Safecoin divisibility

[jlpell]

@neo

A balance field in each wallet only means there is a field in each wallet data structure (MD) which means no extra data objects in the network and only one “coin” transaction to do a sub-coin transaction. And recombination is just when the balance is over one coin’s worth.

I think your suggestion is unnecessarily complicated. Consider the following quote I pulled off of the old “SafeCoin Inflation” thread:

@dyamanaka

Not really. Let’s look at this in real life terms. If the “currency” of the SAFE Network were adopted for all manner of things, it makes sense to use different denominations.

In the US, we use different terms for different tier items. For example…

Tier 1 Denomination
My grocery store price tag says 57 cents for a stick of gum.

Tier 2 Denomination
My grocery store price tag says 12 dollars for a shirt.

Tier 3 Denomination
My car dealership says 28k for a new car.

Tier 4 Denomination
A 10-bedroom Mansion cost about 5 Million.

Why aren’t everything in cents?

Because it’s humanly easier to go up or down the next tier. The same effect is done in MMO games as @dallyshalla mentioned. Millions of players have no problem understanding the different tier levels of gold to silver to copper.

This is the best suggestion I’ve seen when talking about SafeCoin divisibility so far, mostly because it mimics everyday life transactions in cash and coin. Alternatively, increasing the total amount of SafeCoin ie. inflation or partial SafeCoins from a user perspective is a horrible idea. Neglecting inflation issues, in real life the different denominations for any given fiat currency (.01, .05, $0.1, $0.25, $0.50, $1,$5,$10,$20,$50,$100 etc. in USA) exist and circulate independently. When you want change for your purchase at a store, they don’t tear up your $1 into 4 quarters and hand over the pieces, you make a trade with the seller between “denomination networks”. This reinforces the idea that there is little need to worry about divisibility within the SafeCoin protocol, because once the base network is running and stable, there is no doubt that alt-SafeCoin networks will arise with slightly different properties that will serve this function. I would think the most likely trade-off with the different alt-SafeCoins would be tradeoffs in transaction speed vs. data redundancy or security. I’m no expert on the SAFE consensus code, but as I mentioned before, consider a “Platinum SafeCoin” network that requires 128 consensus nodes in order to validate a transaction and makes 128 redundant copies of the data, compared to a “Silver SafeCoin” network that only requires 16 consensus nodes and makes 16 redundant data copies. You’re mostly likely correct that trying to program this into a single network would be a nightmare, but there is no need to assume that the original SAFE network will be the only SAFE network. For now, I think the devs have made a good choice to focus on a single system with reasonable consensus requirements and redundancy, ie. creating the initial “Gold” SafeCoin standard.