maidsafe

Steven Schear schear.steve at gmail.com
Tue Mar 24 21:14:04 PDT 2015


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
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