Safecoin divisibility

[norimi]

How to get 2³² market cap with 2³² coins:

• 25 denominations.
• Coin values between 10,000 and 0.0001.
• Target value of denominations follow a geometric series. Number of coins = target value / denomination, rounded up to next whole number.
• Biggest denomination’s target value: 1,370,261,966.26108.
• Exponent for target value series = 1 / 1.468466485353.

The result:

• 2³² coins. Exactly as classic safecoin.
• Total value: 2³² - 0.0000024. Error over full market cap is about 0.000000000000057%. 1/4th of smallest coin and 1/40000th of safecoin.

Biggest possible inflation: 0.0067%. If an infinite number of smaller and smaller denominations are added, they all are worth about 289326.

Note: I made a mistake. I added up the target values not the actual values. I’ll correct the numbers. But the point is valid: It is possible to match 2³² market cap with 2³² coins and denominations.

[jlpell]

One issue with your table is that because of the ico, you can’t guarantee that all current maid owner’s get their required allocation. It might work out fine that they can, and it might be highly likely that you can satisfy it, but not guaranteed. For example consider if no individual owned more than 5 coins, those 10k denominations would be no good. In order to guarantee the ico you would need about ~430MSC in 1SC denomination coins only.

[Astroman]

would it make sense to tweak your numbers given the need for extra 2s to make up the numbers 4 and 9 (assuming minimum number of coins is desirable)?

actually u might need a ratio of 4:8:5 for 1s 2s and 5s in that order.

[norimi]

@jlpell

One issue with your table is that because of the ico, you can’t guarantee that all current maid owner’s get their required allocation.

That’s a very theoretical argument.

@jlpell

For example consider if no individual owned more than 5 coins, those 10k denominations would be no good. In order to guarantee the ico you would need about ~430MSC in 1SC denomination coins only.

There are two extreme cases:

• There are many people with small amounts.
• There are few people with many large amounts.

For your problem. You need both together. But they are mutually exclusive. So. There is no problem, because:

• We have many small amount coins.
• We have enough big coins for the few big values.

I think it’s called the partition problem.

@Astroman

would it make sense to tweak your numbers

If you introduce irregularities, you introduce points of failure. Not good.

[Astroman]

And you don’t consider the shortage of 2s, as caused by an irregular 1:2:5 denomination scheme to be a weakness?

Why 5 anyhow? Is it somehow important to be able to count my coins on the digits of a single limb?

Please excuse my apparent facetiousness. Am enjoying the discussion. It’s still a valid question though.

[norimi]

1-2-4-8-… is good because regular: The divisors are always 2.

1-2-5 is “better” because: a) Just like normal money. Familiar to humans. Tech minds often forget how important. b) Close to regular: The divisors are almost always 2, except third of cases when it’s 1/8th bigger: 2, 2.5, 2, and repeat.

However. Maybe you are right. It’s already not 100% regular. But it’s regularly irregular. Similar could be implemented to tweak exponent for the “total value of coins in this denomination” series which is the 4th column on the picture. That column / coin denomination = number of coins in the denomination.

However. Tweaking is not so simple as you say. Like “4:8:5”. No:

• First: Need to know distribution of transaction amounts. Log-Normal maybe good first approximation. Take Log-Mean as 0: It changes when Safe Coin price changes. So: Any number is good. Log-Variance: Take it from real transaction amounts. I don’t know where to get this data.

• Then: Needs simulation to determine best locally irregular composition of coin denominations to represent division of market cap distributed as determined in first step. (Sorry. Complicated sentence. Took me time.)

“Locally irregular tweaking”: 3 steps, almost the same, juts little different. But every 3rd step is the same. I have this for denomination step: 2, 2.5, 2, 2, 2.5, 2, 2, 2.5, 2… For “series value” it’s about 1.468466, repeating. Tweaked, it could be: 1.468466 * a, 1.468466, 1.468466 / a, 1.468466 * a, 1.468466, 1.468466 / a, 1.468466 * a, 1.468466, 1.468466 / a… Globally, it’s 1.468466. But locally irregular.

[jlpell]

Hey @norimi, I like your thought process and think you’ve covered some creative solutions. For example, I previously said :

@jlpell

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.

