I like the idea of framing it as just a physical SNT. Or that it is just an SNT, and SNT has the neat property of traversing between online and offline seamlessly.
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The way I’m thinking about it is, say from the Safe Network App, or my wallet app, I can happily send and receive token payments in the normal way, instantly online.
But, I have another option which is to create a gift card, or voucher, which can take them offline, or on the clearnet in a useful way.
It’s more than just ‘printing a token’ I think, because it can be assigned to just one individual, or have other things bundled in, or have other qualities that tokens by themselves don’t have.
Gift card seemed odd at first (the gift word anyway) but the way say amazon gift cards are used these days have very similar qualities, so should should be pretty understandable.
And these are only going to be as useful as they are understandable.
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For wrapping other items in a DBC, the simple and natural term of ‘certificate’ works really well. That’s the C in DBC afterall. Consider these example certificates from yesteryear:
You could have ‘Safe Certificates’ or ‘Salt Certificates’. (‘Salt’ being a generic term fir any altcoin or altoken on safe) This sounds very nice and articulate imo.
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+ 1 for voucher. Amazon vouchers are a good analogy. They are a code that can be redeemed to an Amazon account and can be delivered by email, SMS or physical card, and are widely used and understood. Some people call electronic delivery e-vouchers to distinguish from the physical cards but that’s just a relic I think, like e-commerce.
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I’m struggling to get the point of DBCs.
Why not just send the thing you want to the person you want to send it to?
I get the gift voucher concept, maybe even physical with a scratchable panel like Amazon gift cards etc, but the trust needed in the issuer & the requirement for a connection to validate balances makes it less than ideal for offline transactions / payments.
Can people highlight some real use cases? I can sense excitement around the DBC concept, and I want to understand why people are excited & see what possibilities DBCs could open up beyond what Safe network based transactions already allow.
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You don’t need to have an account on Safe to be able to receive a DBC.
A DBC can be passed around offline from one person to another physically (paper, USB stick etc).
A DBC can be signed over from one person to another offline.
I think all those are correct. They all have some limitation, but they are all examples that you can’t do just by sending from your online Safe to another SafeID
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I have very little experience with gift cards. I didn’t know that you could do many of the things your wife does with them, like combine them for instance.
In my mind a voucher and a gift card is pretty much the same thing except that one is implied that it is a gift. So to me the same types of qualities that apply to gift card also apply to voucher.
A voucher is a bit wider though in my mind as I don’t feel a gift card is able to provide anything other than monetary value. But a voucher can be for more things, like a free ride in an amusement park, a free newspaper, or $20 off anything in a store, etc.
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Thanks for these examples, though I don’t yet see how they could work.
E.g, how could a recipient know that the DBC being signed or passed over to them is valid for what the issuer says it is without a connection to the network?
If a DBC can be signed to another person, once that happens, a DBC on a USB stick / piece of paper would be invalid, but a recipient couldn’t know that without a connection. If there’s a connection, why not just transact online?
It seems to be a bit like a bitcoin paper wallet. Without access to the network, you can’t validate the balance, which means transacting offline requires significant trust.
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I like voucher as well.
Is it possible to give those dbcs/vouchers an expiry date? Because that creates a lot of extra uses cases as well like temporary campaigns for shops or business
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If I’m going to pay for something I can just give away a DBC (digitally or physically) and it’s the other party’s responsibility to scan and receive it, rather than my responsibility to make sure I send it to the right place, which I think is nice.
I also like the idea of being able to generate DBCs and give them to friends to get them on the network easily.
I like being able to send tokens via snail mail if I want. Or give them as a physical gift to someone.
Or being able to “cash out” of the network and save the funds in a secure physical location if I’m suspecting I might get hacked or blackmailed for instance.
In general, I like how it brings the network into the physical realm.
Most people probably won’t use them unless the network gets huge, but they offer new use cases and a lot of flexibility to those who need or want it.
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You can give an expiry date manually by saving the DBCs yourself and using them when the date comes around.
This is the same as any physical means of exchange - it can be fake. Yes, this is a limitation (as I said) but it doesn’t make them useless. For example, its a really nice way to be able to onboard people, giving away free tokens (or anything else) which people have to sign up to Safe Network in order to claim. That alone is worth it, but there will be many more uses than that.
