We have just published a paper on safecoin, which should provide more detail on how we plan on implementing the currency/token, which will start to happen during test net 3. It’s available from the following link: http://maidsafe.net/docs/Safecoin.pdf. I will start to integrate this content into the relevant pages with our system docs.
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I wonder if somebody could gently lead me to understanding the following ways of earning safecoin with some detail. I believe I have the big picture, but I’d like to have my understanding fleshed out a bit.
Earning Safecoin
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Farmers. I contribute 250GB for storage. Random chunks of other peoples encrypted data are stored on my harddrive. Whenever a chunk of data is read from my harddrive, I get to roll the dice to see if I get any safecoin. If I win that dice roll, I’ll get some amount of safecoin.
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Public Data. I pay a small amount of safecoin to upload some data to the network. This data does not reside on my harddrive, but on farmers harddrives. This data happens to become very popular. When people access this data, the farmer gets safecoin, and I also get safecoin. I would appreciate more detail on this. Also, after other people decide to upload the same data that I uploaded, what happens? Do we all share the safecoin reward? How does this work?
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Apps. I create an app. When people use this app, I get safecoin. How does this compare to a public data upload reward? If I have 10,000 people a day using my app, and my friend Bill has 10,000 people a day accessing his “How to convert your car to run on sea water” video, will Bill and I make the same amount of safecoin? What if Bill’s video is 5GB long, but my app only requires 250MB? I would like to understand app rewards and how they compare to other rewards.
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Yes
You will upload public data at minimal cost (wish it were zero but feeling is some maniacs would just try and fill the network) and that’s it. The data is maintained forever. It is treated in Farming as data, we don’t care here.
Apps will receive 10% of the farming safecoins so for every 100 safecoins say apps get another 10. the app reward is like the same lottery with less chance of winning, but with far greater reach. So when an end user does a GET request and it wins an app safecoin then the safecoin is signed over to the wallet address of the app. So you have SAFEtube and folk watch videos with it, everyone gets your app on a public drive (so already installed) and every X plays you will get rewards.
The artist/content creator rewards are not finalised yet, but equally as important.
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Section 8 of the white paper states “Safecoin…ha[s] the potential to be divided up to 4.3 billion times” making it suitable for micropayments.
How is this going to work?
I thought that the plan was to go with subdivided “currencies” which were locked in at a particular fractional value of safecoin.
I think this is great because you can transfer like, a 10th thousands of a Safecoin to another wallet. So if someone creates an app which let you videochat with other people around the planet, no Farming or storing chunks is done. It probably will be a direct connection over a number of hops. This way a developer can make this app in a way that a little money is charged for every minute you use the videochat. Now, if the price of Safecoin goes lunatic, like 100 times the price it is now, you just ask for less Safecoin for the app. Think of Bitcoins and a Satoshi. For Safercoin it will be called something like an Irvine 
Which means that’s the smallest part possible.
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Yeah, thats what I thought too, prior to this conversation last month.
That link seems to tally with the above posts here. A penny is not a pound, but 100 of them are equivalent to a pound.
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Yes but there is a difference between holding .01 Safecoin, and holding 1 Safepence. The main thing is that unlike bitcoin, where all you have are wallets which the block-chain validates as holding a certain amount of bitcoin (down to a satoshi), each safecoin has a particular address, which can only be controlled by one key pair at one time.
The solution to this as I understood @dirvine in the thread I posted was to have other “subdivision currencies” which could be activated by some special kind of transaction with the network, where you would give the network 1 Safecoin and be given back 100 Safepence. Then that Safecoin’s address would be held by the network as a “penced” address, until someone with 100 Safepence requested a full safecoin. The network would peg them to one another, but they would be essentially two different Safecoin-style currencies.
That is different from an inherent ability in Bitcoin, to transfer from one wallet to another any possible division of a bitcoin.
BTC are split as well. If you sent 0,5 BTC to someone, it’s probably something like sending 1 BTC to the network and 0,5 to the one you want to and the other half to your own address. I think Safecoin fixed this problem. If you want to sent 1.1 Safecoin to me, 1 Safecoin will stay one, and the other coin you have is split in 100 pieces so you can sent 10 pieces next to the one Safecoin. But that’s my guess.
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Do you think this would change how you could spend your safe pounds and pence? It sounds like a pretty flexible system and long as fractions have the same behaviour as their parents.
I see it just as a bank account. If you want to sent someone 1.12 Safecoin, just type in 1,12. If you want to sent 3,50, just type it in. Now comes the difference… If someone wants to create a “support this website” button where you can charge them 0.00035465756869 Safecoin (because that could be like 1 cent in dollars one time) this can be done as well. You’re bank wouldn’t allow you to do that, in SAFE it’'s no problem and just as free as sending 1 Safcoin. So I don’t think in pennies or whatever. Just the numbers on the screen, just like a bank but with a lot more decimals allowed.
I have similar thoughts. The user shouldn’t need to know what is happening under the bonnet, as long as the transaction occurs.
Moreover, Bitcoin has less flexibility here. Everything in Bitcoin is a sum of satoshi - a Bitcoin is essentially just a convenient/round number of them, IIRC.
Going smaller than a satoshi has challenges, as it is the smallest accounting unit in Bitcoin. Maybe it will be small enough, but Safecoin has more options for nano payments here, even if it becomes outrageously popular.
If a satoshi is one day worth a penny, then it may be too big for some transactions.
There is no difference for the user. (hopefully)
The differences is that the satoshi level division is baked in to Bitcoin. Whereas, my understanding was that Maidsafe, or who ever is doing core development would have to enable each level of division.
So if we enabled Safe pence, then you would be able to divide safecoin down to .01
But if you wanted to do micropayments equivalent to .0001 safecoin, you couldn’t do it at that granular level, until a particular level was created. I think the smallest division I’d seen mentioned was down to 1/1,000,000th.
But then in the white-paper they state that you could divide down to 4.3 billion times (possibly a reference to a 32-bit division?) Is that going to be the first (and only?) division?
All I was saying was that this represents a change from what I had heard before and I was hoping for more clarification.
It can split easily 4.3billion times technically anyway. I think the notion we create smaller currency units as the network grows makes sense. Whether its limited to code upgrades or automatically happens we are not sure yet. Initially it will be code changes but as with everything my goal is to make this automatic requiring no code changes.
If they were all created on day 1 it would be a large management burden on the network so there is plenty of time to see how we as a community want to do this sub-division. It will be better when the whole tech team is focussed on this part alone and not as now with us all working on different parts.
Plenty of options
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Ok, so my understanding that a single safecoin address could only be controlled by a single key pair was incorrect?
No you are correct it would be the key holders choice to split a coin, it would create a load of smaller coins all signed to him by him. The network cannot override the owner at all.
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So but then how would you ever put a full safecoin back together?
You won’t when its broken apart its divided. Clients etc. can collect them in any client view so it looks like you have X Safecoins, which may be millions of smaller ones as long as they are yours then they can be presented in any way you want. So if there are say safecents available you will see the total in safecoin say, but be able to pay in the largest unit you want.
I think the main thing is the smaller currency units are recognisable and not 0.00000X or something.
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So if its broken apart, then you can no longer do PUT requests with those coinshards?
How do you recycle the divided Safecoin?
If you can’t won’t this be a problem for PUT requests long-term?
Yes this still works, the payments are tiny and likely get much smaller, all the network will care is the payment is made, it won’t care how. Same fro Farming etc. as the sub divisions appear then farmers get paid at a higher frequency smaller units.
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