However, I think I’m leaning towards team @neo now after looking through all the details including those on mutable and immutable data. You should check it out his proposal and give some critique in his thread. Your recent posts have me thinking more about divisibility lately, and I think a few different hybrid approaches might lead to the best of all worlds. When I have more time, I’ll try to throw out a well-researched idea for critique but in the mean time, if you get a chance please check out Is quasi-infinite divisibility useful? and let me know what you think in that thread.

[norimi]

I’m familiar with neo’s idea; it isn’t bad but it’s not to my taste. I fixed up my own. It brings truly infinite “divisibility” but without division and floating points. It self-adjusts to the level of adoption and it no longer has any kind of “lottery effect”. It has a limited market cap just as before. This means there is no inflation in spite of a potentially infinite supply of coins. It also comes with a constant farming rate so that small farmers can get regular rewards to avoid the bitcoin mining centralization problem. I’ll write it up soon.

[Yay]

I imagined at first that people would use Safecoin a lot like siacoin. It seems that maybe people will pay miners for their SAFE using bitcoin instead.

[Traktion]

@norimi

“I put it there, I’ll find it there.” This is what they want.

Just catching up on this thread and saw this. What a great summary for why data should last forever in SAFENetwork in general!

[jlpell]

Divisibility is a very popular topic on this forum to many people for multiple reasons. Off-topic questions in another thread made me decide to post some notes. I thought that we should try to consolidate the variety of ideas that are sprinkled throughout the forums and bring them here in “Safecoin divisibility” to reinforce it as the central divisibility discussion. Many of the links to the topics I covered are shown just under the original post, but they are easy to gloss over.

The summaries are brusk and not much by way of a literature review but it might help stop us from rehashing the same topics over and over. Reading this main Safecoin divisibility thread is also a treasure trove. The process of going through this in one sitting has helped clear up some things for me, and made some new connections. If this is just too much text, or if you think I wrote something in error, let me know and I’ll edit the post. Maybe these should be in their own thread, I’ll let the mods decide. The “highlighted Pros” or “highlighted Cons” tags refer to statements that were either for or against the ideas or topic introduced by the OP. The year tags are just approximate based on when a topic was initiated. Some threads concluded within the same year, but others (such as this thread) span multiple years.

If there is demand, I’ll post a similar set of notes for 2016 and 2017 in addition to this main thread as well in order to lessen the chance that people will gloss over the 313 posts that are now here. After that is done, we’ll likely need a summary of the summaries. It is interesting to see how many times similar ideas and concerns were “rediscovered”.

**TL;DR - SafeCoin Divisibility Notes : Part 1 (~2014)

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Division in SafeCoin
Summary: digipl described his distaste for binary division of safecoin and his preference for decimal division and the issue that 2^32 safecoin doesn’t allow for every living human to own at least 1SC. qi_ma described how the original conceptualization for safecoin believed it unlikely that a lot of divisibility would actually be needed (due to recycling economics?) but that the core routines allowed for any if necessary.

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Subdividing safecoin
Summary: This discussed the confusion surrounding the maximum 2^248 safecoin divisions presented in the Project Safe whitepaper and dissatisfaction with binary subdivision vs. decimal subdivision.

Highlighted Pros

@happybeing

Division by two and powers of two is extremely efficient because of the binary representation of values in a computer, and this is no doubt why the scheme has been chosen.

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Increasing the total supply of SafeCoin
Summary: seneca described his dislike of large amounts of divisibility vs. higher numbers of total safecoin due to innate human difficulties for thinking in terms of fractions. He suggested moving the decimal in the first 280bits of safecoin address that was described in the whitepaper. Various drawbacks were sighted and the idea was seen as violating the ico. Other considerations were that 2^32 SC were more than sufficient for network launch due to the internal producer-network-consumer market dynamic or “recycling”. dirvine stepped in to get everybody on track, indicating that divisibility up to 2^32 was possible with the whitepaper approach, but that he agreed with seneca that fractional payments are not as psychologically satisfying. He also described that the process was unidirectional, once coins are split they will exist has unique objects and not likely to recombine but could if necessary. Although denominations were criticized by some, dyamanaka presented a wallet structure that would show the total number of safecoins and fractional safecoins owned by an individual. These were taken to be Safecoin 1SC, SafeDimes 0.10SC and SafePennies or SafeCents for 0.01SC which was further described by whiteoutmashups.

Highlighted Pros

@chrisfostertv

2^32 It was seen as enough never to split it into decimals as fractions are a PITA for people to work with

@Seneca

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.

