I have the same background as yours, but I reached the opposite conclusion about MaidSafe.
The Safecoin is what Satoshi’s promised to be and never realized. The point of the whitepaper’s vision was to achieve complete distributed mining by the users themselves, so it would be safe from both technical and political manipulation. But clearly he didn’t foresee the consequences of optimization in mining by specialized hardware, pooling and finally the centralization in a few dozen companies in the world, from which more than 50% of mining power is now coming from a totalitarian regime.
I still remember that the early versions of the Bitcoin wallet came with a pickaxe option to mine with your cpu, now that fundamental fact is looked back as a curious historic trivia.
With the SafeNetwork such centralization is impossible, while you might be able to farm wholesale in datacenters, that wouldn’t affect the possibility of single individuals to get a reward as well by sharing their humble single hard drive. The concept of distorting the difficulty increasing by large players doesn’t exist here.
The point of absolute democratization of the issuance of the cryptocurrency is unparalleled, literally every single human can participate in farming, and the chances are exactly the same for everyone.
There isn’t any trick that deep pockets can do to game the system for their own profit in detriment of the weaker.
Besides the technical details, you seem to scorn about the Safecoin being an utility token. I would agree with you if you were talking about Storj, Sia or Filecoin.
But the SafeNetwork allows you way more than what those little projects can ever offer. It is not a token for a single use, it is a token to enter a new internet that could potentially replace every single service on the normal web.
What’s the price to replace reverse proxies, backups, datacenters fees, DDoS protection services, hosting fees, CDNs, security audits, pentesting fees, insurance policies and legal fees against data breach?
If everything goes as planned, you can replace everything with a single network. This is a hell of an utility, we are talking at the potential of leaving at least 9 industries obsolete. Industries, not companies, industries. Poof, irrelevant.
Any junior developer will be able to create a secure app without the expertise in network security, without worrying about scalability, and without the worry about being hacked or taken over. It will be 100% focused in productivity. Do you see how it would dramatically impact the bottom line of every company out there?
Besides that, there is the near instantaneous transfer of coins, with the impossibility of getting any kind of bottleneck by transaction volume in the network. Every transaction would run parallel independently from each other within their own group consensus, the maximum throughput would be infinitely higher than any other crypto project out there, every user in the world could do a simultaneous transaction at the same time and it shouldn’t even flicker a second in its performance. And for free! Zip, nada.
It has all the properties for a global digital cash ever created.
I agree with you that it must be battle tested to see if it delivers on the promise, but that is just obvious and applicable to any project. The point here is that the scope of this project and the ultimate consequences in our society are way beyond of any other project out there.
The rest is attempting to recreate a startup unicorn, MaidSafe has the crazy ambition of delivering an actual paradigm shift.
I keep maintaining my very early assessment that a fair price per Safecoin should be around 20.5 dollars, that is without considering the demand that may exist as cash replacement.
