Your comment about divisibility is irrelevant to what I was talking about.
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It was a question more than a statement. To me they are similar, is the point.
Seems you disagree!
You need to rethink this again until you make the right choice (hardcap = 2^32). With all due respect @dirvine, this is awful.
And no, they do not achieve the same result. The fact (some?/all?) Maidsafers don’t realize this or see why is disappointing.
I agree with you that this was a silly solution. They are diluting the holdings of everyone because they messed up a minting. Just keep the cap at 2^32. There is literally no reason not to.
It has been known since inception that there would be 2^32 coins (or potentially some multiple of that while doing an exchange at the same multiple). To just decide to dilute everyone’s holdings, hurting the people that have been around the longest and believed in the project the longest is the worst possible outcome.
No one is being diluted, no.
I don’t follow you TBH.
Do you increase the supply of gold by offering it in smaller weights? Or by mining an asteroid?
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For starters, your assertion is not technically (nor legally?) true. A 1:1 exchange from Maid to snt at a 2^32 hardcap is not equivalent to a 1:1 exchange at a 4,525,524,120 hardcap. Thus, the proposed approach does in fact cause a finite amount of dilution.
You may argue that this is a negligible difference,(yes the difference is small) but this is just one issue of many.
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The exact some argument could be made for your proposed solution, because they both have the same result.
But in reality, neither of these solutions dilutes anything. Maybe the argument could be made the for it happening at the point of the overmint.
Changing the specific hard cap of a currency that does not exist yet makes no difference though.
What does matter is the proportion of the pie that MAID has (and that remains, as promised, 10%) not the number of equal slices of that pie that are cut.
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I think the confusion or disagreement comes from different views of when dilution did or didn’t happen.
I think Jim is pointing out that because too many MAID were minted, the change (debatably a dilution) happened then, and has no real effect now. And that at the crowdsale there was an accidental de facto change in the hard cap which can’t be fixed in retrospect and never could.
That means that what people actually bought was not and could not be based on the 2^32 hard cap as advertised. The time to complain about this was then, and to get a refund if you didn’t want the accidentally revised deal.
The confusion and disagreement, I think arises from ignoring that and thinking the deal is still for a 2^32 hard cap and trying to make that happen when in fact, I think Jim is pointing out that it can’t.
TL;DR: If there was dilution, it has already happened and we’ve already accepted it.
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I know my thought on this is not the norm.
I also know that to many my opinion may be seen as daft to say the least.
I am going to get back to you in a bit once I have put some thought into how to adequately explain what I mean.
The analogy of mining an asteroid I do not agree with.
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Again, this isn’t true because they didn’t change their white paper back then. Up until 2 seconds ago, everyone was trading under the assumption of 2^32. That means they were diluted. Yes, it is by a somewhat small amount, but it’s disingenuous to say it didn’t happen.
No you don’t but we are comparing apples and oranges there.
Divisibility of digital tokens is smoke and mirrors to obfuscate the true number of tokens in existence.
If I wanted to create a system with 100,000,000 tokens but want it to appear as though there are less how would I do so?
I call those tokens subunits of a whole which is in reality a farce.
To achieve my goal I will say that my “token” is divisible.
Magically my supply of 100,000,000 can be portrayed to be any number that I desire.
There are really only 10,000 units but they are divisible.
There are only 1000 units but they are highly divisible.
At the end of the day there are 100,000,000 units and calling them subunits is disingenuous.
It is semantics clouding perception of the real total supply.
The total number of tokens that will exist on SAFE will only be known once it has been decided how divisible “SNT” will be.
This is different to the concerns @jlpell has of dilution as it does not dilute anyone but the max supply is (arguably) wrongly stated as 2^32 regardless of the issue at the crowdsale.
It is off by a long shot and only accepted because it is industry norm.
The true number of tokens as it stands is 4,525,524,120,000,000,000 not 4,525,524,120.
This is however not my concern, my concern is that it is still open to change on the whims of possibility, ie. can the network cope with more divisibility (more tokens)
As Danda says, Jedi Mind Tricks!
How I see it anyway, as I said a minority take no doubt.
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When statistical studies examine the circulation of conventional currency, USD for example, their metric is dollars, not quarters or dimes. Let’s not nickel and dime this.
