🔥Crypto Fireside #2. Dimitar Dimitrov, Safe Network Ambassador With a Passion for Helping Others.
A: Hello! Who are you and what do you do?
A: Hello! Who are you, and what do you do?
D: Hello, my name is Dimitar Dimitrov, and I am addicted to Privacy, Security, and Freedom. For 14 years, I worked in the telecommunications sector from the lowest stair tread through to a small telecom owner to a person handing you a Safe flyer on the street. Let me tell you about the magic of the Safe Network and how it changed my life.
A: What’s your backstory? How did you come to get involved in the Safe Network?
D: In 2014, I came across an article explaining how a small Scottish company raised $7 million in 5 hours and how servers must die for the Internet to survive. This seemed terribly funny to me, as a person working in the IT world. But at the same time, I found it interesting why someone would give millions of dollars for it and I decided to check in more detail. This sent me on a 7-year adventure that continues to this day.
During these 7 years, my life has changed a lot. The telecommunications business became extremely difficult, and I had to sell my telecom. But I started a new business — at present, I run and operate a small boutique ad agency in the heart of Sofia Bulgaria, we work mainly with b2b customers and with some small companies and independent folks.
My uncle and mother died of cancer, one after the other, which was a very difficult time for me. If I have to point out something good from this, it is that I have completely changed my opinion of what is important in life. At the moment I believe that I have enough physical things and I don’t need anything more to be happy. I want to help people. This is not something new for me because I have been participating in various charity events since I was 20 years old. For 10 years, I have also been a volunteer in the voluntary formation of Civil Protection in Disasters of the Municipality of Sofia, and I have participated in firefighting and earthquake relief action.
For several years I have been developing a project to help sick children by raising funds for them — www.Sofia.help. I popularize it by distributing posters.
A: Take us through the process of what it is that you do, day-to-day.
D: The MaidSafe team and the community are building the Safe Network together — our vision for The New Internet — whose purpose is to return to Man the Freedom of expression, the Control of personal data, Private and Secure communications, and to build a whole new Economy. I contribute to this process by having the honor of serving the community in our forum https://safenetforum.org/ as an admin.
This is a very interesting task because one of the things I do is to welcome every new user of our forum by sending him a welcome message. Over the years, this has allowed me to meet and communicate with many interesting people from around the world. With some of them, our acquaintance grew into a friendship.
I also help Safe Network maintain a presence on social media channels — Twitter, Facebook, and Telegram. As I mentioned, I have a small advertising agency that works locally mainly with start-ups, so the opportunity to help the Safe Network allows me to experiment with advertising on the bigger world stage. I am currently posting Facebook ads in India, and the result is difficult to measure because the Safe Network is not yet a finished product and accordingly there are no users and growth to measure.
At the local level in Bulgaria, I work for the creation of a Safe Bulgarian community by supporting a local Safe site, forum, and social channels. What I do is distribute posters at residential entrances in the capital and major regional cities. Before the pandemic, I also distributed flyers on the street and participated in events in which I presented the Safe Network to visitors.
I try to do this in other countries too — Germany, France, Spain, and Russia — by arranging with other members of the community a translation of the English Safe website, forum, and social channels.
A: Describe the process of getting into this thing.
D: Personally, I strongly believe in decentralization. The purpose of the Safe Network is to eliminate intermediaries between us and our data. That is why my personal strategy is complete decentralization. My tactic to achieve this is to promote and explain to people the benefits of decentralized exchanges and the benefits of holding your own keys to your money. At the same time, I believe that for the big changes that Safe promises to achieve, we need to move from the bottom of the pyramid. That’s why I spread information about Safe in every possible way.
Personally, one of the difficulties is how to stay motivated to make a systematic effort year after year when participating in an open-source project that is entirely voluntary without pay. Public accountability to the community helps me a lot with that. After I finish a task that I have set for myself, I announce it publicly in our forum. For example, you can see my 6-month project, in which I created and reviewed 39 Safe T-shirts, or my project, which has been going on for several years now, to present the Safe logo in the form of a flag for every country in the world.
A: What has worked to attract and retain users?
D: It is extremely easy to attract new people to the Safe Network. Literally, everyone I talk to agrees that we need a solution to regain control of personal data. The Safe community is growing every year, and this can be best seen in our public forum. What hasn’t allowed us to explode yet is that until recently the project was in development, but we are already in an intensive process of testing, debugging, and progressing with great speed thanks to the strong spirit of David Irvine — the founder of MaidSafe.
