There's a small divide growing in the bitcoin community between the group of skilled developers who generate the majority of the coins and the rest of the users (like me). I notice there's lots of talk about Tahoe-LAFS, but I'll be the first to admit I don't know what's really happening or how it might affect the future of bitcoin. Anyone out there want to go over the latest in bitcoin tech talk but do it in simple language?
The Tahone-LAFS debate isn't about Bitcoin per se.
Really, there are two topics that are related here...
First is the debate about establishing a Tahone-LAFS cloud among Bitcoin users for encrypted, off-site storage of their wallet.dat files. Sort of like trading network shared drives on each other's machines; but using Tahone-LAFS would permit the participants to automaticly encrypt and trade with some RAID-like benefits.
And second, there is a discussion of using Bitcoin as part of a p2p filesharing system to pay for bandwidth consumption, etc., for the hosting machines instead of the more common upload/download ratio limitations.
It's more complicated than that, but that's the basic idea. Either way, it's not a debate that would affect Bitcoin development in any negative way.