Energy is forever eh? Tell that to the next black hole you see. Energy technically may be forever but it tends to get converted from one form to another fairly easily.
And you saying something is sustainable doesn’t make it so.
For the purposes of the network the data is persistent. And your appealing to extremes and nature does not change that. Obviously it will eventually be replaced by something or the world comes to an end, but this is way outside of the scope and shows that by appealing to absolute extremes you really don’t have a valid argument.
If something external to the network causes it to fail then so be it. But if you cannot conceive of a network with true persistent data (within scope of what the network is) then that doesn’t mean we cannot. As to survivability of data, we still have data from centuries ago, just not digital data and we have digital data from the early digital computers. So persistent data is not only feasible but is something that SAFE will achieve and be so till something replaces it or the earth is effectively sent back to the pre-digital age. To introduce decay is not only a backward step but something that computer development has been working against. So its not a natural progression, but artificial decay being introduced. SAFEcoin is data so to decay safecoin is to decay SAFE data objects
To bring in decay to the network is to cause the network to decay into obscurity, because people don’t want their coins artificially stolen from them because someone designing the system doesn’t want people to save.
Really sounds like you don’t like people having things and looking for ways to take it off them.
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I don’t give a damn about people having things or not having things. I do care about sustainability. And infinite preservation and infinite growth are impossibilities in a closed system with finite resources. People’s egos don’t change that. Your constant appeals to ego don’t change the cost of resources in a closed ecosystem.
I’ve lived my entire life under an economic system controlled mostly by central banks that are based on debt, the presumption of infinite growth in a finite system and bad math. You CAN’T have infinite growth within a finite system. That is WHY central banks fail. If you have a finite system you NEED to return everything you take somehow, EVERYTHING. Closed loops everywhere. It doesn’t matter how the circuit works, but it needs to come back somehow. Ownership is an artificial concept created by human society. I don’t care how humans want to squabble about it and debate who owns what. Let politicians sort that out. I do care about sustainability of the planet and getting the math right. I don’t want SAFE to end up like the next banking cartel because we decided we didn’t want to get the math right because of some pathetic ego trip.
What closed system? Didn’t you realise SAFE is not a closed system in that way. And the safecoin is designed to be sustainable. Maybe you didn’t realise that. And 18 digit division will enable it to remain sustainable till a replacement system can be made in say 50 or 100 years. The minor leakage will eventually in a few hundred years cause problems but should we steal from people in order to make it sustainable?? No that drives people away and the network dies before it takes off.
Recycling and rewards scarcity handling is exactly like what happens with proper recycling and it can survive.
EDIT: I might add that stealing from people is not sustainable at all. Karma is a bitch and the network will suffer great losses because farmers will leave in droves if its introduced after launch and if before then safe will not go anywhere because no on will farm if their earning disappear.
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In what way is SAFE not a closed system? It has a finite number of safecoin. It gains resources from a finite number of resources on the planet. In what way is it not a closed system dependent on finite resources? But okay now we’re getting somewhere. You say it can be patched in 50 to 100 years to deal with the problem that may occur and that we should just put up with it until then for the sake of PR. Will we be having this same debate on a global scale in 50 years or do you have a better idea? It wouldn’t be the first time a problem got put off until it got really bad.
All you stated is that there is a finite number of one element. That does not make a closed system. Its very open where people interact with it and make things change, add, delete MDs, and so on. So the network is not closed. The number of farmers is not closed and open.
Again with the extremes taking the argument out of a design issue into silliness. Of course there is limits on everything like that. But these do not control the safe network as such. You are being silly because you changed the SAFE “system” from a network to be including the whole earth. Since when did the earth become a part of the SAFE network “system”. Oh you forgot the Sun and the universe. Come on lets keep it to actualities and the SAFE network without extremes that are not relevant.
Your decay does not solve the safecoin issue unless you mean the solution to being no one wants to be a part of the safe network at all. To me that is failure of the sustainability
And you have yet to address the fact sustainability is already in the design of safecoin and when you add division to 18 places then we see that a replacement for the safenetwork will come about centuries before safecoin becomes unsustainable.
