I’ve been reading about safecoin and the safe network to understand how it works, but am unclear about how to determine the total amount of issued safecoin at ‘the current’ point in time. I don’t mean the prerelease of 10% (ie approx 429M coins) nor the total available once released (approx 4.3B coins); I mean the number actually issued ‘right now’ once the network is running.
I understand the allocation of safecoin changes over time depending on the current farming rate, resources available, resources being consumed, and recycling of coins. What I do not understand is whether it’s possible to know the total amount of safecoin that has been issued and is available for transactions.
With bitcoin, there is a deterministic means (use current block height in the coin-rate function), and there is a numerical means (iterate over the blockchain and sum up all utxos). How will the current total issued coins be calculated with safecoin?
Coins are physical SD objects with their own unique address (address range is 2^32)
Each group is responsible for a set of SAFEcoin SD addresses and can find out if the coin exists or not when requested.
So this is used for
coin issuance on a farming attempt. If the coin exists then the farming attempt is told it failed. If it does not exist then the coin can be generated and the farmers coin-address is placed as the owner and the success return to the attempt
when someone wants to spend the coin, the group checks it exists and the person owns it.
The total coin can only be estimated by each group.
The network does not actually need to know the total number issued for any of its algorithms. Its only necessary to know if the particular coin address exists and who owns it when that coin address info is requested.
Is it possible for me to iterate over all SD objects to get a rough idea of how much has been issued?
For example, if I can read 100M objects per second, it would take about 43s to read the entire SD space, and thus get a pretty good idea of how much safecoin has been issued. Is this possible or am I misunderstanding the idea of ‘reading’ SD (specifically safecoin SD)?
Can I use the historical farming rate to ‘reverse engineer’ the total safecoin issued, or would this be made inaccurate due to recycling (which is unknown)?
Are you able to explain why groups can only ‘estimate’ and not ‘know for sure’? I don’t fully understand this.
I understand this but am curious for the sake of, for example, traders who may wish to know the market capitalization; then the total issued coins becomes important. Perhaps in light of your previous post, what I should be asking is ‘how much error is there when calculating the total issued coins?’
I like the proposed efficiency of safecoin over bitcoin (and blockchains in general) but I’m still not totally clear on the details, so really appreciate the help from this great community.
You could try. Remember SD objects have 512 bits of address and I am not sure how the 32 bits for the biycoin # fits into that
No, farming rate is determined from the available space compared to used space so historical FR data would of necessity require the number of GETs done over time.
Also FR varies slightly between groups so any historical data will be inaccurate anyhow.
As to your scanning the coin address space, you can get a rough approximation by scanning two or three 1 million regions since coin is issued on a seemingly random distribution due to the XOR space appearing random to linear space.
Obviously the larger the space you scan the more accurate your results would be.
But of course there is one factor that can skew that approximation and that is paying for PUTs could be not random in the addresses used if the payers chose which coin to use rather than a random one. Thus my suggesting 3 regions. Also if the regions are quite different then a larger sample would be needed
For any group to know the actual number they would of necessity need to scan all the coin addresses. They only need to be able to find out if a coin exists or not, tehy don’t need to know the number. The group is only ask to issue a coin at a set address by the farming/PtD/PtP algorithms, they are only asked to transfer ownership, or asked to recycle the coin at that address.
In other words they are only asked to operate on a specific coin address. They are not asked to allocated a coin or such action.
I am sure there will be an APP created to approximate by examine a region of the coin space and update a SD holding the latest value for that region. Then every time the APP is run by someone it chooses the region SD that is the oldest and gets the count and updates the SD. Then the APP reads all the SDs and tallies up for all regions.
This APP could then spread the load across all those who wish to know and if enough do wish to know then it will always have recent data.
