Have they given a timeframe as to when they'll convert Maid tokens over to Safe tokens? Final release, or before?
No, they haven't. But what they did tell is that Safecoin isn't the biggest problem to solve. The underlying security needs to work. SAFE uses addresses and routing, think of it
as a virtual-IP system with storage. So you'll have an address which is protected by cryptography. Same for Safecoin, you own a key and can own Safecoin. But to use these coins routing
needs to be safe and secure and tested to the max. That's what they're doing right now. At least one of the new hired devs will also work on routing. And right now they're implementing "Disjoint Groups".
The current group messages do not provide a high level of protection against attacks on the network, even under the additional assumptions that routes are disjoint and that a quorum of the individual messages need to be intercepted. Assume that an attacker controls 10% of all nodes in the network, and group size is 8 and quorum size is 5. Consider a group message sent via 10 hops.
In that scenario, the chance to intercept any given group request is 71%. With the group-to-group hops proposed here, it will be just 0.43%. Further adjusting the group size and quorum size parameters, this can be reduced to a negligible number, making this kind of attack virtually impossible.
They're working on this thing right now, which makes the routing layer for SAFE way more easy and much more secure. So it doesn't make sense to implement test-Safecoin at the moment, because it needs to be
tested over the new routing and Disjoint Groups.
Next to that they're working on Datachains. The idea is to make a hash of every datachunk in the network and make a group (that's a Disjoint Group) responsible for it in a whole chain of hashes with archive nodes. It will make sure that data won't ever get lost. Even when the whole network crashes (like the bizarre case where the EU and US have a total blackout) things should come back online as it was before. Including all the personal data, Safecoin and what more.
So both these modules are worked on right now. If you check the GitHub repo's of the Maidsafe devs you see several of them working on this in their own repo's. I'm not a coder myself but my guess is that in the coming 3 to 6 weeks we should see both modules being pulled to the Maidsafe repo on GitHub. Then they test on little test networks and what more. So great times coming. And when this is done, test-Safecoin could be implemented in just a few weeks according to David. As the security layers are fixed in the current layers. My personal guess for test-Safecoin would be November. But that's just one big guess. Maidsafe (the company) won't give a date or even a month like I just did.
These are very nice reads for people that want to go more in depth.
Disjoint GroupsData chains 
