Image: Maidsafe
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Image: Maidsafe
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This week's sale was to help raise funds for MaidSafe, and get people involved in the network. MaidSafe plans to use some of the funds to set up international development units, and to seed the network with tens of thousands of computers around the world to start it off.I asked if the SAFE system couldn’t have been implemented somehow without the need for a cryptocurrency, and Irvine said the idea was to come up with a way that didn’t mean people were limited by a system that only let them use as much resources as they were able to put in themselves. “The problem with that is a lot of people today just have mobile phones and just have tablets; they don’t have resources that would be particularly valuable to the network, like a PC,” he said. The cryptocurrency element means people with limited resources can still use the system in the same way; they just don't get so many safecoins.Of course, their are other barriers in the digital divide, and MaidSafe is a private company, not a philanthropic exercise. It’s also in very early stages and there are no doubt many questions that need to be ironed out. But the idea is nothing if not ambitious, and Irvine’s not planning to stop with just the web. He threw out other ideas: a global decentralised voting system that’s cryptographically secure, a propaganda-free global news system made by the people and distributed in different countries via avatars speaking their own language.“The things that we can achieve with a free, secure, and privacy-enhancing internet are beyond what we can even dream of today,” he said. Whether it will ever take off is anyone’s guess, and I’m skeptical that any new system would ever be widely adopted in place of the long-established current model for the internet. Forbes' Kashmir Hill pointed out that it might just be way too soon for such an idea, given that most people don't even understand Bitcoin yet.At the least, it's refreshing to see a take on the current vogue for decentralisation that has its sights set a little higher than the next novelty crypto-clone."The things that we can achieve with a free, secure, and privacy-enhancing internet are beyond what we can even dream of today."