Suppose you’re an academic and you want to send a paper to a scholarly journal.
That journal demands specific, scholarly citations.
I notice that there are some student presentations online:
http://vk.com/doc26200649_391475398?hash=71ab4cc86c38e4f33f&dl=6e7aaefd20eb76cb95
however, it’s not clear to me how one would cite the contributions of Maidsafe in a scholarly paper. Perhaps one would name the chief software architect and give a link to github.
http://maidsafe.net/docs/Safecoin.pdf
appears to be a whitepaper. I guess we could cite that just by giving the URL.
http://maidsafe.net/articles/ieee_2012.pdf
looks like it could be cited as an issue of “Pervasive Computing” magazine:
Many of the whitepapers are somewhat out-of-date with the implementation or too vague to serve as actual references for many of the algorithms being used so I am not sure about their usefulness as references. There have been newer papers about the high-level security features and resistance to attacks (like this one, and look at anything by Greig Paul from University of Strathclyde) but they do not provide concrete details about the core algorithms, especially about the distributed system part.
It would actually be super useful if we collectively extracted the algorithms and wrote other papers about them with more complete evaluation sections to serve as references.
What is the context of the paper you are writing? Where do you plan to submit it?
If you simply are looking for references that are associated with MaidSafe I would go for the newer papers. Otherwise, you might simply as well explain the part you need for your paper, give credit to MaidSafe for the contribution in the acknowledgement section, and build the rest of the paper around it.