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