Increasing the total supply of SafeCoin

Autonomi Network Token (incl (e)MAID)
22

yep :dizzy_face:

If David and the team have made some kind of massive blunder in regard to SAFEcoin, I’m sure they would have the integrity to make that known here and seek community feedback.

When asked why 4.3 Billion SafeCoin, David said:

2^32 It was seen as enough never to split it into decimals as fractions are a PITA for people to work with. It can be split but I hope it never is

The above comment does not appear to have been contradicted in the flow of the conversation you linked to in the OP:

@Seneca said:

The value is already nearing $0.06, and we’re not even in BETA yet. At launch it might very well be $0.20 or higher. I think users should be able to send SafeCoin to others with a higher precision than that.

@happybeing said

Good point! The same goes for micropayments.

So does this make subdividing Safecoin necessary or do you have a clever workaround for this @dirvine?

@dirvine said:

No need to subdivide safecoin for this purpose (thank God, we are beyond busy ) If your account is charged then it is charged up and the account managers can handle the amount of space and safecoin easily. So they will work on subdivisions but not charge these, only full coins.

23

No one is implying this to be a massive blunder - or any blunder at all. In fact there’s no way to know what the future will be and hence no way to know if it’s a mistake to not increase the supply. The idea here is to apply the precautionary principle in case the future isn’t as perfectly rosy as what some people think it might be.

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Thanks :wink:

25

To simplify or paraphrase Tyler(correct me if I am wrong), what if safecoin market cap is worth 4.3 Billion, or 10 Billion or 50 Billion or 100 Billion due to the demand regardless of how frequently we recycle and people start using safecoin for all manner of payments.

Should we then increase all coins possible and existent to 10B, 50Billion or 100 Billion like XRP? Due to the psychological drawbacks of using 0.000xx safecoins to pay for things. My Opinion is that it doesn’t matter if the network is super useful. However I am not a psychologist. Views are welcomed!!!

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To which @happybeing pointed out that this didn’t address the matter of micropayments for other than network resources. @dirvine hasn’t responded to this as yet, and I’m very curious as to his thoughts. I’m sure that they never want to have to split safecoin, especially after launch, but with the increasing value, the ability to achieve good granularity of payment for other than network resources might make it easier to do so before launch. Again, don’t want to distract from the devs’ work, but I think we’ve identified an important topic to discuss.

2 Likes
27

Yeah, but when someone starts calling into question one of the gods… :japanese_ogre:

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I don’t see how this proposal solves anything whatsoever, practically or psychologically - and yes I’ve read all the posts.
Practically - doubling the amount of coins is no guarantee to resolve the perceived issue - it may need to be a factor of 10…who knows.
Psychologically- If it feels like you’ve got more in your pocket with more coins, then the corollary is that things “feel” more expensive when they leave your pocket. It makes no difference- it could actually hinder commerce rather than enhance it.
Implementing this scheme would however start a furore of negative trolling and confusion - no brainer to my mind. It isn’t broken, so don’t try to fix it.
What we actually need is a name for the fractions of future sub-divided coins - like the Satoshii is to Bitcoin then the --------- is to Safecoin,
Ok…go!
An Irvine?..lol…only joking
Maybe a “bollock”, this may be psychologically better when you tell everyone how many you have.

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That’s basically @dirvine agreeing with my problem analysis. Fractions are a PITA for people to work with. Division is not desirable, especially if they become fractions with multiple leading zero’s.

Back then 2^32 was seen as enough to prevent this, right now with the current value of MaidSafeCoin so high already it looks like it’s to not going to be enough.

Recycling does nothing against hoarding. You can still hoard SafeCoins as much as you want, by not spending them on buying network resources.

He ‘liked’ @happybeing’s post, so it seems he agreed with that.

Right, we can’t be exactly sure. At the same time, doubling it is already better than doing nothing. The only reason not to increase it at all is if we expect MaidSafe is going to stay small.

Maybe… I honestly expected that practically everyone here at least would see this proposal is not inflationary and doesn’t result in value loss for anyone. Perhaps I didn’t emphasize that enough.

