique, that covers a lot of these bases, and is a very good use for our use-case. And I think will be useful for others — so I think we like to think that we’ve made a paradigm shift or a vast improvement over the state of the art.”

  Paradigm shift vs marginal innovation

Despite the team’s conviction that, with Parsec, they’ve come up with something very notable, early feedback includes some very vocal Twitter doubters.

For example there’s a lengthy back-and-forth between several MaidSafe engineers and Ethereum researcher Vlad Zamfir — who dubs the Parsec protocol “overhyped” and a “marginal innovation if that”… so, er, ouch.

Well, I don't think asynchronous consensus on an order of events can be described as "never been done before" or "a paradigm shift". And it's not asynchronous, but "very asynchronous" or "randomly synchronous" [sic], and this synchrony assumption isn't very clearly documented

— Vlad ''not giving away ETH'' Zamfir (@VladZamfir) May 31, 2018

Lambert is, if not entirely sanguine, then solidly phlegmatic in the face of a bit of initial Twitter blowback — saying he reckons it will take more time for more detailed responses to come, i.e. allowing for people to properly digest the whitepaper.

“In the world of async BFT algorithms, any advance is huge,” MaidSafe CEO David Irvine also tells us when we ask for a response to Zamfir’s critique. “How huge is subjective, but any advance has to be great for the world. We hope others will advance Parsec like we have built on others (as we clearly state and thank them for their work).  So even if it was a marginal development (which it certainly is not) then I would take that.”

“All in all, though, nothing was said that took away from the fact Parsec moves the industry forward,” he adds. “I felt the comments were a bit juvenile at times and a bit defensive (probably due to us not agreeing with POS in our Medium post) but in terms of the only part commented on (the coin flip) we as a team feel that part could be much more concrete in terms of defining exactly how small such random (finite) delays could be. We know they do not stop the network and a delaying node would be killed, but for completeness, it would be nice to be that detailed.”

A developer source of our own in the crypto/blockchain space — who’s not connected to the MaidSafe or Ethereum projects — also points out that Parsec “getting objective review will take some time given that so many potential reviewers have vested interest in their own project/coin”.

It’s certainly fair to say the space excels at public spats and disagreements. Researchers pouring effort into one project can be less than kind to rivals’ efforts. (And, well, given all the crypto Lambos at stake it’s not hard to see why there can be no love lost — and, ironically, zero trust — between competing champions of trustless tech.)

Another fundamental truth of these projects is they’re all busily experimenting right now, with lots of ideas in play to try and fix core issues like scalability, efficiency and robustness — often having different ideas over implementation even if rival projects are circling and/or converging on similar approaches and techniques.

“Certainly other projects are looking at sharding,” says Lambert. “So I know that Ethereum are looking at sharding. And I think Bitcoin are looking at that as well, but I think everyone probably has quite different ideas about how to implement it. And of course we’re not using a blockchain which makes that another different use-case where Ethereum and Bitcoin obviously are. But everyone has — as with anything — these different approaches and different ideas.”

“Every network will have its own different ways of doing [consensus],” he adds when asked whether he believes Parsec could be adopted by other projects wrestling with the consensus challenge. “So it’s not like some could lift [Parsec] out and just put it in. Ethereum is blockchain-based — I think they’re looking at something around proof of stake, but maybe they could take some ideas or concepts from the work that we’re open sourcing for their specific case.

“If you get other blockchain-less networks like IOTA, Byteball, I think POA is another one as well. These other projects it might be easier for them to implement something like Parsec with them because they’re not using blockchain. So maybe less of that adaption required.”

Whether other projects will deem Parsec worthy of their attention remains to be seen at this point with so much still to play for. Some may prefer to expend effort trying to rubbish a rival approach, whose open source tech could, if it stands up to scrutiny and operational performance, reduce the commercial value of proprietary and patented mechanisms also intended to grease the wheels of decentralized networks — for a fee.

And of course MaidSafe’s developed-in-stealth consensus protocol may also turn out to be a relatively minor development. But finding a non-vested expert to give an impartial assessment of complex network routing algorithms conjoined to such a self-interested and, frankly, anarchical industry is another characteristic challenge of the space.

Irvine’s view is that DAG based projects which are using a centralized component will have to move on or adopt what he dubs “state of art” asynchronous consensus algorithms — as MaidSafe believes Parsec is — aka, algorithms which are “more widely accepted and proven”.