@dirvine

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.
[…]
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)
[…]
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
[…]
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.
[…]
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)

Highlighted Cons

@fergish

happybeing pointed out that this didn’t address the matter of micropayments for other than network resources.

@Al_Kafir

I fully understand it is not inflationary, others will not and many uninformed others will be informed by trolls - that is my concern.

@chrisfostertv

Well I really think you should forget about it
Safecoin has a predictable cap of 4.3 billion coins
End of story.

[jlpell]

**TL;DR - SafeCoin Divisibility Notes : Part 2 (~2015)

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Safecoin VS SAFE Storage
Summary: dyamanaka forked from the current Safecoin divisibility thread to discuss the wallet PUT balance as its direct use as a parallel currency to Safecoin called “Safe Storage” or “Safe GB” in order to handle the divisibility issue. He hypothesized network survivability in the far future. neo pointed out most of his concerns are alleviated due to how the network algorithm is not fixed and 1SC is allowed to purchase variable PUTS. The conversation soon transitioned to a discussion about network sustainability due to the the accumulation of “garbage data” in the network and limitations with relying on a Moore type law for storage. dirvine addressed this issue through the use of archive nodes and other means. krnelson pointed out the aesthetics of having safecoin valuations that are close to unity.

Highlighted Cons

@neo

Seems like your whole analysis is based on a fixed price for X bytes of storage, and is wrong.
[…]
The protocol/Network adjusts the PUT costs and GET rewards according to activity on the network.

@Seneca

This scenario can be avoided if we design a proper dynamic PUT price algorithm. It should take into account the elasticity of PUT prices in relation to quantity of PUTs. It should also have a dynamic target % of SafeCoin in circulation, one that makes sure there isn’t excessive inflation and that there is always a sufficient SafeCoin reserve for the network to increase farming rewards during a crisis.

Highlighted Pros

@krnelson

Really it is two sides of the same problem IMO. If whatever it is we are trying to value using Safecoin requires looking at ten zeroes on the left or right of the decimal then it is not aesthetically pleasing (is that 10 or 11 zeros, hard to tell at a quick glance)
[…]
I think dyamanaka idea is interesting and analogous to the Petrodollar.

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Safecoin divisibility vs. inflation ideology
Summary: betterthantrav looked at the number of safecoins per person based on the number of users on the network and asked if inflation could be a solution to divisibility. Anders argued that crypto/safecoin inflation needs to be balanced with fiat inflation. dyamanaka pointed provided use cases for inflation vs. divisibility through an analogy, while others discussed the similarity to stock splits.

Highlighted Cons

@fergish

To inflate by simply increasing the supply, after the fact, would be flat-out theft and completely unacceptable.

@anon81773980

If safe dev decides to increase to 64 bit, then it will be 2.1 quadrillion coins. But, that still won’t solve the micropayment like smacz stated. micro payments works wonder if there is a decimal in place. Even more so, safecoin cannot be divided since it is a data entity. How does one split up datastructure?

@dyamanaka

Regarding currency price stability and usability… I personally prefer SAFE GB as the alternative. It is already divisible, maintains its own global price valuation, and inflates with increase productivity.

Highlighted Pros

@fergish

Division would not do that (theft)

@betterthantrav

Safecoin will not get it’s value from fiat conversion. It receives it’s value from its ability to buy, sell, and trade goods and services ie. storage/computation/bandwidth. This value will be noticed on the exchange markets and the markets will be willing to exchange fiat currency for that value.

@krnelson

You could increase the space for Safecoins to 64 bit ints like Bitcoin does and still maintain the 4 billion SafeCoin limit just by placing the decimal point appropriately.

@smacz

Divisibility can always be worked into the way that the network works, however raising the total number of Safecoins (however it’s done) changes the core of the network itself; 4.3 billion - a figure that most likely will be hard-coded into the network.

Unfortunately for SAFE GB, it doesn’t solve the problem of currency circulation outside of network storage.

@Blindsite2k

I think we need to think about the imagery we are using for safecoin. Is it like gold or some other precious metal with a fixed amount? If so then the cap stays and divisibility is the answer. Or is it like a new resource with an endless supply, say sunlight to be collected or food to be easily grown for example

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Safecoin Cap at 4.3Billion?
Summary: Once again the question divisibility vs. inflation for equal investor value was generally discussed in regards to the future of safecoin. The consensus was that this would be possible by once again “freezing” a safecoin and introducing a parallel currency at some fixed exchange ratio. The use of SI unit system type labels for different denominations were also discussed for the case of decimal subdivision (milliSC, microSC, nanoSC etc)

Highlighted Pros

@betterthantrav

The idea was that instead of dividing the physical SD of a Safecoin, it would instead be divided by exchanging Safecoin’s for smaller value units of physical SD. For example, one dollar is exchanged for one hundred cents. This way the cap would stay at 4.3 billion and Safecoin could be divided infinitely as long as new units of physical SD of smaller value are introduced. Of course there could only be 4.3 billion Safecoin’s worth of any coin at any given time.

