I’m pretty much convinced of it.
Yes, and in addition to the ones you listed, this is my main reason: MaidSafe will have considerable appeal regardless of SafeCoin. Most people have no interest in crypto-currencies, but a lot of people do store pictures, music, videos, documents and own multiple machines. Since accessibility of the same files from multiple machines and also backups are important, a lot of people also see the advantages of using cloud services.
However, cloud services ask money and want to make a profit, there’s only so much free space they’ll give you. In addition, some of those people are wary of their privacy and/or legal ownership of their data.
I’m convinced MaidSafe will be quite economically competitive to other cloud services. It will utilize a lot of free storage space that is currently just sitting there on people’s systems. That’s almost pure profit for any casual farmer, so it will drive the costs down. Casual farmers don’t have a profit incentive, they just try to recover some of the costs of their hardware that they bought anyway. Or they can use the SafeCoins they farm themselves to upload their own data to the network. A huge cost saver compared to traditional cloud services.
In addition, de-duplication will save massive amounts of storage space. A lot of data people want to put in the cloud are public files that are rather popular. The network makes sure there are no unnecessary duplicates of the same files. Putting data on SAFE that already exists is thus de-duplicated and doesn’t cost SafeCoin, since no extra storage space is used. This is a huge cost saver as well.
So, MaidSafe will give you better bang for less of your buck. It offers services that are attractive to the general public. Once people start using it, they’ll come into the possession of SafeCoin (hopefully mainly through farming themselves). Once they have it, they’ll find out how easy it is to use and that it is desirable, and will be far more open to getting more and trading with it.
There you have it, a regular citizen not interested in crypto-currencies, in possession of and using a crypto-currency to buy services he or she desires. That is the formula to mass adoption.