I'm glad to see MaidSAFE on here!<p>Over the years, I have been in touch with two great founders of decentralized networks, both of them in Scotland:<p>Ian Clarke (founded Freenet in 2000: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ</a> ... recently relaunched it)<p>David Irvine (founded MaidSAFE in 2004).<p>(I also briefly met Bram Cohen of BitTorrent in SF once, but didn't really keep in touch).<p>Anyway, Ian Clarke uses a different routing system which he refers to as a "small world topology". BitTorrent uses "mainline DHT" based on Kademlia, by Petar Maymounkov (who I also met 6 years ago, when I started Intercoin.org ... he had been a lecturer at NYU so it was easy).<p>MaidSafe (now called Autonomi) is slightly different, it uses its own Kademlia DHT, but with at least one major improvement: it removes the IP addresses after one hop. So you can't DDOS the network, for example, or discover all the nodes easily.<p>I'm big into decentralized systems. I've met pretty much everyone in the space, from Tim Berners-Lee in 2014 when he was doing SoLiD (who left and started Inrupt) to Stefan Thomas and David Schwartz from Ripple. I even emailed back and forth with Leslie Lamport for a while, about the "Buridan's Principle", which helped me a lot to understand how to properly do scalable consensus across large distributed systems.<p>Anyway, here is their forum in case anyone is interested... they are finally going to market with Autonomi soon: <a href="https://forum.autonomi.community/u/gregmagarshak/summary" rel="nofollow">https://forum.autonomi.community/u/gregmagarshak/summary</a>