With the people from the Bulgarian Safe community, I have prepared and tested computers to be used as farms in our network. Specifically, I did the tests with another project offering decentralized storage of data — Storj:
A: Maidsafe has been in development for a long time since before Bitcoin, some have said. Are you confident it will launch its Safe Network?
D: Everything in life is just probabilities and such a thing as certain does not exist. But I believe in the ability of people to change the world for the better, it is also important to note that after the latest test networks we already know that the network is working so the launch is only a matter of time.
A: You mentioned “farming”, are you able to explain what this is?
D: There is a huge amount of free storage space on people’s computers that are connected to the Internet and not used. The Safe Network allows people to receive rewards if they provide this free storage space to the Safe Network. The process of doing useful work for the network is called farming.
A: How are you doing today, and what does the future look like?
D: Although the Safe Network is my passion, I also play as a crypto speculator in other cryptocurrency projects. It’s never a good idea to talk about your money because it carries its own risks, but I can’t complain about the current bull run.
It is clear to anyone who has been in the crypto world for years that everything is still at the level of speculation with the potential in the future to be used in all areas of human activity. It is exciting to think about how decentralization is changing our daily lives and how I personally can contribute to this process. It will be interesting to see in the next 10 years which crypto projects will survive and be used by humans.
A: Through starting this project, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
D: The Safe community is full of good and smart people, and for me, it is a real inspiration to communicate with them every day. One can learn a lot, and I am grateful that I was lucky to come across Safe. Like most people who make money, I thought I understood what money was and how it worked. I have learned a lot about this in the last 7 years.
My current understanding is that cryptocurrencies have value because of the social consensus of millions of people. Once this consensus is reached, it is very difficult to be lost by all participants at once. Yes, some people lose faith, and that’s why we see bear markets with a price change down even on the premier blue-chips like Bitcoin and Ethereum by 85–95%. But not all people lose faith at once, so the bubble never bursts. Each subsequent cycle of price change up and down attracts more and more people and I believe that there will come a time in the future after a few more cycles when the price will stabilize and will not be so volatile.
For this reason, my strategy is just to HODL. I do not trade. I don’t look at charts. I’m here for the long game. This allows me to focus on the really important things — improving the human experience by eliminating intermediaries. Of all the crypto projects that I follow, Safe has the greatest potential to achieve this for a huge portion of the population of our planet. The question is whether we are ready for that. There are many interesting discussions about this in the Safe Community Forum.
A: What platforms or tools do you use for your business?
D: I only use open-source software. For image processing, I use Inkscape, and for the international Safe forums, I use Discourse.
A: What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
D: The 7 years of communication with David Irvine taught me that one can dream big things and inspired me to help Safe actively. All members of the Safe community help free of charge, we organize ourselves, and everyone is free to join.
The Incerto works from Taleb taught me how important it is to play with a soul. So I use my own money to pay for everything I do for the Safe Network.
And Richard Heart (https://richardheart.com/) teach me most of the things I know about cryptocurrencies and why the best we can do as human beings is to help other people.
A: Do you have any advice for other creators, entrepreneurs, or developers who want to get started or are just starting out?
D: There are too many knowledgeable people and too few active people in the world. Even if you don’t know enough, if you act and don’t give up, you will learn along the way.
A: I recognize the tattoo on your hand, is that real?
Yes. I believe that the Safe Network will bring Privacy, Security, Freedom to the human species. and on the occasion of the 7th anniversary of my Safe adventure, I made this tattoo memorial. See it here too: [Boots on the Ground] The Gathering Storm campaign (week 2) — #2 by Dimitar
A: Where do you see this entire space going in the next 5 to 10 years?
D: My personal view is that technology like Safe will spread slowly but become unstoppable. It is very interesting to think about this because two technologies have a great contribution to the development of human civilization — copying and transporting of data. We are at the dawn of a third such technology — the eternal storage of data. How will human society react to complete anonymity, to the impossibility of censorship? We have no way of knowing. But most people on the planet are good, otherwise, we would have already destroyed ourselves. Therefore, my hope is that the Safe Network will lead to a new golden age for Man.
A: Where can we go to learn more?
D:
🔥Thank you Dimitar!
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