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.