EDIT: actually they are better than other forms of exchange because they can’t be faked. You will only need to trust the signatory, that they are not double spending because you will be able -offline- to read the content and validate the signature. So you only need trust the issuer, and only until you cash it in.
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But, it’s a bit like the Amazon Gift card example. Not like cash, where I can check the validity and trust it just be eyeballing it and feeling it, but sort of half-offline. I could scan a QR to see that it is valid, and the amount it contains. In that way it’s a read-only operation too.
But it’s still super useful because the method of transferring it from one person to another can be done offline once that check is made. Hand to hand. I don’t need to tell the other person what address to send it too, or juggle about with unlocking things, or disclosing my SafeID etc. Just by having the DBC, I have the funds.
In this way, it facilitates offline transactions (I could but a DBC loaded with tokens from a highstreet store), I could exchnage them really easily on the clearnet (I could email them). And they could even facilitate other sorts of contracts, or tying them together with other types of data.
Oh, and just because there is trust required for full offline transactions, doesn’t mean it’s not super useful anyway. Say I own my friend some money, but I’m gonna be meeting them offline, or I’m not sure when exactly they will get back online after I’ve paid them back. Or perhaps I won’t know exactly how much I owe them until I can meet them offline. I could generate a DBC ahead of time, then complete the transaction in that offline space, and then it all validates later.
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They also have the potential to take out much of the nightmarish UX out of crypto exchange environments.
Buying tokens could be very much more smooth and understandable, and much more like a regular ecommerce transaction. I wouldn’t need to supply a SafeID, or address, or wallet, or decide where the funds need to go etc. I’m just buying the certificate/voucher, which I can check is valid independently, and then decide what to do with it later.
And, the fact it could be linked to other data, or signatures etc too, has some exciting possibilities in that regard!
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thinking further, if these dbcs can expire, you might create things like financial options. That’s whole new territory 
Offline options!
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Trying to come up with all kinds of trendy names for all of the possible functions makes one’s head spin. For the moment the three letter acronym works well as a generic catchall. If NFT was able to break into common parlance via SNL I don’t see why DBC powered like a UFO can’t. 
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This is good. I guess it means you could pay in a shop by signing offline from your phone / giving a printed DBC if you don’t have a connection, but the shop does.
These are good use cases too. I guess you could achieve a similar effect without DBCs by creating a temporary account, paying it, and printing the login details, but that’s perhaps a bit more clunky.
It’s very different to most physical means of exchanges, which can to a good degree be physically validated. A £20 note has various features built in to let people detect fakes. A piece of paper with unverifiable cryptographic signatures on requires significantly more trust.
Yeah, that’s definitely a good use.
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I think the opposite is the case:
- I can’t be sure I would spot a quality fake £50 note, or a fake dollar, or a fake ticket by eye. Features are there to make undetectable fakes costly to manufacture, but it’s still an issue for lower value currencies, denominations etc.
- if you know the issuer of a DBC you will be able to verify what it contains and that it was issued as claimed with certainty, by verifying the signature against the public key of the issuer (is a bit like knowing you have a secure communications channel - exchanging public keys proves this). So this case requires some initial setup, but simple, and exactly what you want when dealing with trusted parties.
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If you’re offline, you could scan it, and see what it says it contained when made, but could you detect whether it’s been spent in the meantime, or if it’s been minted on a forked network that still produces apparently valid signatures (until you check against the real network)?
Absolutely. Paying a friend offline or sending someone some assets in the post seems useful. Though, these could be addressed with temporary accounts just as easily I guess?
Assuming you want the DBC locked to your account to ensure the issuer doesn’t redeem it before you do, the merchant will need your account details, so would that be any easier than having a normal transaction?
That does sound interesting for NFT type applications with actual content / data / rights attached.
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Once someone has redeemed it, it looks exactly the same to anyone without a network connection despite it no longer being valid. This means it’s useless without a connection to validate it unless there’s trust in place between parties.
It’s true that fake bank notes aren’t easy for most people to spot, but at least it takes some real effort to make a decent fake vs printing a DBC, then redeeming it & trying to pass it off as something of value.
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