@dirvine

Yes indeed, or safecoin v2 comes out, it is 2^64 and existing safecoin holders get 4.3 billion safecon II for each safecoin. Or safecoin just divides etc. my point in the blog was, as people have spotted, not to close any doors.

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Number of safecoins must not be to few
Summary: There is some confusion considering the initial quantity of safecoin chosen to be 2^32 rather than something greater with lesser divisibility. fergish mentions that safecoin will not be divisible from the start due to the computational burden it would place on an infant network. neo mentioned how the PUT balance also serves as a means of divisibility to make network use more convenient to users. krnelson provided a summary of some ideas that had been presented in this thread (Safecoin divisibility) up until that point in time. He pointed out that in order for safecoin to properly serve the network it must be able to serve as a unit of account (UOA), being able to be easily divided and recombined. He also noted that supporting parallel currency denominations on the network is also computationally burdensome and is unecessary if safecoin is design well. Last, he mentions that high levels of divisibility are already required due to IOT.

Highlighted Cons

@mvanzyl

The Safecoin Whitepaper states each coin is divisible something like 4.3 billion times.

I think they have addressed the issues very well there.

@fergish

So a super-high level of divisibility is not needed till it’s needed.

@neo

The network “divides” the coin when it is spent for storage in to an allocation that allows the user to store data at the then going put_cost.

The network “effectively” combines units of work (retrieving chunks) in one coin issue attempt for a certain number of retrievals. That number is determined by the then farming rate.

Highlighted Pros

@krnelson

The problem here of course is that if Safecoin cannot be designed to serve as a UOA as it is speculated to place an undue computational burden on the network, then the burden of supporting “many other easily managed currencies” is also a critical show stopper, and even more so.
[…]
Super-high level of divisibility is needed already - IoT.

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Is the Safecoin Economy Deflationary and would it be better with Inflation built in?
Summary: happybeing raised the question of how people holding safecoin for speculation of rising fiat will affect the internal safecoin ecosystem. Infinite divisibility (approximately) is discussed as the ultimate solution to deflationary spirals while not penalizing or stealing value from savers. seneca raised the point that deflation is not usually an issue for asset backed currency. riddim mentions the idea that safecoin itself need not be divisible but an alt-coin like SafeCents could be introduced to take care of concerns, and other discussions follow that consider other alt-coins denominations at fixed ratios analogous to traditional precious metal ratios that could be traded on decentralized exchanges and the problems associated with that process. It also seemed as though there was some confusion between inflation/deflation regarding the internal safecoin ecosystem vs. how safecoin may be treated by external human markets. It also seemed like there was a tendency to have fluid definitions of inflation vs. deflation rather than a common definition.

Highlighted Pros

@happybeing

Anyway, what I’m saying is that without any inflation in the Safecoin economy, it seems we’re programming the system to move ever more towards hoarding and deflation at some point (having a fixed limit on supply ensures this unless utility of Safecoin falls, and we want and expect utility to increase).

@quippu

On the other hand one could argue that inflation is a mechanism which allows succeeding generations to participate in the economy the same way their parents and grandparents did. In a deflationary system the advantage for those joining the system first can be enormous. So

@Blindsite2k

I agree. Currency is just another exchangable good. Making a “stable” currency that won’t inflate or deflate is like creating food that won’t rot. Yes you can do it but it’s dangerous and kind of ignores the reason of WHY food rots in the first place: because we need the nutrients to return to the soil so we can grow more food.

@Warren

The currency that is the most stable goes a long way toward providing a business the greatest degree of security and freedom.
[…]
Perish-ability does seem like something that could be phased in later to help increase stability. We already have long experience with the psychological equivalent. Coin is less perishable than cash and cash less perishable than card. We have more direct experience with the concept through options and life estates.

Highlighted Cons

@betterthantrav

Both, divisibility or inflation will solve this problem. But only one will solve it with out stealing value from users.

