the proyect of Maidsafe is a bit more complicate than Burstcoin or Storjcoin.
Maidsafe born from a problem to storage datain the years to came.
quote from the whitepaper hosted on git, you can have a look at here
https://github.com/maidsafe/Whitepapers/blob/master/Project-Safe.md.
Existing Internet infrastructure is increasingly unable to cope with the demands placed on it by over 2.4 billion connected people, a number that is predicted to grow to 3.6 billion by 2017. Today's architecture, where central intermediaries (servers) store and provide access to data is expensive and inefficient. Datacenters use between 1.1% and 1.5% of the world's electricity (growing at 60% per annum) and represent significant expenditure for datacentre owners, providers and businesses, who all have to pay to host user data and maintain the infrastructure. Security of user data has proven to be nearly impossible in today's networks with almost weekly reports of ID and password thefts.
To overcome these challenges a fresh approach is required, a solution that removes these inordinately expensive central points of failure, data leakage and bottlenecks. By developing a fully decentralized replacement for all Internet based services, Secure Access For Everyone (SAFE) will ensure the decentralized Internet is a reality
So the point of SAFE is way to store information in in a p2p network, this mind the network will need a kind of reward for the people is using and lending resources to the network.
maidsafecoin was created afterwards as a way to reward the "miners" if you can call in that way.
but is not a cryptocurrency as Bitcoin. because the rewards are given in a totally different way.
quote again from the white paper.
The SAFE network can validate nodes and their value to the network in a very accurate and cryptographically secure manner. The SAFE project will use this to create a proof of resource (see Appendix) which has some significant advantages. The resource in question is a computer's ability to store data chunks, which depends on CPU speed, bandwidth, disk space and on-line time, amongst others. This allows the proof to be a useful, measurable and an immediately verifiable entity. Proof of resource is a very efficient mechanism as its cost is very minimal.
Burst coin have a totally different approach:
Burst uses a new algorithm for proof of hdd capacity (POC) mining. Miners pre-generate chunks of data known as 'plots' which are then saved to disk. The number of plots you store is effectively your mining speed. Every block the miner will skim through the saved plots, and come up with an amount of time until it is able to mine a block if another block hasn't yet been found. After reading through the plots is complete, your hardware can idle until the newest block.
in another words. Burst coin and MADSAFE have one big problem since the SSD pay a big toll to mine this kind of coins.
My advice earn bitcoin doing micro-tasks or wherever you gonna waste 500$ on ssd and you will mine 75$ dollars worth of it
N3rvi0zz0