I like this idea. Typed a lot trying to find holes but they mostly closed themselves up.
Here’s my unresolved questions:
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Fees
4.3B safecoins was decided as a compromise between the convenience of having lots of units vs the computational cost to the network when transferring lots of coins.
Credits become a ledger system (effectively tracking tx amounts rather than coin units). This isn’t free for the network to look after. If a coin is split into a million pieces, then recombined, it’s a very simple and cheap attack (infeasible with safecoin). If there’s fees for using credits I think this attack may become too expensive to be feasible. But I’m cautious of huge numbers of credits being used as an attack vector since it may become very low cost to create a huge amount of work for the network.
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UX
How does a wallet manage credits and coins? How do users come to understand this difference? Is there additional cognitive load for the user? How do fees work? Is there a coin vs credit selection preference when transferring? Are credits automatically converted to safecoin where possible?
It seems surmountable but there’s definitely an increase in complexity here. I would say users would probably prefer to only use credits, since it’s much easier to reason about.
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Benefits
Safecoin: can be used to buy anything, but isn’t granular
Credits: can be used to buy anything except network storage but is extremely granular
I think I know which one most users will prefer! Credits are much more useful than safecoins when presented this way. This isn’t just about this specific ‘credits’ proposal; any non-safecoin token used for higher granularity will have this same difference.
Is this a bad thing? Probably not since credits are always fully backed by safecoin. Just want to make sure the economic incentives for farming aren’t compromised. It seems not.