My short response to this is it’s dangerous for the foundation to be held legally liable at all either financially or for the content of the network. It’s just giving ammunition to governments to shut down the network, which if all goes well, would be impossible. This is something the Maidsafe Network should never have agreed to. The SAFE network will for all intents and purposes become an overlay for the INTERNET and allow people to become uncensorable which means they won’t have to lie. Much of our society is made up of people who say they believe one thing and believe another in order to get along in society. They deliberately misrepresent their public belief system to avoid punishment. Whole demographics of society do this. I don’t think the Maidsafe Foundation is taking this into account. When SAFE goes live and people can be truly anonymous and uncensored they will be able to express what they actually feel and think which is something very DIFFERENT from what they currently express publically and what may be considered morally and ethically, not to mention legally, acceptable.
Moreover all this talk about having fiat on and off ramps just sounds rather ambiguous to me. What precisely is Maidsafe proposing here? Either you can track who someone is or you cannot. If you can then their privacy is compromised. If you cannot then the whole process of KYC and preventing money laundering becomes moot because at some point you can just convert cash to SNT and create a new anonymous ID. Which is it? Is privacy ensured or not?
As for knowing your businesses for developer payment I find that to be extremely fishy. Are you saying that the only developers you’ll give token rewards to will be those that provide their real world ID in one form or another? What about all those anonymous developers out there that write good code but don’t want to be indentified? Lots of good open source code has been written and contributed to by anon devs. Moreover not all code is written for profit. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be rewarded. So again if only the “above table” devs get rewarded then that sounds like some pretty fishy politicking by Maidsafe to me.
Many of the things centralized governments want to censor: sexual deviance, terrorism/rebellion, non conforming religious belief, radicalization, or political embarrassments of one kind or another are exactly the kinds of things we need a decentralized anonymous internet for so that they WON’T get censored and that we can end up talking about them. We can’t solve anything if we keep driving everything underground and keep trying to sweep everything under the carpet. If you believe x is immoral then instead of censoring it then talk about it with those that disagree with you. If we have a problem with y political issue don’t censor it, talk about it and solve it. If there is an uprising over z value don’t try to hide it, discuss it openly because it’s bound it come up again if it isn’t resolved. History tends to repeat like that.