MaidSafe is a Scottish technology company , founded by David Irvine in 2006, which has a mission to provide security and privacy for everyone by building a better internet platform. It will do so by building the SAFE Network, the world's first autonomous and decentralised data network. The network is made up for unused hard drive space, process power and bandwidth of users. Farmers, who provide unused network access, are paid for their excess resource. The network calculates the cost of the services, (such as storage, communications and in time computation) providing it to the user at the lowest possible price. An autonomous network, not a set of servers, or owned storage locations, or identifiable nodes. This means no human intervention. An autonomous network are self-healing, self-configuring and self managing; similar to a colony of ants, there is no centralised authority in control and yet it’s highly optimised and effective. The open source SAFE Network will enable application developers to create and launch applications across all platforms on an open API where all the infrastructure costs are provided by the network's users. An internal and automated reward system, called Safecoin, provides an in-built revenue stream.