Just an idea that I came up with while working on the 3D modeling is what if we actually created 3D printable safecoins that included a chip or something to store a measure of safecoin within them? Then people could physically exchange safecoins, like cash, and literally print their own money using a 3D printer. You’d exchange the coins like regular money, with varying denominations, and then when you were ready to convert back into digital form you’d scan them with some kind of scanner which would transfer the value from the coin to your digital wallet. Basically each coin would act as a TINY wallet. And like any other safecoin exchange would not know who it exchanged with once downloaded. After that you could reload your coins with safecoin and go back into the world. I don’t know if the hardware is available for all this or if this might somehow compromise security but it’s a thought.
I’ve often thought about this idea for Bitcoin, but nobody has achieved it yet as far as I know.
For Bitcoin, you’d need to make sure that the private key isn’t known by anyone until it’s extracted & used, and that must only be done while someone has physical access to the coin, so if you check the balance, you can be sure it won’t dissappear. When someone swipes the coin, a new private key must be generated that the current user cannot know. Viewing the private key has to be part of a swiping & key replacement process that can only happen once per key. Clever people may figure it out 
For SafeCoin is a paper wallet type thing possible? If so, would it work similarly to Bitcoin (private key, public key etc)?
It’d be great if this could be done using Bluetooth low energy or NFC. Perhaps the coin could be solar powered.
From what I understand Safecoin is quite different from Bitcoin, for instance Safecoin doesn’t have a blockchain, or at least not the same way bitcoin does. As for the coints being solar powered, perhaps but they’d need a battery if so. Remember coins are usually kept in dark places like pockets.
Whilst coins are kept in a dsrk place they may only need power when being accessed for checking balance, or for a transaction. If this were the case, even the light from a smartphone flash could give it enough power to do its job without batteries (assuming very low power microcontroller etc).
If the coin had to actually log onto the MaidSafe network, they it may need much more power & a battery would be required.
A physical Safecoin would be taking a step back into the old world.
Ideally you want Safecoins in wearables, smart phones and feature phones. If the latter is even possible.
Then again if your a gold/silver bug, you would want a physical Safecoin. But it would need an NFC like DavidMc0 said. What if you loose your physical Safecoin? You actually loose twice, the metal object and the Safecoins amount. You can prevent loosing the Safecoins by scanning the physical coin. This means that the info of your Safecoin is kept on the physical coin and your smartphone. In this scenario, when you give some one the coin, you should also send them the smartphone version. With this set up, if you would loose the physical Safecoin, you would still have the Safecoin amount on your smartphone.
I actually am a gold and silver fan but in case of precious metals you can directly barter those and melt them down into other objects. What if you lost your safecoin? Doesn’t the network account for that? Safecoins that aren’t in contact with the network for like 60 days expire (or is it 3 years). Which means anyone using physical safecoins would have to be refreshing them fairly often at a computer for them to be valid. As for the lost value of the metal that’s why I’m saying make the coin out of cheap materials and recycle it, it’s just a holder for value. Say you loaded a coin with 0.10 safecoin. That’s a transfer from your safecoin wallet to the coin wallet. Where that coin goes after that is anyone’s guess but eventually it’ll end up in someone else’s safecoin wallet.
Do you define the old world as that of fiat currency or that of physical currency? Wearables and other mobiles are dangerous because they can be tracked and they are expenive. Yes I realize that SAFE could write an alternative mobile OS at some point which would be awesome however that’s not going to happen right away nor is everyone going to adopt a safe only policy. Also there are those that just prefer cash pure and simple and do not use computers period. Do you want to exclude that segment of the population and force them to use fiat currency or would you prefer to give them a physical safecoin alternative?
Pursue this knowing the possibilities:
stay SAFE.
“The problem comes from the fact that Caldwell has no way of verifying
that the person who sent him the bitcoins is the same person he his
shipping the final product to. As a result, argues Faisal Islam, the
director of compliance advisory services with Centra Payments Solutions,
in the Wired article. By receiving bitcoins over the Internet,
and then transferring access to those bitcoins via the USPS he could be
in fact engaging in money transmission.”
Sorry this makes zero sense to me. First of all what does it matter? Party A pays party B for coins and party C receives them? Isn’t that just bad for business? Or party A pays party B for party C’s coins, don’t we call that a gift? And if money transfer is a problem then why not crack down on the whole bitcoin network?
As for verification that could easily be taken care of with a signed email or even just a skype call or something of that manner. In fact it could probably be even easier over the SAFE network. And considering my idea is to make coins one would load themselves and hopefully make themselves there’s no reason to use the postal service at all. If you needed to transmit “coins” a long distance you’d empty the coins, mail them, transfer the funds to your friend on the other end and they could fill the physical coins up when they arrived in their mailbox. It’d be safer that way too as if the physical coins got lost all the third party would receive is blank coins. One COULD send loaded coins but then as you pointed out would probably get hounded by the feds.
“As of Nov 27,
2013, I suspended sales of items that contain digital bitcoins. Current
items for sale do not contain bitcoins.”
"Aluminum “Strength in Numbers” Promo Coin (bag of about 500) FREE POSTAL SHIPPING
1.25 inches in diameter, blank back, does not include any
bitcoins. Print your own sticker for the back and use it as a business
card, or print your own private key sticker and put bitcoins on it."
@Blindsite2k with you on that one if you’re talking about making a physical wallet for SafeCoins then that’s pretty ordinary… and cool.
More or less but instead of trading the coins themselves you’d trade the wallets that hold the coins. Imagine people trading iphones instead of swapping digital coins. It sounds nuts not to mention awkward but if all that was on your mobile was coins and said mobile was only a few milimeters in size it would be a different story. You have a product and I have this disc shaped mobile device with safecoin on it. I’ll give you the device which you can take home and download the safecoin off of and you give me the product. Of course to make this work the cost of producing the devices (the physical wallets) needs to be less than what is stored on them or we’ll be in the sad case of the Canadian penny.