Last week I began a little series about decentralizing the internet, and I kicked off the series talking about Golem, which focuses on decentralizing computing power.

Today I’m going to cover MaidSafe, which targets decentralizing storage by distributing your encrypted data.

MaidSafeCoin (MAID) is currently listed 27th on coinmarketcap.com

• Current price- $0.52 per coin

• Current circulating supply- 452 million coins

• 24 hour volume- $2 million

• Market cap- $236 million

By clicking on the “markets” tab on coinmarketcap.com, you can see the exchanges that work with the coin, and the prices that the coin is being traded on those exchanges.

If you’re looking for an arbitrage opportunity, you can get a hint by checking out this section.

You can purchase MaidSafe on a number of different exchanges including Poloniex and Bittrex.

When choosing which exchange to use for making trades, it’s best to use the exchange with the highest volume, in this case right now for MaidSafe, that exchange would be Poloniex.

MaidSafe has been working on providing a decentralized solution for data storage for quite some time now. This project, along with the few others that are also working towards providing a decentralized internet, no doubt was sparked by the mass surveillance state brought to us by the NSA and robustly cultivated thanks to websites like Facebook, Google and Yahoo which pretty much give away what should be your private information to the highest bidder.

Here is MaidSafe’s approach towards finding a solution and hopefully preventing a nationalized internet.

The idea is that once you join the network you can volunteer your unused computer storage to be used by the network, the more storage you provide, the more safecoins you’ll be paid.
If you want to upload a file to the network, you will encrypt it first, then it is then divided into many “pieces”, randomized, and distributed throughout the entire network. Because you were the one to encrypt your file, you will be the only one with access to your file. The network will respond accordingly and redistribute the fragmented files as computers on the network are turned on and off.

What I think is the coolest aspect about MaidSafe- although it makes it sound like a pyramid scheme- is the fact that the more people who use the software, the more distributed the network becomes and the more space is made available for a faster network.

It’s the complete opposite of what we are used to when popular sites get a huge influx of traffic and it causes the centralized servers to crash and the site goes down.

With MaidSafe on the other hand, the more the better. Furthermore MaidSafe is designed in a way that it removes duplicates of all stored information, making it the very definition of efficient.

They have recently finished Alpha 1 testing and are now transitioning to alpha 2 testing which includes new APIs, a browser, tutorials and demo apps

Like I said earlier, MaidSafe and Golem aren’t the only projects working towards providing a decentralized internet, there are others like SIA, Shift, and coming soon: Filecoin, which I will be covering in the future.

Additional Reading/Sources:

MaidSafe Website
CoinMarketCap: MaidSafe
Status of MaidSafe Project
MaidSafe Forum
MaidSafe Reddit
How MaidSafe Measures Up to the Competition
MaidSafe Github
More on Safecoins
CryptoCoinsNews Article on MaidSafe