Last week it was reported that GameStop, a clown show of a company peddling meme stocks and cheap video game merchandise, had unceremoniously and without notice shut down Game Informer, a magazine and website that had been publishing in some form since 1991. The decision was a terrible one for many reasons. For readers and […]
According to the site you have to buy tokens to use the network. Despite stating that the maidsafe network is decentralized, nobody controls it, etc., etc., having to buy tokens seems to be a barrier to entry.
I don’t know, I guess I have a hard time with a network that reserves access via a coin that fluctuates on a market price. Seems like they’re playing a “it’s like bitcoin, but not, but kinda is” type of game.
My understanding of its system is the following:
Hosting data costs money, so in order to have a decentralised hosting system there need to be an incentive for people to contribute hardware. Developing apps/websites costs money.
In the current internet, the incentive is that you can make money by harvesting people’s data (selling them to advertisers) and displaying ads to users.
What maidsafe proposes is that users use some of their hardware to host data, get paid in a dedicated currency that they then use to access website/apps which remunerate app developper. In this manner everyone has an incentive: users have an incentive to host data to not pay anything, developpers have an incentive to make apps in order to get paid, company and stakeholders have an incentive to invest into the system in order to have a presence/visibility.
I know nobody wants to pay to access the internet, but the truth is we already are paying for it, we just don’t realise it. If we want an ad-free internet there needs to be some other way users are paying for content, I think contributing CPU and HDD is a nice solution because it wouldn’t feel like paying.