Surly the demand comes from people wanting to use more computer power than they have, and that supply is met by thous with extra computer power selling there spare capacity. The medium of exchange is safecoin?
To my mind its impossible to know if they have a good economic model until we see what people do with the system, will people demand more power than they have (price goes up) or will there be more power than people demand (price goes down).
What could be done with all that processing power? unimaginably virtual worlds? Extremely cheap laptops where you pay purely for what processing power bandwidth you use.
What a great time it is to be alive and see all this unfold and evolve
If they implement bytemaster's advice:
3) charge* users any time they consume more than they produce
* I think it's obvious they must charge safecoins...
how else would it work if you didn't charge users for using resources? If they didn't put that in the white paper it must have been a case of not needing to state the obvious?.... i hope!
The idea of having a token cryptocurrency attached to the system is a fairly recent one, which is why it's not very fleshed out at the moment and not in the whitepaper. In the hangout they did introducing the idea of having a Maidsafe token, the lead developer briefly says that the tokens could be used to pay for extra storage space.
So I guess the first use case will be for users who would like extra storage space, users like myself who currently pay ~2$ a month for Google Drive. We'll see once they actually launch their product.
One thing I don't like though is what bytemaster said about the coin not being divisible. This is not good for transactions, as an appreciation in the coin value would probably have to be taken into account by scaling the service offered rather than the price for the service, which seems a bit more complicated but not impossible. At time t1 you get 10gb/1year for 1 Safecoin, at a later time t2 you'll get 20gb/year for 1 Safecoin as their value somehow doubled, instead of now paying 0.5 Safecoins for the same service. Does that make sense? Maybe having so many coins this will never really be a problem, and 1 Safecoin will never be worth enough for something to cost less than 1..