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I don’t agree with your logic. If something has finite or infinite divisibility, it doesn’t affect the quantity available, or the total value of what is available.
I see you can say well, the more units you have the smaller the value of each unit, and that’s correct. But that doesn’t change the value of the total, or of any particular chosen unit.
TL;DR: If I have one thing, or ten sub units of one thing, what I have still amounts to one thing.
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I don’t think the network is affected by the divisibility, or rather only a small area of operations is affected by it because it isn’t concerned with tokens as units. That was the original design - a limited 32-bit address space with one token per address.
That has changed and the network deals in numbers and the representation of those numbers affects the maximum divisibility. Extending that representation to support more divisibility will always be possible but won’t affect the total value of SNT in circulation (assuming all have been issued). It will only affect the size of the smallest amount of value which can be transferred.
EDIT:
I think a misunderstanding arises here out of the mantra from bitcoin that only 21 million? can ever exist. It wouldn’t matter if bitcoin were made more divisible in future because it would only affect the smallest value that can be transferred, not the total number of bitcoin.
In practice, for bitcoin it is the cost of transacting that imposes that limit at least for now, so it has never been considered worth increasing divisibility. But if a bitcoin were to become sufficiently valuable it would almost certainly be on the table.
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That’s a bold claim. What percentage of people who have ever bought MAID are aware of that figure? Even people who bought at the crowdsale may have difficulty remembering it, I know I do.
I think you have a particular position on this and are assuming that’s how everyone should or does see it, but I think you are way off. A purist, and ignoring or unaware of how most people actually operate, as well as the priorities many of us here have.
I’m not convinced that the ‘purist’ position is even correct and nobody who disagrees with my statement has so far tried to explain what they think is wrong with it. I repeat that I’m open to persuasion but I’m seeing mostly religious like arguments for that position. 
I have a bit of religious ferver myself, but for the delivery of a working network not this. I don’t buy the arguments that this matters because for some reason people coming here will not use or trust the network (or its token) once it is running because of the minting error or how that was handled up until launch.
People will I think want to see it stand the test of time and gradually earn trust through operation. I don’t think they will be looking at the White paper in shock and turning away.
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I don’t necessarily believe it is going to undermine the trust of the network, I just don’t understand the point.
When you have an error and you have a choice to either have it benefit the early adopters, or not, why would you choose the option to not benefit them? It also makes it harder for people in the long run because one could easily calculate the max supply, and now, instead, have to look it up.
- If each Ethereum tx was a fixed 1 Wei, it would have stopped the conversation of tx fees, dead in it’s track.
- Users would have a predictable trajectory of their tx costs, with sumdumb luck they would compare that to fiat based tx costs. Merchants pay to receive money in fiat systems, but not with receiving “instablecoins” in crypto…
- Miners would be minors and not giving parental supervision of who is the highest bidder for a tx to go through (all tx’s are equal).
IMCO subunits should have a function from the start in our economy, so that we get less distracted by the fiat economy and the ingenious ideas like: “1 Satoshi will be $1, when 1 bitcoin is $100M” 
Hopefully we can learn from this and not Stoupe t̶o̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶l̶e̶v̶e̶l̶ ̶o̶f̶ the enemy of mankind. 
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I dont know for sure if I understood debate but if I did it doesn’t matter if one maid is divisible by 99999999999999999999999 units or 9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 for value of one maid. i mean yes its good to have divisible on a lot of number because you maybe want buy small things for it. But if divisible is enought to use small unit as money then its good and imo the more divisible then better. Its all about to use on exchange for small things imo
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People like to think (and endlessly repeat) that bitcoin’s divisibility can somehow be changed on a whim. It is not so… it requires a hardfork and I think would be extremely controversial if/when somebody actually submits code for it.
This is because it actually is increasing the supply of the fundamental tokens, as you say. I’ve stated elsewhere, the “21 million bitcoins” thing is a jedi mind trick because it sounds a lot more scarce than “21 quadrillion bitcoin tokens” and because it makes the price per unit in fiat appear much more attractive.
Is anyone aware of a cryptocurrency that has “increased divisibility” after mainnet launch? I would be curious how the market/price reacts to such.
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