I would like to point out that maidsafe is objectively a scam.
Operation of the maidsafe system as advertised relies on a number of provably impossible technologies, like purely algorithmic proof-of-identity.
They gave a presentation at a recent Bitcoin conference in DC. I asked a few basic questions about how they planned to do certain things critical to maidsafe's operation (that no one knows how to do, and many think are impossible), and their answers were so obscenely stupid that anyone in the room with relevant technical knowledge was laughing.
Example: "How do you plan to prevent bots from gaming the data transfer payment system?" The answer was something like "Oh, it's way too hard to make a bot. There are too many steps."
No. Proof-of-identity means proving you are a unique human. I.e you're not a bot, and one human can't claim to be multiple humans.
It is not possible to have proof-of-identity on a distributed system without having a trusted centralized identification service (which maidsafe claims to have solved, yet offers no evidence).
I don't know if this matches academia, but in my usage "identity" means that a user can prove they are the same user ("A user can establish that they are identical to another user.") What you're looking for is demonstrating uniqueness ("A user can establish that they are identical to no other user of the system"). I think that is a part of "identification", as you say, although my usage of "identification" might include mapping to other information (govt. records or similar). I don't know which of these MaidSafe is assuming - the first is not hard, UI notwithstanding. The others are.
Yes, as far as anybody seriously believes this is completely impossible. Their "solution" will likely be not one at all. There's several comments floating around that MaidSafe has saved all of the people who bought MasterCoin and didn't have anywhere to dump it due to the markets being too shallow. I'm inclined to believe that's more the purpose than anything.
Operation of the maidsafe system as advertised relies on a number of provably impossible technologies, like purely algorithmic proof-of-identity.
They gave a presentation at a recent Bitcoin conference in DC. I asked a few basic questions about how they planned to do certain things critical to maidsafe's operation (that no one knows how to do, and many think are impossible), and their answers were so obscenely stupid that anyone in the room with relevant technical knowledge was laughing.
Example: "How do you plan to prevent bots from gaming the data transfer payment system?" The answer was something like "Oh, it's way too hard to make a bot. There are too many steps."