Seems like there are **loads** of features or things that could be arbitrarily offered for safecoins. All they have to do is offer a customization/parts suite that comes as a default bookmark and make Safecoin the cheapest option. The market has a good reason to value the safecoins, there is no per-piece cost for anything sold on this platform for safecoins and the safecoins can be sold back onto the market at this supported price.
They may not have done this yet, but it's a trivial thing to do once the platform is there - I'm a little curious what great insight you have Daniel? I've already got folks onboard with an angelshares-like model and the various work is open source.
Anything can be used as money... the issue is whether people want to hold an inflationary currency in a market where there are deflationary alternatives. Yes you could offer services for safecoins, but there is little reason to be exclusively safecoin when you could accept something else.
The market will place a speculative price on anything, it will all come down to where exclusive demand for safecoins will come from and the relative inflation rate.
Lets make one thing clear... I like maidsafe's network solution (KAD + UDT) ... I like that they are thinking outside the box and have the 7th major design alternative when it comes to coins.
bitcoin: proof of work - losses
ripple: proof of debt + consensus - profitable
peercoin: proof of stake hybrid - inflationary / losses
nxt: pure proof of stake - break even
opentransactions: federated servers issuing debt + voting pools
bitshares: delegated proof of stake + profits
maidsafe: individual tokens with no block chain... first decentralized transaction ledger - inflationary
So any critiques I have against Maidsafe are not on the value of the problem they are solving, but on technique they think will solve it, but which I do not think has a strong economic foundation.
To improve upon their system I would:
1) eliminate inflation all together and power the network by better unit of account
2) move the responsibility for load balancing and replication to local nodes
3) charge users any time they consume more than they produce