But you still appeal to silly extremes and make SAFE’s “system” the whole earth and its resources.
No I am not saying that since it will take a lot longer to become a problem and I AM saying that technology will have progressed so far that the design of SAFE will be like kindergarten stuff and new technologies and techniques will be far superior. Just like the Tesla is compared to the early automobiles
Just thinking out loud here… hope you have the stamina to make it to the end of this monster.
@oetyng
Your thought experiment was a good one to try and bound the significance of the deflationary effect. And as you just mentioned, I concur that at this point “we don’t know what we don’t know”. Estimates can be tweaked for both sides of the these arguments, and limit cases promoted to serve either point of view, but it’s all just hand waving and prognostication until actual experiments could be tried in alpha3, alpha4, and beta, if at all. Although I’ll admit it appears @neo has some early estimates that may indicate/prove it’s not a major issue.
Let’s see if I can very “briefly” summarize how we got here prior to your thought experiment trying to quantify the effects of when users burn or abandon safecoins, ie. “bad inflation”. Others can feel free to jump in and correct my memory or you can all read through either this thread or the Safecoin divisibility thread for more details if you are bored and have time to kill.
The coin composting discussion branched off from the divisibility discussion
When this debate started, we were discussing different means to subdivide a safecoin in Safecoin divisibility. A variety of options have been considered in that thread over the past couple years from a variety of users. In the past week we talked bout increasing the address space, to having transfers of multiple owners, to having some kind of mini balance sheet / ledger. @neo was critical of a lot of these ideas and he was very concerned about a current (legal?) requirement for having a maximum number of 2^32 coins, while also achieving fine levels of divisibility. (Now after all this deliberation he mentioned that this requirement could potentially be lifted 
) In the final rounds of the divisibility discussion @norimi and I bounced a few ideas back and forth and on the merits of using safecoin “denominations” based on address were characterised pretty well. Based on my admittedly naive understanding of the network operation I would say this system also satisfied @neo’s requirement to achieve a high amount of divisibility (10^-10) while also allowing for the 2^32 coin limit to be maintained, although I suspect that @neo may object to that conclusion. I should note that in order to eliminate a “lottery effect” that occurs when assigning different denominations we discussed the requirement for coin addresses to be range restricted based on a node’s farming rate.
At that point in the discussion I would say that some really good ideas for safecoin subdivision have been brainstormed and devs will need to decide the technical merits of each. Then, wait for it, @whiteoutmashups decided to ask about what would happen to the coin supply if people lose their keys or otherwise burn their coins and how bad that might be. I naively suggested having some kind of coundown clock to resurrect coins that haven’t been transferred a while, which led to a backlash of animosity and the formation of this thread. @neo provided some constructive critique and suggested that this was fundamentally not possible because the network has no notion of time. Which led me to concoct the idea for “composting nodes” that could be used to decrement a health counter parameter stored within a safecoin in order to define a criteria for it being abandoned by its current owner. If the composter identified an abandoned safe-coin then the network would allow them to claim the coin. @neo hated the idea and seemed to think this would require a lot of “jumping through hoops” on the part of the user in order to try and maintain ownership. I finally objected to the notion that it would cause the user any difficulty because the possibility of completely automating this process within a wallet app seemed easy and it would be extremely unlikely that a user would ever lose coins as they at least periodically accessed the safe network once every 5 to 10 years or so based on farming rates vs composting rates. A few commenters had violent gut reactions to this idea. @happybeing showed up provide some balanced and constructive feedback. In the end I think the composting idea could be made transparent to the user and actually scavenge abandoned coins in order to eliminate the possibility of “bad deflation”, but the criticisms of @neo and others clearly pointed out that the safecoin would lose it’s ability to be “cold” stored in a “paper wallet” under any scenario where composting nodes are in play unless they were first moved to some other blockchain based token (MAID anyone?) to which a paper wallet was assigned. But I doubt that even this would be a suitable solution to many.
