Maidsafe don't market aggressively, it's not their way so I think you are mistaken. They did attend a could of bitcoin type conferences in person in the early days but I very much doubt they paid anyone to promote their coin.

IMO they are an outstanding team both technically and ethically. In fact it was the latter that got me interested in the project in 2014 and my impression then has been confirmed many times since.

This was in about 2015. Somebody was telling me how great is MaidSAFE and I should check it out, but when I wanted to ask her about technical details, she wasn't able to tell me anything specific.

It was before Ethereum launched, I really liked how passionately Vitalik was speaking on the stage about the altcoin he was making, and what kind of contracts can be created with a few lines of code, it was much more interesting to me than an altcoin with no technical information to tell you the truth :)

If people were harassing folk saying we paid them, then that was just false (harassment or not, we don't pay for coin promotions, in fact we don't pay for any promotions).

I wish folk could discuss the project and it's goals. Incentivisation is part, but a really small part of the project. As soon as I see a cryptocurrency comment I just lose faith and have barely any energy to engage. Folk need to forget money/coins and so on and focus first on the function and vision. All you get talking cryptocurrency is "it's a scam", "it's a fraud", "somebody told me X and it was false". Then let's look at some price chart and so on. It is really just a distraction and the arguments have an infinite lifetime. When I see projects on github/lab who mention cryptocurrency way up front I also lose faith. An incentive should not be the vision or function, it's an incentive it should never be a core goal or technology.

I've been following the project since the early years.

It's a shame that folks look only at surface level.

Dirvine's name is going to ring throughout history for his honesty, integrity, and brilliance.

The MAIDsafe project is the most well developed, well managed in the entire space. I personally don't even look at it as a cryptocurrency, but instead as a project in and of itself.

I've been following MAIDsafe for years I've never seen anyone in the team ever try to hype or crash anything at the project.

They all talk to each other with love and courtesy. Truely an amazing project with amazing people check out their forums. It's where I lurked for years now.

https://safenetforum.org/

> we don't pay for coin promotions, in fact we don't pay for any promotions

> Incentivisation is part, but a really small part of the project.

It isn't clear to me how to reconcile these statements. Can you elaborate?

Incentivization is a part of the product in that Proof of Resource dictates that Farmers (I.e. those who provide resources to the SAFE Network in the form of bandwidth, hard drive space, CPU, etc.) are rewarded for doing so with Safecoin. In a sense it is similar to how POW compensated bitcoin miners. This form of incentivization is autonomously governed by the Network itself, and has nothing to do with paying for promotions. I’d recommend taking a look at the SAFE Network primer to understand more (https://primer.safenetwork.org/)

Good synopsis, thank you!

That's odd seeing as (somewhat to the chagrin of many SAFE Network community members) the MaidSafe team generally does not participate in conferences. Maybe you're confusing SAFE with something like Substratum or Skycoin or some such...

Also, MaidSafe consistently shares a dev update every week Perhaps now's a great opportunity for you to read up on the current state of development. Here's the most recent update: https://safenetforum.org/t/safe-network-dev-update-april-30-...

All these other coins are just a few years old, so they couldn't been them.

The problem with MaidSafe for me is that they have their own unsafe coin. If I would want to write an application layer, I would build on top of the Lightning network, as it allows cheap, small and fast payments on top of the most secure network in the world (Bitcoin).

I just looked at the whitepaper, and it talks about the price of SafeCoin going up all the time...it hasn't been the case, for a good reason.

That’s weird. Could you provide a link to the white paper that says that about Safecoin? I’ve never heard of that document.

Please bear in mind that there is another project (started after MaidSafe) that decided to use the Safecoin name. I think it’s a scam. It has nothing to do with MaidSafe or the SAFE Network. This is the website for that project (https://safecoin.org/). Once again, it is completely unrelated to MaidSafe.

I see, that's said, I probably checked that one.

It would be probably better, if the web site of this project would be much more technical, as there are just too many buzzwords for me to take it seriously. I don't see how it solves a concrete problem.

All infrastructure has good and bad sides, and the bad side is not well documented.

Which website are you talking about? Hopefully not the fake one (https://safecoin.org/). If you want to get more technical, do read the weekly updates (I think I’ve already provided a link to one somewhere above in this thread).

Also, I’d recommend checking out the forum (https://safenetforum.org/) where there are a lot of in-depth technical discussions. The weekly updates and the various discussions on the forum are very transparent on what’s working well along with what are still significant challenges that they are dressing and how. The MaidSafe devs often post RFCs to get community perspective on how to tackle some of the meaty issues. Here’s an example of one such RFC (https://safenetforum.org/t/rfc-data-types-refinement/30508/1...).

Plus, it’s worth visiting the project’s DevHub too (https://hub.safedev.org/)

I am an early adopter and I've been following the development of MaidSafe since 2014. I think I do understand your frustration because in the very early years the development had very little documentation.

Also it is doubly frustrating to read about this perception of being "buzzwordy" or "scammy" or to have "people paid" to promote this network... because this team is exactly the opposite to the point of frustration. The actual team is all about doing the grunt work with zero regards towards marketing or promoting it. They didn't even properly capitalized for PR their participation as consultants of HBO's Silicon Valley, if Pied Piper Network sounded very similar to the goals of the SAFE Network it wasn't just coincidence. Mike Judge confirmed it in the Decentralized Web Summit that they especially did research on MaidSafe.

In any case, that image should be changing now, the risk profile has changed substantially. The proof-of-concept was released two years ago, and now there are actual usable alpha you can download right now to test it out.

The main risk in a project as ridiculously ambitious as this one is that they may never release anything. But they had, and they are still developing at neck breaking speed. So if you really understand the scope of this project and you see actual code to play with, you should be orgasmically elated.

If you are not, you don't really understand the implications of a network like this being released. If you don't understand how they are designing the network, you should start by reading this: https://primer.safenetwork.org/ And watch this to understand how Xor Distance and Xor routing works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lr9FJRDcNzk&list=PLiYqQVdgdw... And learn about PARSEC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKagaPUrDsY

I hope it helps you understand that this a serious project that isn't using buzzwords just for the sake of marketing, it is truly groundbreaking and in my opinion is the next paradigm shift after the invention of the blockchain. And this is coming from a bitcoin early adopter (2010).

Regards

Just to point out, I think you may haev got the wrong end of the stick on Safecoin.

MaidSafeCoin (MAID) that is currently traded, is just a temporary token that was created in a crowdsale in 2014 to support the project, and is not the Safecoin that is the subject of the whitepapers, code on github etc.

Safecoin will exist when the network launches—it is the token and incentive mechanism for the network, and is secure, fast, and not blockchain based. At the point of launch MAID can be swapped 1-to-1 for Safecoin.

Hm, doesn't sound like the MaidSafe I know. Started working at MaidSafe last year, after being a community member for some years. There's only been devs at the company since end of last year. But anyway, back in the days when there was marketing people at MaidSafe, if anything I only perceived them as very discrete and humble - almost excessively so - and that was not only compared to the crazy crypto world, but to any type of business. I guess others can make up their mind about that thing by themselves.