MaidSafe (MS) is an inadvertent (apparently due to a lack of historical information) attempt to realize the experiment Jim McCoy, Bram Cohen, Zooko O'Hearn and I set out to perform with Mojo Nation. They are doing this with the advantage of the experience of bitcoin. MN was sort of Freenet + digital currency. Unlike the file sharing systems that came before Freenet is publication-based. Both file sharing (FS) and publication content distribution approaches have their pros and cons. FS is simpler but offers little or no plausible deniability about the sharing activities. Publication offers much better deniabilty but more complex and requires more resource commitments on the part of its users. Both suffer from limitations based on popularity. MN tried to find a sweet spot by adding a resource-based currency to solve the persistence problem by paying user clients to offer storage and communication bandwidth. Unfortunately, MN never really got off the ground, due to a lack of funding, but it got far enough to encourage Bram to create BitTorrent and Zooko to create Tahoe LAFS. I tried to get Bram (and some others through client add-ons) to include some sort of digital currency to BT but it never happened. McCoy patented MN's content distribution systems with resource-based currency around 2001/2. Not sure if the patent is still in force, if Jim is even aware of MS or if he's even care if MS appears to be using MN's approach. Steve