There appears to be three perspectives with respect to the idea of composting nodes. The first is that it is the same as theft, violates the ownership rights the user since it cannot determine 100%proof positive that they will never return to the network (hint: nothing can), and represents the antithesis of the safe network philosophy. The second point of view does not consider it theft, but simulation of a natural process in order to ensure a optimal access to available safecoin. It also sees those users who hoard or burn safecoins as ones who are not meeting a minimal criteria for interacting with and providing resources to the network. Since the criteria is so lenient (such as checking their wallet balance once every 3 -10 years depending on farming/composting rates ) they don’t see it as a burden on the user since it serves the useful purpose of recycling “lazy” coins" and views those owners are attacking the health of the safe network by inducing “bad deflation”. The third just employs the bitcoin perspective that we shouldn’t worry about coin loss and that it will never be a big deal that couldn’t be fixed by a fork or two (which is bad inflation).
Alt-coin Crypto Fever
I think the fact that there are such wide ranges in points of view or gut reactions to the concept of safecoin decay and composting is because cryptonaughts have become accustomed to what blockchain does, feeling very secure with their paper wallets and not so secure with desktop or network wallets. Nowadays no-one cares about the details of a 51% attack that steals their coins or others adversarial threats etc. In other words, because of the fact that bitcoin and alt-coins were released into the wild first, a lot of people have the expectation that safecoin needs to act just like a blockchain does and the same rules should/must apply. They think its “just another crypto”'; one that is just more anonymous and higher performance. The fact that many have crypto fever right now due to BTC spot, which doesn’t help forward the discussion either…
Blockchain isn’t a gold standard
I never really liked blockchain tech. My perspective has been throughout this discussion that the real value of safecoin is in the development and implementation of @dirvine’s idea for a secure “autonomous network”, and the degree to which others speculate or get capital gains to suit their interests is fine as long as it doesn’t come at the expense of dirtying the network. I would have to agree with @Blindsite2k that it is permanence of the data that matters, and the safecoin is only a resource employed to achieve that end. But I also have to thank @neo throughout this process for being a good sport and sounding the alarm bells on aspects that might be highly unpopular.
A comparison of long term storage mechanisms
To conclude, I wanted to summarize how the different scenarios we’ve talked about compare (in theory) with respect to serving as a stable store of value for any users and/or investors. This was the final part that (among other things) @neo and I will likely never agree on. May be it’s a northern-hemisphere, souther-hemisphere issue where his right-side up will always be upside-down for me and vice versa 
Regardless I thank him for the good critique and the aiding me with understanding of some of the technical aspects under the safenet hood. I’m not going to claim to be an expert on the tech under the safe-net hood, all this has been a best effort ideation based on the information I have been able to gather up until now…
Standard Blockchain (Bitcoin)
- Has a fixed maximum supply of 2.1x10^15 Satoshi. Since inception the monetary supply undergoes inflation at a calibrated and well defined rate based on proof-of-work mining.
- Has performance issues due to the fact that all nodes on the network must work the the same global ledger.
- Coin theft or double spending is possible under a 51% attack of the network.
- Coin theft/loss possible if public/private keypair lost or stolen.
- Coin theft from ISP attack.
- Fosters “bad” deflation since when coins are lost and/or burned due to user error or negligence they cannot be returned. The deleterious effects of this are ignored, or extremely difficult to quantify but speculators like it due to price elasticity and volatility.
- Account balances are most secure for long term cold storage in a paper wallet. This paper wallet must be archived and protected in the real physical world against theft, fire, wind, rain, rot, pests, and/or other forms of physical decay.
Classic SafeCoin
- Has a fixed maximum supply of 2^32 SC. Since inception the monetary supply undergoes inflation via farming nodes at a calibrated and well defined rate based on proof-of-resource farming.
- May employ SC denominations in order to provide for high levels of divisibility and high performance.
- Does not use a global blockchain and offers superior performance.
- Fosters “bad” deflation since when coins are lost and/or burned due to user error or negligence they cannot be returned. The deleterious effects of this are ignored, or extremely difficult to quantify but speculators like it due to price elasticity and volatility.
- Coin theft or double spending is possible under an 88% attack of the network.
- Coin theft/loss possible if public/private keypair is lost or stolen.
- Account balances are most secure through long term cold storage in a paper wallet. This paper wallet must be archived and protected in the real physical world against theft, fire, wind, rain, rot, pests, and/or other forms of physical decay.