@Traktion

Stuff getting cheaper through progress is benign though… Maybe even desirable. Computers are the obvious case study and people buy technology regardless of imminent obsolescence.

@jreighley

If a currency just exists, and is not being pumped and dumped by some central bank or other issuing authority, the decimal point oughta float naturally… You don’t divide it to infinity just for sport

@happybeing

Just to clarify because I’m not sure if you understand this: the value of Safecoin and the rewards to farmers are only loosely coupled. Essentially the fiat value of Safecoin can go up and down. In the immediate term, yes this increases or decreases the value of the farming rewards, but as farmers respond to that (leave or join) the network notices and adjusts the level of farming rewards to bring the network back into balance.

[jlpell]

Not sure of demand, but since there were no major objections from the first set of folks to glance at these summaries, here are parts 3 and 4. That’s all for a while.

**TL;DR - SafeCoin Divisibility Notes : Part 3 (~2016)

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On creating SAFE alt-coins
Summary: seneca described a means for creating utility coins on top of the SAFE network that was applicable to Project Decorum. The method introduces a type of distributed “mining” system where users directly create the alt-coin by proof of work according to predefined settings introduced by the alt-coin’s originator and the natural properties of SD objects.

Highlighted Pros

@dirvine

I can sniff a potential mechanism for divisibility etc. as well, this could grow into something quite substantial indeed. Best of all it’s the community now starting to take hold and be the innovators on their own network (SAFE) and this has been a goal for sure. Great work Seneca as we move through the mvp you will get a lot more maidsafe eyes on this as well to help out.

TL;DR Here lies a potential game changer for the SAFE network and projects that run on it.

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Will SafeCoin Be Divisible?
Summary: General discussion on the benefits of divisibility and different schemes to achieve it. neo suggested limiting coin divisibility to 64 bits of fixed point precision, and mentioned how a 4bit ‘nibble’ mask can be used to convert from binary divisibility to decimal divisibility. There was also some confusion about whether 1SC would be allowed to purchase a fixed amount of storage or variable storage, as well as a description of using an SD (deprecated?) to handle subcoin wallet balances. The use of the “SAFE GB” PUT ledger was also mentioned by dyamanaka.

Highlighted Cons

@digipl

I see some problems. If we use the numerical wallet to pay for example, a PPV by seconds or minutes, what happen when the wallet reach zero? Automatically change a safecoin from the standard wallet to the numerical wallet? This can be very dangerous. And do it manually can be very annoying or can generate problems in automated tasks.

The truth is that I never liked the binary division and find a solution to prevent it seems important to me.

Highlighted Pros

@neo

[wallet…]
I proposed a variation on that with a SD using the same security (core processing) as the coin.
Maybe initially the division is 1/100ths which would be useful at the moment when coin is worth 10 cents. But tomorrow (with a system upgrade) the note could be 1/1000000ths. Any note at 1/100ths remain the same value because well its the same. just less zeros until it is used then it gets the extra resolution.

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Most Wanted and Unwanted Features
Summary: betterthantrav mentioned his desire for the network to provide incentives to users to delete data. neo responded with a description of how if PUT balance was used to handle safecoin divisibility, an internal “stock market” effect could lead to network instabilities.

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Idea for divisible Safecoins
Summary: polpolrene proposed a credit system where a safecoin is frozen, and then 1SC credit is given to the owner to spend decimal fractions of as they see fit based on discussions previously had on the forum with regard to safecoin economics and PUT balance. Nimos also proposed multiple dominations like 1 SafeCoin = 100 SafeCent. mav highlighted the fact that: “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.” neo described how “Divisibility has then to be able to provide a lot of divisibility without multiplying the transaction load” and also mentioned that problems with transaction load can be mitigated by controlling the degree of safecoin divisibility based on network size. The discussion then continued with regards to algorithms that the network would need in order to know when a new degree of divisibility should be increased, and whether or not divisibility should be linked to fiat values. Erwin asked about simply increasing the number of coins by moving the decimal place and neo described the problem with doing this here.

Highlighted Cons

@mav

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.

@neo

The problem with having 1000 SAFEcent and so on is that each would be a SD and if someone sent 100 SAFEcoin’s worth in SAFEcents then the transaction load on the network is 1000 times.

@rand_om

If I split 1 coin into credit, sent the credit to someone else and destroyed my password? Wouldn’t there be credit and a Frozen coin for eternity?

