Hi all,
I’m browsing the whitepaper again, and this issue came up when talking with a friend:
How many coins/tokens does the safe network eventually have? A) MaidSafeCoin B) Safecoin, C) Proof-Of-Resource. Is POR a separate transferable token?
If POR is a separate coin, what incentivizes nodes to accept Safecoin? What drives and determines the value of safecoins vs PORs?
Hey @ripper234, congrats on your first post after a year 
A) There are exactly 430 million MaidSafecoin that were sold in the pre-sale, there will never be any more.
B) There can be up to 4.3 billion Safecoin (same link), but they are replenished in the network, so it’s a bit quirky to answer. That means once a safecoin is generated, it doesn’t necessarily exist forever, because when it’s “spent” the network marks that safecoin’s id from “alive/valid” to “dead/not valid, but can be regenerated through farming”. So if there are 1 billion safecoins, there could be more generated, or if there is a lot of spending across the network, it may drop to 500 million (it’s attached to the network’s farming rate and health).
I’m going to call on @dirvine to answer how POR works, because I’ve read discussion that it could be an alternate to Safecoin, but I’m not entirely sure what the current thinking is on it.
Hi @ripper234 welcome,
Maybe it’s best to take SAFE Network classes to better understand it all
You got the highest rep on bitrated dude, keep it up 
I might correct this. The coin is actually deleted from the system as part of the recycle process when spent to buy storage from the system. That is deleted as in the SD object is removed from the system.
there is no current plan for a “proof of resource” token, as far as I know.
A Farmer provides resources to the network in the form of cpu, bandwidth and hard drive. These resources do the network’s business. Part of that business is to store data chunks. The network continually checks those chunks to ensure that all is well and that they haven’t been corrupted (part of the process which adds up to “proof of resource”). At the point that chunks are called for and successfully delivered (the final proof of resource for a Farmer) the Farmer’s vault has an opportunity to be awarded safecoin and in a variable percentage of attempts will be successful. That is the point of award, in exchange for resources which have proven to be valuable.
There are other aspects to this, but that should give you a pretty clear notion of how proof of resources works.
As @19eddyjohn75 said above, there is a series of podcasts I did that will run you through many of the basic understandings of the network, including a number of aspects of this one. I recommend them, since I busted my butt and warped my head to produce them.
RE: POR,
I know that @dirvine had said that the space on the Network was initially to be granted pro rata - meaning that you could PUT only as much as you farmed. There was also to be a currency of the Network separate from farming.
Then the two got merged later on in the concept that he had. IIRC he said that it was easier to have one currency keep track of both use-cases instead of putting that burden onto the vaults.
Thanks everyone, yeah I don’t see a need for a separate token, one currency is KISS.
You’re absolutely correct, however I decided to explain it that way because I think it’s hard for the average user to understand what “deleted” means in general. In this context when I see “safecoins are deleted” I immediately think they’re irreversibly gone from the network. Where as “marked as spent and can be re-generated” seems more clear to me personally of the actual reality.