Wait a minute, how did you handle redundancy in your old solution? Did you do something like 3x redundancy in case some of the nodes went down?
I didn't develop (pursue) the idea beyond the conceptual investigation phase, because I determined that it wasn't a solid enough direction to pursue.
The idealism of it appeals to me of course. But I've also learned to be very skeptical of idealistic causes, because they can be intoxicating and cloud objectivity.
I am obviously going to be more circumspect about dubious project technologies, given my age. I don't have another decade to expend on something that does not pan out.
The problem with monero is that it is not used much as a currency
https://getmonero.org/getting-started/merchants the same thing happened to peercoin, hardly used for anything besides speculation.
It is hardly profitable for me to mine it desipite having 2x r9 290 and it is likely to get even worse as the blockreward continues to decrease, i am afraid the coin will end up in the hands of botnets.
Not used much as a currency? Did you miss all the post where people are talking about buying things with xmr.to? To make it short in that sense every shop that accepts bitcoin also accepts monero.
That was the main marketing innovation I saw from Monero's ecosystem. Even someone used that once to fund me.
It is befitting that Shapeshift.io copied you, given one of the threats Monero used to make when ever I would explain I wanted to work on my own experiments, was they being open source could just copy any thing that was valuable.
Btw, I was pitching the conceptual idea of XMR.to back in 2013 on BCT. It was one of the rebuttals I had for the Bitcoin maximalists. And yet again one of my ideas becomes a blockbuster success. You think I don't have a lot more of those ideas in my back pocket.