@anon40790172

Only people that have a frozen Safecoin address can merge credit back to coins. So if you have new addresses you no longer have frozen coins.

Highlighted Pros

@mav

Credits: can be used to buy anything except network storage but is extremely granular

[jlpell]

**TL;DR - SafeCoin Divisibility Notes : Part 4 (~2017)

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Proposal for SAFEcoin division - read datastructure topic first - please discuss
Summary: neo proposed his idea for introducing safecoin divisibility by way of a wallet balance datastructure. There appear to be subtle differences with the proposal of that introduced earlier by polpolrene. Any portion of a coin up to 10^-18 divisibility is possible to transfer from one wallet to another using a single transaction. Farmers can be paid for each GET served with minute fractions of a safecoin, rather than having a certain probability of earning an entire safecoin. Some edge effects and security issues/non-issues need further discussion/clarification.

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Divisibility of the coin
Summary: General discussion on safecoin divisibility and how it relates to farming rewards. polpolrene provided a set of 4 recommended reads when it comes to divisibility. drehb referred to a previous discussion about how divisibility will help farmers be paid more regularly. neo highlighted the fact that even without divisibility, PUT balance provides some flexibility.

@neo

In other words even without divisibility the coin is divided by the storage algorithm and storage subsystem. So you spend one coin and the network gives you a “PUT” balance. “PUT” is the term used for storing one block/chunk. And when you store a block/chunk the network reduces your “PUT” balance by the current price for storage. One coin usually will go a long long way when storing.

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Proposal: TransferValue - a transferable value system of SAFE
polpolrene proposed a method to create an general method for creating alt-coins within the SAFE network analogous to the OMNI layer for BTC. This approach would allow for the creation of lesser valued denominations with which to handle ultimate divisibility concerns within the network. The conversation transitioned to talk about transaction fees due to the datatypes used, but dirvine mentioned they could be minimized.

Highlighted Pros

@anon40790172

1 piece of mutable data for Alice her wallet and a group of datamanagers holding account of her balance. So it could be 10 million coins, 1 trillion coins, still just one piece of SD needed . That’s the idea, the transfer of value without creating a SD piece for each coin.

@4M8B

You are using bookkeeping nodes in your proposal then. Looks cool

@dirvine

The ledger type can relate to Private or Public data. So a full public ledger and public transactions, or private ledgers and private transactions. So just like the data types we have, the ledger can apply to any and give people the ability for public and private ledgers.

Hope that helps.

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Yet Another Safecoin Divisibility idea (YASDI - Network has a wallet)
Summary: wes presented an idea for giving the network it’s own wallet, and it was discussed how concept was similar to that presented previously by polpolrene in “Idea for divisible Safecoins”. neo described the reasons why he prefers a balance system to denominations. toa introduced the concept of multiple owners for a single coin as a means to achieving a crude but intuitive/natural binary divisibility.

Highlighted Cons

@wes

The main difference is credits vs. “hard money”. A strange concept for something entirely digital, however, I am inherently against the idea of IOUs.

@neo

For me the biggest issue with the denomination ideas is that the number of MDs required seem to far outweigh the elegance benefits. Even with the limiting and recombination, I still feel that the number of denomination MDs will be forever increasing and can it ever handle the 0.000001 denominations or as some want 0.000000001 and lower. As the value of the safecoin increases the requirement for smaller and smaller denominations increase.

@neo

The balance scheme is perhaps the least complex of the suggestions so far. Everyone who has coins will need something to store their coin addresses in for the coins they own. This is likely to be at least one MD, all the balance idea does is use a MD that is already needed and place a field in it for the balance. And then simply have a network wallet for the frozen coins.

Highlighted Pros

@toa

And all I’m saying is, you aren’t forced into anything new with multi owner safecoin. That is more of an implementation detail built on top of a division scheme. The concern isn’t new to multi owner, it is a separate issue in my opinion.

@neo

It is a small cost for ordinary usage and would typically be tons less than anything around the place it does add up for any attack using small amounts. And limiting part coin balances to created wallet data structures make attacks much more costly.

@neo

The balance idea I proposed is like a hard data object for the part coin amount.

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Yet Another Coin Idea
Summary: Tim87 proposes a series of denominations following the powers of 2, and that this allows for large and small transactions while retaining the concept of discrete coins.