3 Likes
30

I fully understand it is not inflationary, others will not and many uninformed others will be informed by trolls - that is my concern. This may also cause some hoarding due to the psychological impression that things are expensive. I’m just saying I’d forget any psychological reasons for doing anything and just look at the practical - if its easy to do beforehand and there is a practical benefit then you may be right, but I honestly think unless a substantial benefit, then the trolls could result in a negative impact. People don’t generally think rationally in the crypto world, they appear to be like sheep and are easily spooked.
Edit: I think this is a deeper problem than I initially thought and I need to think a bit more about this. Currently now sat on the fence.

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31

OK……I now believe you are correct in how to proceed, in that the benefits would outweigh what I now see as the somewhat mitigated concerns I had. I think doing this early would reduce many of the trolling concerns – I do think we need to think about what the trolls could possibly troll about though. ( It was stated that msafe would be exchanged 1:1 – could this be an issue?)
In going forward, I would suggest we need to first ascertain what we would like each Safecoin to be worth in an ideal world at launch. We’d then have to estimate likely price of msafe at launch (my estimate is 8-10 cents for example) – then work the ratio out. If the ratio is substantially higher than 1:1 then make the change, if only 1:1.2 or something, then maybe not worth doing. Just my thoughts (at present….lol).
PS- the main swaying factor for me was that psychologically holders of msafe will feel “richer” and impact on msafe price will be positive rather than negative.My initial concern was that the trolling would impact price negatively, thereby negating any benefit, because msafe would not be worth enough to increase safecoin cap…phew…tricky one this

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32

My suggestions would be lets try testnet3, get safecoin 1.0 implemented and run some tests for divisions if required. I would think that if safecoin went ballistic then it can become like a dollar and we can create subdivisions similar to dimes. That way we do not renege on the 1:1 split and if this is massively successful we will also have a significantly larger dev team to handle changes. We are currently really busy and making very large but effective changes along the testnets (but slower than I would like so far :slight_smile: ) and this is potentially an issue that can be tackled along that route.

As a small dev team we need to consider security and code quality for a system that when you consider it is all levels from level 3 to 7 in the 7 layer model. It’s already a large body of work and if it seems we need to increase supply then I feel it should be part of a much larger conversation.

The knowledge that we cannot tell the future is valid and I find the edge effects of fast decisions are always considerable. This is not really a decision that can be made on the fly without considerable thought and consideration for all the effects (space usage, size of coin space, churn implications etc.). More importantly though I think that if a safecoin was very valuable a sub currency would appear so instead of 0.x safecoin there would be a subdivision of 1 bit say (doubling the number of the sub currency etc.). This is what I mean though we are then dealing with inflation of a currency by not printing money in a way (or pre print a ton of it at the start).

In the network things like buying space / computation would not be per byte or cpu cycle but large chunks (let me store for a year without worry for a few safecoin as a normal user kinda thing). Many other things will be similar. Of course the greatest value will likely be off network purchases and transfer of value for goods and services, and where the issues will appear first.

If there is is an issue that a a safecoin is worth say $0.50 and it becomes a problem I am sure we can overcome it with subdivisions as planned and that is fair and balanced and initial holders are rightly rewarded without doing maths in their head to figure what they bought. The subdivisions should be well thought out and named properly though and this is where we win. Bitcoin nearly did it with bits but by the time it happened people were already confused. If we need smaller currency units probably the first thing to do would be to decide on the unit and the name and release it properly and to a wide audience. Unlike bitcoin we will not already have .000X ability which I think is good as it will prevent confusion.

We can do this 2^32 times if needed (it won’t be) in due course and really well planned. I think any guessing of the future is futile, but being able to cope with it is effective and something we can do. When I say I don’t like subdivisions, this is this what I mean, I don’t want to pay 0.000000X of anything, but if we do this right nobody will have to. :wink:

6 Likes
33

Ah….I get it……it would be an actual new coin with a smaller denomination….of course. Yep……jumped back over the fence again……lol. Ok we only need a name then, all nice and ready for if/when needed.

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34

That’s another way to go, though I think having multiple denominations also causes confusion for new people, especially if they have unfamiliar names. It also seems like a system that came into existence because of the material nature of traditional currency, I’m not sure if we should stick to it in the digital currency age.

