
MaidSafe: A Wildly Successful Cryptocoin Debacle - mdelias
http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/24/maidsafe-a-wildly-successful-cryptocoin-debacle/
======
dmix
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?

~~~
cryptolect
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.

~~~
thisiswrong
Correct. More info on this here:
[http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/news/maidsafe-embroiled-
safec...](http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/news/maidsafe-embroiled-safecoin-
presale-mastercoin-pump-dump/2014/04/22)

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.

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wodow
404 for [http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/24/maidsafe-a-wildly-
successfu...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/24/maidsafe-a-wildly-successful-
cryptocoin-debacle)

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cryptolect
MaidSafe sounds intriguing, but the one thing that gives me pause is their
licensing page ([http://maidsafe.net/developers-
licensing](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.

~~~
Marcelus
They've ditched the 1% bit.

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

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higherpurpose
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.

~~~
bascule
See also: [http://cryptosphere.org/](http://cryptosphere.org/)

------
battani
There is a lot of uncertainty surrounding the MaidSafe IPO. Exercise due
diligence before sending coins over to them. More info here:
[https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=579797.320](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=579797.320)

------
taylorbuley
For those wondering what happened, it looks like this article was removed
because the author was fishing for BTC donations somewhere in the middle of it

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thisiswrong
I think one of the most overlooked aspects of Maidsafe's 'decentralized
internet project' is:

"(...)application developers are called Builders and the network will reward
use of these applications by paying the Builders in safecoin based on the
application use by users of the system. This is possible since the application
developer can insert their own network immutable wallet address in their
application." [1]

This has huge implications for the future of application development and
automatic 'crowdfunding'.

[1] [http://www.safecoin.io/](http://www.safecoin.io/)

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jere
Having never heard of MaidSafe, the promises made in that promo video seem
ridiculous and bordering on parody.

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minimaxir
The article was removed because OP snuck a Bitcoin tipper into the article.

[https://twitter.com/alexia/status/459376944006856704](https://twitter.com/alexia/status/459376944006856704)

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enscr
Link's been removed from Techccrunch. Any other source?

~~~
Lukeas14
The google cache is still up:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Atechc...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Atechcrunch.com%2F2014%2F04%2F24%2Fmaidsafe-
a-wildly-successful-cryptocoin-
debacle%2F&oq=cache%3Atechcrunch.com%2F2014%2F04%2F24%2Fmaidsafe-a-wildly-
successful-cryptocoin-
debacle%2F&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.2126j0j4&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8)

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msgilligan
Techcrunch took the article down.

It is now available here: [http://letstalkbitcoin.com/maidsafe-wildly-
successful-crypto...](http://letstalkbitcoin.com/maidsafe-wildly-successful-
crypto-crowdsale-debacle/)