Highlighted Cons

@happybeing

In order to freely exchange denominations, everyone had to be confident that they won’t become scarce. But if a wealthy group could capture a large proportion of the smallest denomination, it would cause problems for everyone else (and ways for the group to profit from that). So there is an incentive to do this which is not present with fiat money.

I think the key to any multiple denomination scheme is ensuring that denominations are readilly exchangeable at negligible cost, and the issue I’ve highlighted would need to be solved. Otherwise I’ll grab loads of the smallest denomination and force you to pay double if you want any.

Highlighted Pros

@Tim87

Well, you can’t ask for double because I would just use the next larger denomination instead

How would one go about collecting all the coins of a given denomination? It would take a lot of time even if it’s possible. Let’s not forget they should also collect the coins from at least a few denominations below the targeted one, or else people would use those instead, and then one or two denominations above, or else people would just accept the slightly larger rounding error than before.

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Safecoin divisibility / SafeNetwork potential market cap
Summary: piluso began a discussion that compared the degree of divisibility required to adequately account for real world fiat values. neo advocated for 18 decimal places. polpolrene advocated for freezing safecoins and issuing other units of measure up to the required divisibility. There was also confusion from others about safecoin object size and population size, which led to a discussion how brute force divisibility suffers from storage and performance constraints

Highlighted Cons

@neo

Mind you the 1KB is probably the overhead needed when storing a MD and then the coin info is on top.

But as you say in your edit, it is a lot.

For micro-safecoin (10^-6) that figure is now 421 PB

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SafeCoin Divisibility Idea
Summary:
Guybrows introduced in idea based on splitting the actual safecoin address.

Highlighted Cons

@neo

Even if you limited the number of splits of any coin and stored in the coin’s MD who owns what part (MDs are of limited size so number of splits is limited) then someone could overload the groups processing transfers with a very small number of coins.

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SafeCoin divisibility by ranges
Summary: semtexzv introduced the idea of treating a single safecoin as a range of “partcoin” addresses. Double spending and unique ownership would be checked against range overlap. neo counters that a balance method does essentially the same thing and is easier.

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YASDI - Bitwise Denominations
Summary: mav further expanded the idea about the use of safecoin denominations, without resorting to parallel currencies or exchanges, but by using the bitwise relative abundance of similar safecoin addresses for identifying a coin denomination. tfa expanded upon this by demonstrating a straightforward means for having 2^32 safecoin by using a total supply of 4.444E13 network objects which would require at least 46 bit addresses. His example met the ico requirement of maintaining a hard cap of 2^32 SC, while also allowing for enough denominations of 1SC to provide for all current MAID holders and MaidSafe shareholders. There was continued confusion in regard to increasing address bit depth, where people thought it would require a greater total number of coins, rather than just increasing divisibility. neo accurately pointed out that the true
divisibility of bitcoin is not 1 satoshi but rather 1500 satoshi (divisibility = 1/66666.6666667). (sidenote: Considering that there the safecoin hard cap is ~204x that of BTC, this shows that 1/1000 of a SC or 1mSC provides approximately 3x the divisibility of classic BTC assuming worst case scenario if ALL coins are “hoarded”. As it has been noted in other sources, the effective divisibility gets even better to the network PUT/GET farming algorithms and the general use of the SAFE network )

Highlighted Cons

@neo

Look at tfa’s table to which he was replying about.
greater than 4.4 x 10^13 objects needed

@digipl

The big problem with your idea is the conversion. If the safecoin price increase, as we expect to happen, the number of small denominations are extremely low and a shortage seems inevitable. This would seriously damage the reputation of the network.

@neo

Is the network now going to act as an exchange to exchange a 1.0 coin for 100 of the 0.01 coins? If so then it is going to have to create those 0.01 coins and destroy the 1.0 coin? This adds to the complexity and transaction cost.

Highlighted Pros

@neo

Although your system still helps with large amounts (less transactions to send large amounts)

@tfa

These objects won’t be created at day one, but progressively when safecoins are farmed. Later they will be a balance between destroyed and created objects, but I recognized that there might be potentially a lot of objects.

@edapa

It does seem like increasing the address space is a good idea. We are running out of 32 bit IP addresses, and I don’t see how a successful SafeNET would avoid a similar problem.

[fergish]

Really good piece of work here, @jlpell. We all thank you!

I’m thinking this sort of summary would be really good to duplicate for other topics as well. (Not suggesting you do it, but something for anyone with a passion for a topic, or wanting to really embrace an understanding of it, to do.