SafeCoin in a Safenet with composters
- Has a fixed maximum supply of 2^32 SC. Since inception the monetary supply undergoes inflation via farming nodes at a calibrated and well defined rate based on proof-of-resource farming.
- May employ SC denominations in order to provide for high levels of divisibility and high performance.
- Does not use a global blockchain and offers superior performance.
- Fosters a stable coin supply that does not suffer from the deleterious effect of deflation since coins that have been abandoned are able to be recirculated through the action of composting nodes.
- Coin theft or double spending is possible under an 88% attack of the network.
- Coin theft/loss possible if public/private keypair is lost or stolen.
- Paper wallets are not suitable for long term cold storage without extra work. Instead, account balances are most secure by ensuring periodic access to the safe network (via a client or wallet app or some other manual/automated means) at a minimum rate of about once per 3-10 years to ensue that the coins are protected from virtual decay by the composters.
Last it should be noted that blockchain aficionados could exchange their safecoins to a blockchain product within the safe network if they preferred the hassle of securing a traditional offline paper wallet. But this suggestion will likely raise other objections not yet mentioned…
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Recycling without recycling? Optional provision in coin: “My ownership is transferred to X account at Y date.” Owner can transfer coin at any date, remove provision, change provision. If the day comes, the ownership is transferred. Wallet software a) Knows default account to put in coins. b) Extends transfer date again and again. Other address can be heir, “password recovery account” (metaphor), or maybe special provision to “burn it” and return to network.
Problems: Network doesn’t know time. “X date” must be some external reference. Can be tricked.
Yes, but if you have composters you could set it so that the transfer occurred when the health of a coin reached a critical level…
Correction, I did not change the/my position. Really I was pointing out the opposition to the increased address space and there was enough talk of people willing to take legal action if this approach was taken and also if there was any changes to the 1 coin == 1 safecoin and the 1:1 exchange from MAID to SAFEcoin
The fundamental issue was you cannot prove the negative. Since on SAFE a lost coin has the same characteristics as any other coin and to prove that it is lost you suggested to apply proofs, or patterns or user actions in order that people have to prove the coins are not lost. This is unacceptable in a civilized society where we abhor institutional theft. There is never enough patterns etc in order to prove a negative. And also in a civilized society we accept that people wish to lock up some of their savings for years without having to do things to keep them safe. And the SAFE network provides those means. So then to say forget the benefits of secure data and you have to keep proving your coins are yours is a way to put people off mining and using SAFE.
I pointed out that under your “prove the negative” schemes that cold storing SAFEcoins in the most secure system (SAFE) could not be done since you would steal them
And this is news to me that I said anything of the sort
He gets it 
Point two is actually against the purpose of SAFE. SAFE is for persistant data, ie. Anti-decay. It is not a valid perspective since it requires SAFE to become something it is not. That would mean point 2 is really calling for a new network different to SAFE with similarities. Persistent data is not one of them.
I am not against recovering truly lost coins and against institutional theft of coins because people do not meet your profiling standards. Since SAFE does not profile people then all this is talk.
Your perspectives though are not based on community desires but those of a few. For instance point one has a few posting about it. Point 2 has only one supporter posting a lot about it (excluding yourself here). Point 3 is a default opinion since there does not seem to be a positive way to identify lost coins.
Well, you are kind of. Since by definition an abandoned, “truly lost”, coin is one that is assigned ownership, and then is never put to productive use forever. I can never give you the proof positive you demand because waiting forever is the same as doing nothing. Using your logic, I could propose a criteria where as long as the user accesses their wallet or the safenet on a single occasion at any point within the next 2048 years after obtaining the coin, the system will not recover the coin and they (the current owner) will continue to maintain ownership for another 2048 years and still be given the option to reset the counter again at any time until the end date, indefinitely. You would still not be happy and call it theft because they might instead be on a really long vacation and access their wallet after 2049 years to see their safecoins missing or that they were removed due to abandonment on the 2048th year of their absence. The concept of abandonment is inherently linked to some notion of the user having self-interest in preserving their connection to some property or thing or person within or over a given duration (of time).