“So these projects should contribute to the research, but more importantly, they will have to adopt better algorithms than they use,” he suggests. “So they can play an important part, upgrades! How to upgrade a running DAG based network? How to had fork a graph? etc. We know how to hard fork blockchains, but upgrading DAG based networks may not be so simple when they are used as ledgers.

“Projects like Hashgraph, Algorand etc will probably use an ABFT algorithm like this as their whole network with a little work for a currency; IOTA, NANO, Bytball etc should. That is entirely possible with advances like Parsec. However adding dynamic membership, sharding, a data layer then a currency is a much larger proposition, which is why Parsec has been in stealth mode while it is being developed.

“We hope that by being open about the algorithm, and making the code open source when complete, we will help all the other projects working on similar problems.”

Of course MaidSafe’s team might be misguided in terms of the breakthrough they think they’ve made with Parsec. But it’s pretty hard to stand up the idea they’re being intentionally misleading.

Because, well, what would be the point of that? While the exact depth of MaidSafe’s funding reserves isn’t clear, Lambert doesn’t sound like a startup guy with money worries. And the team’s staying power cannot be in doubt — over a decade into the R&D needed to underpin their alt network.

It’s true that being around for so long does have some downsides, though. Especially, perhaps, given how hyped the decentralized space has now become. “Because we’ve been working on it for so long, and it’s been such a big project, you can see some negative feedback about that,” as Lambert admits.

And with such intense attention now on the space, injecting energy which in turn accelerates ideas and activity, there’s perhaps extra pressure on a veteran player like MaidSafe to be seen making a meaningful contribution — ergo, it might be tempting for the team to believe the consensus protocol they’ve engineered really is a big deal.

To stand up and be counted amid all the noise, as it were. And to draw attention to their own project — which needs lots of external developers to buy into the vision if it’s to succeed, yet, here in 2018, it’s just one decentralization project among so many. 

  The Safe Network roadmap

Consensus aside, MaidSafe’s biggest challenge is still turning the sizable amount of funding and resources the team’s ideas have attracted to date into a bona fide alternative network that anyone really can use. And there’s a very long road to travel still on that front, clearly.

The Safe Network is in alpha 2 testing incarnation (which has been up and running since September last year) — consisting of around a hundred nodes that MaidSafe is maintaining itself.

The core decentralization proposition of anyone being able to supply storage resource to the network via lending their own spare capacity is not yet live — and won’t come fully until alpha 4.

“People are starting to create different apps against that network. So we’ve seen Jams — a decentralized music player… There are a couple of storage style apps… There is encrypted email running as well, and also that is running on Android,” says Lambert. “And we have a forked version of the Beaker browser — that’s the browser that we use right now. So if you can create websites on the Safe Network, which has its own protocol, and if you want to go and view those sites you need a Safe browser to do that, so we’ve also been working on our own browser from scratch that we’ll be releasing later this year… So there’s a number of apps that are running against that alpha 2 network.

“What alpha 3 will bring is it will run in parallel with alpha 2 but it will effectively be a decentralized routing network. What that means is it will be one for more technical people to run, and it will enable data to be passed around a network where anyone can contribute their resources to it but it will not facilitate data storage. So it’ll be a command line app, which is probably why it’ll suit technical people more because there’ll be no user interface for it, and they will contribute their resources to enable messages to be passed around the network. So secure messaging would be a use-case for that.

“And then alpha 4 is effectively bringing together alpha 2 and alpha 3. So it adds a storage layer on top of the alpha 3 network — and at that point it gives you the fully decentralized network where users are contributing their resources from home and they will be able to store data, send messages and things of that nature. Potentially during alpha 4, or a later alpha, we’ll introduce test SafeCoin. Which is the final piece of the initial puzzle to provide incentives for users to provide resources and for developers to make apps. So that’s probably what the immediate roadmap looks like.”

On the timeline front Lambert won’t be coaxed into fixing any deadlines to all these planned alphas. They’ve long ago learnt not to try and predict the pace of progress, he says with a laugh. Though he does not question that progress is being made.

“These big infrastructure projects are typically only government funded because the payback is too slow for venture capitalists,” he adds. “So in the past you had things like Arpanet, the precursor to the Internet — that was obviously a US government funded project — and so we’ve taken on a project which has, not grown arms and legs, but certainly there’s more to it than what was initially thought about.

“So we are almost privately funding this infrastructure. Which is quite a big scope, and I will say why it’s taking a bit of time. But we definitely do seem to be making lots of progress.”