I am Lolling at the "get-rich-quick scheme" criticism of yours. This project has been in development for 14 years. It is incredible that people don't even care to properly research it, and they blindly choose their favourite bias just to say something. On one side we have those who criticize for not being soon enough, and other for being a 14 years get-rich-quick-scheme. Fabulous.
Secondly, if you want proof that this project actually predates bitcoins, here is a talk the founder gave at Google Tech Talks in 2008:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLA77zxk-vA
And maybe it was just because of this that they found a way to solve the Bizantine Generals Problem independently without relying on blockchains. I hope you get the significance of this.
This is an important milestone in the pursuit of a truly decentralized, distributed and autonomous internet, for the people by the people.
This early version is released for community alpha testing, and anyone is invited to download to play with the angular stone of this gargantuan project.
I think higher latency will be expected as the nodes you are connected will be randomly assigned geographically, which is necessary for anonymity and security goals of the network.
But the download speed itself should be faster than what typical CDNs might offer, as all chunks could be downloaded in parallel, and in some cases the experience could be felt as instantaneous.
The effect would be a network where all content within the SAFE network would be like torrenting with guaranteed number of seeds with 100% uptime.
The only limitation would be your local bandwidth.
I am an early adopter and I've been following the development of MaidSafe since 2014.
I think I do understand your frustration because in the very early years the development had very little documentation.
Also it is doubly frustrating to read about this perception of being "buzzwordy" or "scammy" or to have "people paid" to promote this network... because this team is exactly the opposite to the point of frustration. The actual team is all about doing the grunt work with zero regards towards marketing or promoting it.
They didn't even properly capitalized for PR their participation as consultants of HBO's Silicon Valley, if Pied Piper Network sounded very similar to the goals of the SAFE Network it wasn't just coincidence.
Mike Judge confirmed it in the Decentralized Web Summit that they especially did research on MaidSafe.
In any case, that image should be changing now, the risk profile has changed substantially.
The proof-of-concept was released two years ago, and now there are actual usable alpha you can download right now to test it out.
The main risk in a project as ridiculously ambitious as this one is that they may never release anything. But they had, and they are still developing at neck breaking speed.
So if you really understand the scope of this project and you see actual code to play with, you should be orgasmically elated.
I hope it helps you understand that this a serious project that isn't using buzzwords just for the sake of marketing, it is truly groundbreaking and in my opinion is the next paradigm shift after the invention of the blockchain.
And this is coming from a bitcoin early adopter (2010).
I would invite you to check out what the project is really about, check out: https://primer.safenetwork.org/
Secondly, if you want proof that this project actually predates bitcoins, here is a talk the founder gave at Google Tech Talks in 2008: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLA77zxk-vA And maybe it was just because of this that they found a way to solve the Bizantine Generals Problem independently without relying on blockchains. I hope you get the significance of this.