That's just a
tiny bit too complex and convoluted to pass the smell test. Actually it reeks of Rube Goldberg over-engineering.
Remember how the elegant simplicity of BitTorrent's tit-for-tat beat the layers of Gnutella cruft, and how TOR's onion routing (and i2p's garlic routing) won the race between private internets-within-the-internet?
I don't see that kind of breakthrough here. If you can't explain it without sounding like jl777 explaining SuperNet, there's a problem.
I can describe the basic ideas of Bittorrent and TOR to my mom and dad. Maidsafe? Not a chance. The best I could do is "Maid is like Freenet, except you have to pay to upload and without the 10 years of proven security."
For a science fair project, Maid has been in development far longer than comparable experimental software, many of which are based on Bitcoin blockchain tech and already in production.
EG:
https://zeronet.io/ (thanks
https://torrentfreak.com/play-p2p-impossible-shutdown-160301/).
Sorry, still not clear on how Safecoins can be anonymous+private+unlinkable without using ring signatures.
So users are required to pay in order to store data. That sounds like SIA and Storj.
There are persistent rumors Maid has some unique value/selling proposition, but it continues to elude me (and not for lack of searching).
I really have no problem explaining it to friends and family. It's a P2P-internet where all data is "chunked" and encrypted and everybody stores pieces. All connections between users are encrypted as well so there's a lot of security. You can store data just like on Dropbox but you can also store websites and register a domain like zeeman.safenet which everybody can request user their browser. The network it based on Ants where all Ants have their own role without central organisation. Still though, they help each other out and work together to make sure everybody get's their data.
On BitTorrent you always hope that someone is providing a file as a seeder, on Safenet you'll always have at least 4 seeders (more likely 6) for each MB. And the seeders have an incentive to keep their connection open to make Safecoin. So download an episode of Breaking Bad from years ago and for every GB you'll have about 6000 seeders. The link with Freenet is logical but not right IMO. On Freenet you hope (just like BitTorrent) that there are seeders. In the case of Freenet you hope someone requested a file before you did in the last few weeks and that it's in cache somewhere. If it's not in cache it will be gone. On Safenet once uploaded, a file will be there forever if the uploader didn't took it off. It will be there for years. And again, for every 100MB. you'll see about 600 seeders that have the chunks available. And instead of BitTorrent where you need to provide upload to get downloads, these seeders (Farmers) are paid for by the network.
And about Safecoin, they use ring signatures if you like. Remember, to your close nodes in XOR your just an address. And as one of the users from that 32 nodes group you can't do a thing. You'll always ask for them to do it. So they GET your chunks for you and pass them to you. They decide if you can upload (PUT) a chunk to the network or not. And they sign everything you do. Without about 80% of the group signing a request you can't do anything on the network. And you can't pick your own group or address. It's like a virtual IP-Address that's given to you by a group of nodes.
But if you want more info you might want to join the forum. Lot of discussions about the questions you have. I had them as well some time ago, but I jumped in and I think it can be done what they say. Although we need to see proof over the coming months when people run Vaults from home. My expectation is that even without Safecoin the network works. Just like nobody got payed to run BitTorrent and seed some files.