You are a Hero member, yet still must post a disclaimer explaining nobody really knows WTF Maid is.
The New Internet®? A mirage? A chimera? No wonder the pumpers get so defensive when you try to pin down specifics.
This is what I wrote a few pages back about what it is:
It's a P2P-internet where all data is "chunked" and encrypted and everybody stores pieces. All connections between users are encrypted as well so there's a lot of security. You can store data just like on Dropbox but you can also store websites and register a domain like zeeman.safenet which everybody can request using their browser. The network it based on Ants where all Ants have their own role without central organisation. Still though, they help each other out and work together to make sure everybody get's their data.
On BitTorrent you always hope that someone is providing a file as a seeder, on Safenet you'll always have at least 4 seeders (more likely 6) for each MB. And the seeders have an incentive to keep their connection open to make Safecoin. So download an episode of Breaking Bad from years ago and for every GB you'll have about 6000 seeders. The link with Freenet is logical but not right IMO. On Freenet you hope (just like BitTorrent) that there are seeders. In the case of Freenet you hope someone requested a file before you did in the last few weeks and that it's in cache somewhere. If it's not in cache it will be gone. On Safenet once uploaded, a file will be there forever if the uploader didn't took it off. It will be there for years. And again, for every 100MB. you'll see about 600 seeders that have the chunks available. And instead of BitTorrent where you need to provide upload to get downloads, these seeders (Farmers) are paid for by the network.
And about Safecoin, they use ring signatures if you like. Remember, to your close nodes in XOR your just an address. And as one of the users from that 32 nodes group you can't do a thing. You'll always ask for them to do it. So they GET your chunks for you and pass them to you. They decide if you can upload (PUT) a chunk to the network or not. And they sign everything you do. Without about 80% of the group signing a request you can't do anything on the network. And you can't pick your own group or address. It's like a virtual IP-Address that's given to you by a group of nodes.
So Safecoin is cryptocoin that doesn't use a blockchain. You can buy storage on the network with it or use it just as all the other coins to exchange value with people.