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I think it does cater for any exponential growth in price in a better way though really and removes any crystal ball gazing in regard to price. However, let’s take David’s example and assume Safecoin goes to $1 - in your proposal we’d have covered the issue and there would be 45 billion safecoins (@10 cents each). I’m not sure how the new lower denominated coin would be implemented/released though. It would already have a fixed value of 1/10th a safecoin, so couldn’t be launched in the normal way, finding a value on exchanges etc. There would necessarily be 45 billion of them with a face value of 4.5 billion dollars - there would also be 4.5 billion dollars worth of Safecoin in existence. My obvious (or stupid) question is “Where does the extra $4.5b come from without replacing one coin for the other?” - or is that the plan?

36

So any safecoin that splits would not exist as a safecoin, so say you used a cent (for want of a better name) then the safecoin the cent came from is gone, its now 100 cents (it can become a safecoin again though and this is where the implementation can be very interesting and requires a lot of consideration), so no further increase in capital etc. is required. This seems fair and reasonable to me and I would really hope that if it went completely mad, then we would see a flattening out of money across the globe. Right now the $ is worth next to nothing in USA but several meals in other parts of the world. It would be nice if it were just the same everywhere, but good ol government’s eh! they always make sure there is somebody to screw with.

Anyhow that goes into a huge discussion where folk can be called crazy :smiley: for now I think the answer to your question is new coins do not appear, it’s old coins that split.

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Thanks for clarifying, @dirvine. We’ll leave you in peace on this subject . . . for now! :wink:

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In the world of warcraft game - there is 100 copper makes a silver 100 silver makes a gold

This statistic shows the number of active subscriptions for the MMORPG
World of Warcraft online game from the first quarter of 2005 to the
third quarter of 2014. In the last quarter of 2012, World of Warcraft
had a subscriber base of 9.6 million.

A game in this case has the limited entertainment utility. Yet, there is considerable amounts of empirical data regarding digital economies within those developments.

6 Likes
39

@dirvine I like your plan (contingency) to split Safecoin, IF the value rises. I also agree we should give TestNet3 a chance and have a bigger discussion… later.

Safecoin must be able to: subdivide (decimal), or denominate (into smaller units)… in order for it to fully function as a currency.

Unless there is a world wide catastrophe, the likely trend for production + adoption is to increase. There will be more goods and services to purchase as time moves forward. At the same time, the supply of Safecoin will increase along with it, for the next 20 years.

IMO, the supply should increase at the same pace as adoption + production, giving us stable currency. Since we cannot see the future, we have to make Safecoin as flexible as possible.

I was surprised to hear Safecoin will not go the (decimal) route. Instant micro transactions is a big seller. But I was glad to hear we can go the (smaller units) route… in the future.

As @Seneca pointed out, it may cause confusion for new people. So I’m going to offer a solution for “future” discussion. See below.

At Launch or soon after, when a user logs into their Safecoin wallet, they will see the following.

Example Safecoin Wallet

1 SC (1/1)
0 SD (1/10)
0 SP (1/100)

I used generic letters to express the denominations, but the names should be discovered by the community. I also put math equations to help non-english users understand the conversion rate.

If I understood you correctly. A user can “burn” their Safecoin in order to convert it into smaller denominations. I used the word burn, because if that Safecoin can be refarmed, we would have massive inflation. And no body wants that.

Lets say they wanted to convert their SC into SD. They would see the following updated balance.

0 SC (1/1)
10 SD (1/10)
0 SP (1/100)

And if they wanted to convert their SC into SP they would see the following updated balance.

0 SC (1/1)
0 SD (1/10)
100 SP (1/100)

I think it’s important to set the denomination standard at launch or shortly after. If we are going this route, then at least prepare people ahead of time so they can have a smooth transition. I hope this helps.

6 Likes
40

Lol…Ok that’s thrown me…I was expecting “Yes, the Safecoins get burned as they are exchanged for cents”. What we now have is inter-changeability (definitely for want of a better word!) . This leads me to think of a few further questions, such as "Will this mean that retailers etc will be able to give change, can vaults handle both coins etc…
To be honest, I’m now asking questions more relevant to how the coding is implemented, which I know nothing about, so will leave the questioning to others more qualified. Nice one though.

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MaidSafe Team is highly skilled and diligent, certainly you are thinking of the right stuff @Al_Kafir It’ll get done in due time and correctly.

1 Like