MaidSafe: A Wildly Successful Cryptocoin Debacle | Hacker News Reader

MaidSafe: A Wildly Successful Cryptocoin Debacle

techcrunch.com

24 pointsmdelias19 comments

This article makes a lot of assumptions you've been following some MaidSafe drama online. But searching HN show that MaidSafe has rarely been mentioned here. Maybe someone could summarize?

Apparently they made the SafeCoin IPO (safecoin being the altcoin/blockchain that powers MaidSafe) available to purchase with both MasterCoin and Bitcoin. Based on exchange rates at the time, it was possible to get more SafeCoins if you purchased with MasterCoin, than if you used Bitcoin (since MasterCoin was so cheap).

Some people thought they could take advantage of the situation, and bought up MasterCoin to purchase SafeCoin. However it sounded like the IPO purchase cap for MasterCoin purchases was filled quickly, meaning a lot of people were left holding near-worthless MasterCoin. Thus began the cries of "Mastercoin pump and dump", which the IPO had (inadvertently?) caused.

Correct. More info on this here: http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/news/maidsafe-embroiled-safec...

From an outsider's perspective the 'IPO' did indeed look like a planned pump on Mastercoin: People were buying up Mastercoin to take advantage of the btc-msc arbitrage. This drove the Mastercoin price up by ~100%. Meanwhile certain people could potentially have offloaded tonnes of msc purposely bought the week before (for half the price). This may not have been intentional. But either way some people lost big money when Maidsafe stopped accepting msc for their 'IPO' - thus causing the msc price to collapse.

The cryptocoin situation is an endless source of hilarity. It's so crazy. Just this wild west of speculation, massive fortunes rising and plummeting, millionaires minted overnight, all the shady characters, etc. What efforts are in progress to catalog and package these stories for posterity?

404 for http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/24/maidsafe-a-wildly-successfu...

MaidSafe sounds intriguing, but the one thing that gives me pause is their licensing page (http://maidsafe.net/developers-licensing), which says that any non-GPL MaidSafe codebases requires 1% revenue fee. I still dont know if that means I can or can't create my own MaidSafe application from MaidSafe compatible libraries that I've written myself, without having to pay them. I also don't know if they have some sort of central enforcement mechanism to prevent such an Application from working on the MaidSafe network. I can only hope they start releasing example code and applications soon to clear up the confusion.

They've ditched the 1% bit.

It's still showing up on the URL that OP linked to.

Good to see that after 8 years of working on such a distributed network, it's finally paid off for them - at least in terms of reaching this level of funding, we don't know yet how successful the network itself will be in the long term.

The 3 such networks that excite me right now are Ethereum, MaidSafe and OpenLibernet, and I guess there's also BitCloud, but the last two are still mainly in whitepaper phase I believe. I don't mind that there's some overlap between them for now. Each is taking a bit of a different approach, and some things might work better on one than the other, and I'm excited to see what comes out of all of these in a few years.