We even have the feature already on the foum 
Like a last will 
On account creation there could be a pop-up ‘do you want to define a trusted user to be sure to not even loose your coin when you forget your account credentials?’
A smart contract already signed to give the coin to someone you trust on date X (executed by the other person) that gets postponed again and again with every login into your account
I think that would be an excellent idea ! And I know who would be the person that would end up being my backup =)
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Did you answer @oetyng s question whether loosing coin really is a problem and why exactly you think it is?
(because I didn’t see it answered - but maybe I just overlooked it in the flood of text - if I overlooked it: could you please give a shorter more to the point answer i can understand …?)
@riddim
We’ve hashed a bunch of possibilities out in this thread. Depending on how you massage the numbers you could draw any number of conclusions about whether or not it is a problem. Is the bit depth of safecoin addresses really restricted to 2^32 or can it be 2^48? How long do you want the system to survive in a world of iot and connected houses, cars, robots, people. Population growth, wealth growth, the singularity, all major data sources to absorb. How do you handle divisibility, microtransactions, and payments for nearly any function on the net. What’s your take on deflation and what it will due to a safenetwork, which is so far beyond blockchain tech that you can’t really make good analogies to bitcoin. Things are changing faster than ever in the next 30 years. Most people seem to take the position that we’ll worry about it in the future if it becomes a problem. Which is fine and practical, but leaves a lot of slop in the system. And finally, once the system launches you won’t really be able to make changes without a lot of hassle… how do you fork a safenet?
Okay @jlpell - did you do a calculation with neos suggestion with the micro ledger system where one coin can be split into 10^18 parts?
No matter if 99.9 percent of coin are lost i would expect this divisibility to be enough to fuel the earth Oo
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Now, this will be fun, I used 10^11 parts.
Let’s switch out the numbers here
429.5 k quadrillion * 10^7 will give 4295 million quadrillion parts, or simply 4.295 septillion parts, i.e. 4.295E24.
To still be able to pay 1 millionth of a coin, with 2^32 supply, you need at least 4.295E15 parts.
4.295E15 / 4.295E24 = 1E-9
That means you can have lost as much as 99.999999 % of coin supply and still be good.
Losing 15% every decade for 1000 years, and you will still have enough coin left do do micro payments.
Now count in that humanity will not be as unexperienced as when bitcoin started out, and less will be lost.
Say 5% will be lost per decade, then we are good for almost 4000 years.
So there is plenty of room for safecoin to be backing all world economy, and doubling of the world economy many many times over, and still be able to do the equivalent of micro-dollar transactions for the coming 1000 years. Given of course, that we manage to stay alive for that long, and completely lose our human ingenuity so we come up with no better technology during these 1000 years.
Anyone worried?
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He did the math.
Well that is very reassuring.
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Yes. That is what I meant. Problem: There is no time on safe network.
I don’t understand. How can something reach a critical level if we can’t measure time? Without time, change is not well defined. Time always remains a problem for anything like this.
Anybody with an idea to measure time yet? Somehow?
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Is this what you are talking about?
No, I don’t like it. Deflation in the system will mean that eventually the only thing that people will have is a single promissory in their wallet with stating .00000000000001 SC. @neo has essentially proposed an infant deflationary reserve banking system using the SC as a gold standard, while issuing paper notes against that standard. Is this not safecoin blasphemy?
By using bitmask ranging to manage farming rates combined with the denomination system @norimi gave a 1-2-5 progression for, you get what I consider to be ideal. In his example I think you had the smallest denomination of 10^-10. It is a superior system in my opinion. To keep the investors happy, just adjust the denomination distribution so that the total SC market cap is 2^32 in addition to the fact that the total quantity of denominations is 2^32. Now they will be doubly happy because the project will be in doubly compliance, right?
Anyhow, shouldn’t talk like this be in the Safecoin divisibility thread?
“Smallest” is just a number. It can be 1 or 1e-4 or 5e-7. It doesn’t matter. It’s a geometric series so it is scale free.
Because the biggest denominations are at beginning, it is possible to add more bits to the address space to make smaller denominations. Naturally extensible. If necessary. Example: Smallest current denomination is worth $100 now. It will happen!