The link credits a David Irvine AND a James Irvine, who also released a paper titled Security of the MaidSafe Vault Network in 2014. Lots of his other papers seem to be based around decentralisation, too. Any relation 
?
Or maybe he works at the University? If that is the case, could you give any insight into the ongoing(?) relationship between Maidsafe and Glasgow University? Was the program to sponsor the student with them too?
And what was sigma x?
That was Strathclyde uni we work with them, Glasgow, St Andrews, Stirling, Napier etc. We did sponsor a PHD there and some students at Ayr. No relation ā¦ we do a ton of work with many folk when we can, I cannot remember them all 
Sigmoid was a company to use our tech for corporate with different login etc. it is all wrapped in maidsafe now.
Either that or you trust the inventor and Dev team
MAID (or Safecoin) will not be valued higher for a couple of simple reasons.
When the Safe Network launches it will take years for it to prove itself as secure - and that includes security for the token. Without such security it cannot complete with Bitcoin.
But thatās okay with me because the Safe Network is about much more than the price of Safecoin. It represents a quantum leap forward to a new type of internet, one that is desperately needed.
Ethereum was hacked at launch but it took off like a rocket. The hype when SAFE-network launch might be beyond our wildest imaginations, who knows, letās wait and see.
Patent search turned up 8 patents granted and 7 applications pending.
It may be good to have a giant centralized SAFE Network backup facility for the early days of launch, just in case it is hacked in the early days. I am thinking of training wheels for the SAFE Network. Would that be possible? I would not care as much about the value of SafeCoin as much as I would about securing the data.
Iām not sure how this would be possible, without centralisation baked in (as you point out).
Might be worth posting a new thread if you want to explore the ideas/questions/solutions around the early days of the network.
Lot of knowledge in this forum, but often it can get buried in the dev update threads.
Ok I searched ādavid irvine maidsafeā seems a lot there. We have over 30 patents I donāt even remember the correct numbers, but they are in the UK, USA, India, Australia, China, Japan etc. I donāt have the time to search though. I hope you are more successful than your initial search. There is a ton of papers and patents though.
Searching for patents and papers is better with patents.google and scholar.google:
patents: Irvine Maidsafe
papers: Irvine Maidsafe
You can scrape a fine list directly from those links. If serious interest, I can access the originals.
Thank you @dirvine, @dask. I used USPTO search for US patents and applications and I would be surprised to find more in the US patent database. For non-US patents I used patents.google with various search terms but maybe there are better ones that I missed.
A dump of google search results contains a lot of irrelevant stuff so going through the results one by one is needed to get a quality list. I will check the links you proposed to see if I can find any additional patents (excluding mere translations, or duplicate entries such as patent application and granted patent matching that application.)
As for peer-reviewed papers, I have found one but by a third party. Again, a curated list would have been much easier. I donāt have much time either, and would rather spend time reading than searching.
The good thing is that we will have a list to refer to next time someone asks.
Edit 6/25: Completed USPTO and WIPO search: 5 unique patents granted, 3 applications pending, the rest published/disclosed.
After you have read all the papers could you let us know your views on the hackability of the network
I agree with a lot of this, but ā¦ nothing can categorically be said about the future relationship between MAID and BTC.
The MaidSafe Network could launch, prove wildly successful and generate huge excitement, while BTC could falter for whatever reason (e.g., critical bug, or due to a million other known and unknown potential threats). Probabilities aside, I think itās impossible to say much of anything definite about what the future holds in this space.
Thereās a parallel universe out there where Dentacoin becomes the world reserve currency. For the simple reason that we canāt prove that that canāt happen. Itās a slope of probability, with Dentacoin and Spankchain on one end, and Ethereum, MaidSafe, Cardano, IOTA, Factom ā¦ (pick your favorites) on the other.
Thx for the update Maidsafe devs.
Tomorrow iām doing a SAFE network demo (or setting up the basic and let people figure out how it works). It doesnāt help if i show it, they got to try it out and give feedback if it makes sense.
The handson approach just works better for me.
Keep up the good work super ants.
ps. Great effort here. You always have to clean the data a bit, and this is a really nice resource.
It is a gargantuan job. The hackability will probably be very high simply because it is so hard to access detailed information about the design and because the system is so complex. There is practically no way a few experts can outsmart millions of hackers.
I hope I can at least start doing something about improving technical documentation.
The community will need to work hard to find ways to attack the system before it is launched. Some threads on this forum are discussing attacks and SafeNetwork incentive structures but this but it seems too little and rather late considering the long history of this project.
The peer-reviewed paper behind the paywall, here is the full paper:
@piluso, Many thanks!!
For those interested - have you seen (or even read!?) the thesis of Paul Greig? I found it yesterday but have not read it yet. There are I believe two chapters about SAFE Network.