We talked with maidsafe today and will be using our Dns system and they will be consulting with us on the economics of their system.
In the end the mastercoin ipo will be insignificant compared to our partnership potential.
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I figured they would have figured out the economics by now if they're launching an IPO later this month. What are your thoughts on their token-based system vs a system that just uses Bitcoin for escrow? We've thought about the economics of a token-based system for something like MaidSafe/Bitcloud a lot at Bitcloud, but it seems that tokens really complicate things. Here are a few issues:
1) Most people in this space would rather use bitcoins than convert to a new token.
2) A token basically averages out the quality of the storage nodes on the network, so you have low quality nodes and high quality nodes getting paid the same rate. This leads to average quality storage and hosting.
3) Legal implications of profiting off a system that will undoubtedly be used for illegal purposes.
4) How can you increase the value of a token without also having the services paid for with that token become more expensive (for example storage)?
I wouldn't rather use Bitcoin. What if the Bitcoin price goes way up after I send it?
It's better to use a credit token divorced from Bitcoin. It's only credit tokens, not going to be a functional currency which works outside of MaidSafe as far as I know.
So if I were going to buy an Amazon gift card or gift token I would rather buy it with cash than with Bitcoin. A fiat exchange for this would make the most sense. The only reason to use Bitcoins is if there is no fiat exchange or else you risk losing money through volatility.
3) Legal implications of profiting off a system that will undoubtedly be used for illegal purposes.
The legal implications, what legal implications? If it's used for illegal purposes then an internal mechanism based enforced by the source code is the law. You cannot police information. It's debatable whether or not information should be policed in the first place.
But you can decide not to promote or share certain information. I'm assuming you're worried about the risk to intellectual property, copyright infringement. If you believe in intellectual property then pay a bit extra to have code developed to isolate that information using a distributed process. Pay the network participants to enforce your intellectual property rights in some way and then that information would be censored, but the use of legal threats to protect your business model is an unfair advantage that no other business model has.
4) How can you increase the value of a token without also having the services paid for with that token become more expensive (for example storage)?
Whether or not the value of the token increases, I'm actually skeptical about that part too and that probably isn't the goal anyway if it's just credit. You pre-order the tokens and if you have a lot of tokens you can get a lot of service. You don't necessarily have to increase the value.
If you want a world with a decentralized drop box then you're going to have to regulate in a different way if you're a regulator, profit in a different way if you're dropbox (or in a business which profits exclusively from intellectual property), and of course I'm all for building regulation protocols into the network itself.
However in order for something to be censored the nework of users have to decide it should be censored and not some external entity trying to enforce it's will on thousands if not millions of users. So of course if you want some information taken down or censored and you'll pay people a fee for them to remove it then it should be removed. But by making the censorship organization pay the fee it would make censorship far more rare and not as simple as making a phone call or sending a threatening letter.
Let's be fair, if you're the average person you don't have the ability to get sites to take down information about you. You can't protect yourself from the Internet and if your business is failing you cannot call your lawyer, your politician and your police to crush the competitor.